On Sep 7, 12:43 am, Fred Weiss
papertig.com> wrote:> On Sep 7, 3:06 am, Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>>> On Sep 6, 2:14 am, Fred Weiss
papertig.com> wrote:>
>>> On Sep 5, 11:05 pm, Immortalist
yahoo.com> wrote:>
>>>> As an example the Soviets, when they existed as a left wing form of
>>>> totalitarianism, invented the satellite,....
>
>>> Please. All of the basic technology was invented in the West,
>>> primarily in Germany and the USA. The Soviets usurped it, poured
>>> billions into it for its propaganda value while their people were
>>> standing on line for bread.
>
>> I think I agree but the main point is that inventions come from people
>> with incentives. All incentives do not come from free enterprise and
>> competition. What about Galileo etc... before free enterprise was even
>> formalized into a system of ways and means?
>
> Not all incentives need necessarily be financial and many aren't.
>
> Galileo was primarily motivated by the pursuit of knowledge. Or, in
> the example you provided, the Russians were motivated by their need
> for propaganda to justify their dictatorship.
>
> But in business it is different and whatever other motives you might
> have, the financial ones have to be front and center and primary
> otherwise you won't stay in business for long.
>
This is one of the problems with how free enterprise can hold up
progress. Sometimes standards in products are kept alive longer than
they should be and we have old technologies put upon us when there are
better ways to do it. But the better ways sometimes don't make more
money.
> On the subject of scarcity, I was addressing how *business* addresses
> - and solves - the problem. The communists notoriously not only didn't
> solve the problem - though that was supposed to have been their
> utopian mission - they caused it on a massive scale, including
> outright famines, e.g. Stalin and Mao.
>
Well the capitalist have not yet notoriously solved the problem of
scarcity either. I think that if there is a solution that it would
come about by human creativity, whatever the economic ideology. But I
agree it might take a longer or shorter time in some world timlines
with differing systems.
> Fred Weiss
