Indium Flappers wrote:Investment does not merely create wealth, it involves a trade, it creates wealth for the workers you spoke of.
By "trade", I take it you mean "exchange" and not "paid activity". All transactions-- purchases or investments-- involve a trade. The creation of wealth is not necessary to trade. An even trade creates no wealth, but it is still trade.
In the rest of this paragraph, it appears that, despite my efforts to make the separation clear, you are conflating the contributions (not investments) that the individual makes with the investments the government makes with those contributions.
If I invest in your business and you pay me a return, we are engaging in trade
And if you give me money to invest safely for you, we are engaging in trade.
if I take money from your business and invest in roads
You're getting off-topic, whether deliberately or accidentally. Social Security is an insurance product that the government requires that one buy. Coercion within the law does not make it any less a transaction. Social Security is a business expense. It is no more "taken from your business" than money spent on a copier contract.
then it may be the case that I have in some indirect, loop-de-loop way produced some wealth for you as well
The directness of wealth creation is irrelevant to the discussion, but you should know that most wealth is created indirectly.
but if I understand the subjective theory of value correctly you would be better equipped to decide where your money is put than I
When one chooses to live in a society, whether under a government or not, one does not always get the final say in individual decisions that have a bearing on the well-being of society.
for example, it might be better for you to use helicopters for transportation rather than roads. (If you have a strong say in how I spend the money, or if I have an intimate idea of your values, then it may still be as strong as a trade.)
The fact that I might not use public services is irrelevant. I'm happy to pay school taxes even though I don't have any children (as far as I know) because society as a whole is better with schools. Same with roads. Part of my wealth-- both real and personal-- is living in a good society. And a good society is something that no individual can buy.
my contention being that the wealth/security/what-have-you that you receive is yours in return for your helping which-ever company is concerned build its profits. The money, (loosely), goes from you to the business, on to the workers, and back.
That's pretty much what I meant. My investments help companies grow, they hire people and create wealth (the ones that pay better than a living wage, anyway), and those companies send me a little of the profit that the employees generate for them. But investment and wealth-creation are risky.
We are, essentially, bordering on the issue of taxation vs. trade
Taxation and trade are not necessarily in opposition. Taxation results in the purchase of lots of infrastructure, protection and paper clips, all of which is trade.
Perhaps my powers of perception fail me, but these two snippets seem to answer each other.
Perhaps both of us have perception problems, then, because the only relationship between them that I can discern is that they share a few words.
And thus we delve deep into intricacies for which I do not currently feel qualified to provide adequate citations for.
There's nothing intricate about it at all.
It seems to me that what is required is not so much a demonstration that these methods exist, but an analysis of which ones provide different services at a lower cost and higher quality than the others.
There would be no clear winner.
It is my overwhelming impression that government provision and regulation tend to work at a higher cost and lower quality than alternative methods....for the most part the more research I do the more evidence I find in favor of my thesis.
Then you need to keep reading. And visit some public works facilities, such as the waterworks or the sewage treatment plant. Visit a few street and highway construction sites. Attend a few City Council and Planning Commission meetings. Read the city ordinances and the health code. Visit Houston, Texas (no zoning-- it's an adventure). Compare the fees and inefficiency of trash hauling and recycling in Wichita, Kansas (private) with the fees and efficiency of the trash hauling and recycling in Fayetteville (public).
So, to cut the turgidity and answer your question, people provide all the services you mentioned and do so through a variety of means and institutions, one of which is government
You don't give government enough credit; at least three of them are governments. And if you came out to my house, you would see a big drop-off in quality from the public roads (county, state and federal) and the private roads.
But it does not follow that government is the only method, nor the superior method, for providing any particular service.
A relevant question here: How would a society as large and diverse as ours cooperate without forming, even accidentally, a government? Having no government might well work for small, relatively homogeneous groups of people, but feudalism has never been particularly successful at creating a dynamic peacetime society-- or peace-- and, for example, the assorted small states in present-day Italy didn't do very well until they were united-- though a few families became very wealthy.
In regard to your statement that "Real estate is the only real wealth", I'm not sure what you mean.
It is a tad bit philosophical, but then it has been so for a long time. Paper assets have abstract value, as do valuable items and substances such as oil, gold and diamond. That value fluctuates, sometimes wildly. But never mind the oil, gold and diamonds-- where do we get the things that ultimately have value-- water, food, and shelter? From land, for the foreseeable future. The main reason the United States became a world power was its land and resources. When there is no fresh water, what is the value of gold? What did Sam Gamgee want, if he could just survive the quest to destroy the Ring? A little piece of land where he could make a garden. Where can you sit, stand or sleep, without land? It's called "real estate" and "real property" for a reason: it's real. Our nation was built on the premise and promise of making land available to everybody, because land is wealth.
Perhaps it is a little late in the discussion, but: define "wealth".
