Thursday, March 30, 2017

Some more thoughts on production

Much of the idiocy the great and good seem to spout stems from a misunderstanding of the nature of production.  There has always been a sense of the immutable value of money amongst those who would raise minimum wage or increase the progressive nature of taxation or engage in outright payments to level the income imbalance.

Money is not production

This is the first major problem with the idea that you can simply pay people money and make these sorts of problems go away.  The way to increase the wealth and quality of life for everyone is to improve production.  This is pretty obvious because there's only so many goods and services available, a concept known as 'scarcity' in economic circles, so the share a person can acquire is limited by the percentage of the total money supply in circulation he can acquire.

We can use our imaginary economy, complete with burritos, to explain.  With ten workers making one burrito each, the total production is ten burritos.  The time frame doesn't matter really, but we could say ten burritos per day.  Each worker gets paid ten dollars per day, and can purchase whatever he likes, but, since there are only burritos, he's pretty obviously going to buy burritos.  Since there are ten of them and each only needs one burrito and the burritos don't keep, they each buy one burrito per day.

Now, we can pay one guy more for some reason, but there's only ten burritos, so all that would really accomplish is that person pointlessly accumulating money unless one of the other guys fasts for a day, at which point he can have two burritos, but, as we already said, the burritos don't keep.

Now, if one man is determined to be disabled and therefore unable to pay for his quotidienne burrito, and the rest of the people decide to buy his burrito for him, we have a problem.  He's not making his burrito to be sold in the market, so we have ten people with only nine burritos.  The guy who got paid more above is going to get his burrito because he can bid more for it.  The man who was determined to be disabled will have to bid with everyone else, and one person will go hungry.

A solution to this, of course, is to pay someone extra to make an extra burrito, or to see if a machine can be invented that can make the extra burrito.  Either one would work, although the first leads to worsening work-life-balance and the second leads to encroaching automation.  However, everyone would now be fed.

A problem with this, of course, is that now the guy who made the machine can make another or someone else can make an extra burrito both of which lead to more money being paid to them.  Here our little economy breaks down because there's no point in their making any more money than it takes to buy their burritos, so we introduce the trinket, which trades at a rate of one burrito to ten trinkets.  Now, there's incentive to make more than the minimum to buy a burrito.

Suddenly, the guy above who got paid more for his lone burrito, perhaps it was better than the others, and the guys who can make more than one burrito in a day and the guy who can make the machine that can make a burrito, can all make more money and thus get more things.  So, there are, say, five guys involved in making burritos now and four making trinkets.  Each person gets enough money for a burrito, as the burrito production is now ten again, so there's no shortage of burritos and thus no tight market increasing prices.

However, there are only four guys making trinkets, which they sell to the five guys making burritos, so there is a shortage in trinkets, as the guy on what we will call welfare for convenience is not getting any trinkets.  Giving him more money for trinkets will fix this but reduce the available trinkets in the whole society.

Money is not value

As we've seen above, we have non-durable goods, the burritos, which spoil if you try to save them, and durable goods, the trinkets, which don't, in our economy.  We've also established that burritos are essential while trinkets are not.  We've also established that the people who are on state support don't like getting only the essentials.

It turns out, however, that, while you can save trinkets, you really can't save money.  The production does not increase, so you can buy trinkets later, but that would cause prices of trinkets to rise, causing others to save their money.  The number of trinkets produced cannot increase without improving production like we did with burritos, so the only way, obviously, to increase the trinkets every person can have is to increase the production of trinkets.

Some people, through shrewd trading, can amass vast quantities of trinkets, but this leads to social unrest as it is viewed as unfair.  After all, fairness is the reason we gave the guy who couldn't work some money for burritos and trinkets.

You can use some money to paper over economic issues so long as it keeps value, but you really can't save up production because when you spend the money you will be competing with other people for the production.

So socialist schemes are doomed

Since each person who does not work reduces production.  You can pay him all you like and you won't help the economy produce more unless someone else steps up and works more or someone increases production.

Taking money from the rich to give the poor does not help either as it causes the kinds of people who could increase production to not do so because they don't have an incentive.  Thus total production does not increase, and there simply aren't enough rich people to rob to pay the poor.

As an aside, regulations impeded innovation most of the time, so increased regulations result in reduced production.  For this reason, regulations have to be very carefully constructed to only affect the things that must be regulated.

Over time, recently, for reasons having to do with the banking system, the very rich have managed to increase the percent of production they can control, while the overall production has grown faster, so the average person has seen the amount of production they can control go up as well.  The average person is now better off than at any other time in history.

They are also working more.  The pace of modern life is faster.  There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them is the above-mentioned fact that, in order to support all the various schemes of a heavy government, they have to work harder to make up for lost production.

A better idea

What to do about those in our imaginary economy that can't afford a burrito?  This is actually a real problem, shown up in the need for essentials in the world economy today.  If you cannot work, as we've already shown, then you reduce the available production by not working, then reduce it further by consuming.

A simple solution is to provide everyone with enough money to afford a burrito.  Give the money to everyone so that any money they make above that they can use to buy trinkets.  In order for this scheme to work, the money has to be given to everyone and there can be no means testing or restrictions on it.

The reason is that the above disabled man might be able to work some, but not enough to get his burrito.  Most systems will only pay disability if there's no way for the person to support himself, so he's restricted to not working at all in order to get disability.  In the proposed scheme, he can got work part-time for his trinkets, and the whole society is ahead because he has increased production for everyone.  He's now only a partial drag, not a complete drag.

A second, possibly more important reason is that those who innovate are not disincentivized to do so because they can make way more money if they do.  They are also not as likely to be angry about it because everyone gets it.  It seems odd that they would pay taxes, often many times more than the payment, and still get the payment, which they would likely simply apply to taxes anyway, but it is the principle of fairness that would make the system work.

China, as I understand it, takes this approach with healthcare.  Everyone is given an amount for healthcare they can spend, and when it's gone, it's gone.  This would allow price information and innovation into the health care industry.