4 Sep 2022 1:02 am
FOS » 04 Sep 2022, 12:57 am » wrote: ↑ we have had this argument before. I think henry george failed to account for the shortening of distance thanks to technological advances in transportation. But we can agree to disagree on that.
fundamentally i think human natural instincts would be good enough for politics, except that technology changes things. Old instincts become obsolete. on that more general premise, we can agree.
I emphasize this point because it seems so often overlooked. I will use shoes to make a point, but you could use literally any consumer good, service or commodity that exists and the point holds true.
when Adam Smith wrote wealth of nations, there was probably one shoe that existed for every 100 human feet on earth. When the Communist manifesto was written, there was maybe 5.
Now there is 10,000 shoes for every foot. That transition from scarcity to abundance is either hard for people to grasp, or they just want to remain comfortably ignorant, but it renders nearly all the old works on economics useless.