moore@ucbcad.UUCP (12/06/83)
#R:csd1:-13600:ucbcad:21900002:000:1877 ucbcad!moore Dec 6 02:26:00 1983 Firstly, this isn't net.flame, so why be so arrogant and caustic in your writing? It certainly isn't an aid to communication. Secondly, your arguments about resource wastage are not to the point, you dismissed the perhaps overly colorful heat engine argument too quickly. We can view the problem as the government invests a certain amount of resources, represented by money, in the economy and eventually these resources are consumed and turned into rusting missiles, sewage, smog, etc. The question is then not whether these resources will be wasted, eventually everything will be turned to sludge, but rather how much happiness is generated by the consumption of these resources. (Here, I believe at your suggestion, I approximate happiness by consumption of consumer goods by the citizen.) Giving these resources directly to the consumer is not necessarily the best. Spend $1000 on food and you get $1000 in satisfaction and some sewage. Spend $1000 on inventing and/or buying a plow, and not only do you get the most of that money back in the form of wages, but $100,000 in increased productivity. The ideal method would be one that would hire many people, increase productivity a great deal, and use as little raw materials as possible. This is where space exploration and at least weapons development are good investments. There are very labor intensive, involving the hand building of essentially one-of-a-kind prototypes. They are research intensive: look at all the technical byproducts of the Apollo program. They are capital intensive: a great deal of Silicon Valley's productivity was capitalized through military/aerospace spending. So it is not a question of resources being used, that is going to happen no matter what, the question how efficinetly they will be used for the production of happiness. Peter Moore (moore@Berkeley, ucbvax!moore)