[tdeck]

> The lower tier is that things work. Food gets grown, things get built, medicine gets done - and it's all done well.

> The upper tier is 'justice'.

I'm not sure about this distinction at all. The lower tiers of human needs are about people being able to access things, not whether or not those things exist. The "justice" of the system is just another link in the supply chain between a person and what they need to survive, it can be a bottleneck in the same way that low production or waste can diminish access. This means that issues that might seem abstract to us are concrete to people who can't access food, shelter, or healthcare and therefore can't meet their basic needs.

[pdonis]

> The lower tiers of human needs are about people being able to access things, not whether or not those things exist.

If those things don't exist, nobody can "access" them. All of those things have to be produced before anyone can use them.

[tdeck]

And yet producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless, which is my point. In fact, it's worse than pointless because effort and resources are expended in production.

[pdonis]

> producing them without the ability to access them is completely pointless

Your continued use of the word "access" obfuscates the issue. It isn't a matter of "access"; it's a matter of trade. Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves.

If people are producing things that never get used by anybody, it's because some other entity (which would be a government) is paying them to do useless work. It's not because they are just deciding to produce things that others don't have "access" to. So the way to fix that problem is not to "improve access". It's to stop governments from handing out the taxpayers' money in exchange for useless work.

You are also ignoring the other possibility: that governments pay various special interest groups to not produce things that would be used (a good example in the US is farm subsidies for not growing what the government thinks is "too much" of some crop). Again, that isn't a matter of the people who would be able to use the things not having "access" to them: it's that the government is preventing them from being produced at all, even though their production would be a net increase in wealth. And the way to fix that is not to "improve access"; it's to stop the government from paying people not to do useful work.

[tdeck]

> Nobody is going to produce something that they aren't either going to use themselves, or sell in exchange for money that they can then use to buy something they are going to use themselves.

Citation needed. People do this all the time.

[pdonis]

> People do this all the time.

Example needed.

[perl4ever]

People constantly produce things without complete certainty that they will find a buyer. Think of all the produce which is thrown away unsold. The reasons are certainly not limited to senseless government demand. Life and business involve uncertainty.

[perl4ever]

It sounds like you are dismissing the phrase "improve access" as some wibbly-wobbly social justice fuzzy meaningless concept that is obscuring the important stuff.

To me, though, it sounds like the fundamental basis of the whole capitalist system - I'm thinking of the idea that free markets can only function if transaction costs are reasonably low, and the economist Ronald Coase, etc.

[pdonis]

> It sounds like you are dismissing the phrase "improve access" as some wibbly-wobbly social justice fuzzy meaningless concept that is obscuring the important stuff.

No, just as a term that is hindering understanding rather than helping it.

> I'm thinking of the idea that free markets can only function if transaction costs are reasonably low, and the economist Ronald Coase, etc.

Coase didn't say free markets couldn't function with high transaction costs. He only said it would be more difficult and take longer for those markets to reach equilibrium.

Also, the true observation that free markets in the real world are always imperfect does not justify the further claim that is usually made, that governments must intervene to "fix" these imperfections. In fact, the government "fixes" almost always make things worse, often much worse. Even on strictly Coasian terms this should be evident, since the most common source of high transaction costs in modern markets is...government regulations.

However, when it comes to basic necessities--things like food, clothing, and shelter, the kinds of things this thread was originally focused on--the issue is not transaction costs for the people who need these things. There are perfectly good, low friction markets for these necessities. The problem is that governments are skewing those markets by paying people not to produce useful things, or to produce useless things instead. Or, in the case of many third world countries, the government simply confiscates all the useful things for government officials and their cronies. I don't think "transaction costs" or "access" is a useful description of those problems.

[perl4ever]

When transaction costs are too high for transactions to be made that would improve society, the losses don't somehow get made up. You have a lot of produce or something, and you can't get it transported to the people who could use it, and it gets trashed, that's permanently lost.

It seems wrong to me to dismiss this as "taking longer to reach equilibrium", as though you get to the same destination either way. Perhaps you are interpreting "function" in a loose manner, but of course I didn't mean "function" = merely "do something".