At what rate should scarce resources—in land, labor, or capital—exchange? In plainer English, how much “should” I be paid for the services I render, and how little “should” I have to pay for the things I need? The answer will expose the economic astuteness, or ignorance, of the respondent. If the answer is a function of the pseudo-concept of “affordability,” about which the Democrats, especially their frankly communist faction, cannot stop yapping, then we know it’s ignorance when not also wrapped in mendacity.
Maybe Joe Blow can’t spend even a hundred bucks on his wedding, while another JB, Jeff Bezos, can afford to spend $50 million on his. But how did Bezos amass such purchasing power, and whence the ingredients of everything he ever bought and consumed either for business or pleasure? The answer: privately owned scarce goods traded on more or less free markets.
Without respect for property rights in the aforementioned resources, there’s no way to calculate how much of any good or service (and therefore all of them) should be produced and offered for sale. (Keep in mind that we implicitly impute the value of consumption goods back to the ingredients of their production. For example, we value rare earth minerals not because we consume them directly, but because they’re essential ingredients of the goods we do consume.)
Therefore, if you’re an enemy of said rights, then you invite chaos into every economic calculation, yours and mine, Bezos’s and Blow’s, chaos that will inexorably degenerate into a living hell. For that is how shortages and gluts, two cold analytical terms, cash out experientially. And that makes you my enemy: you’re not someone I debate, but someone against whom I arm myself should the state’s monopolized police, courts, and armed forces break down and no free-market alternatives to such socially necessary services are available.
Free markets for privately owned goods and services comprise the common good. We undermine markets, or facilitate their being undermined, at our peril. Generalizing about that plurality of markets, we may say that the free market is identical with the common good: it is the good of order on which depends our regular enjoyment of every good of consumption.
Such talk bores, when it doesn’t enrage, communists and their dupes. A sandwich, they dogmatize, simply “should” not cost more than $x, whereas the one who prepares it for the public “should” not be paid less than $y for doing so. God only knows how to resolve the conflicts issuing from those ethical “shoulds,” embodied as they are in trillions of daily instances of buying and selling—and He ain’t talking.[1]
The communistic “demands” of Muslim Marxists[2] like Zohran Mamdani, whose specter currently haunts New York City, are the stuff of dreams that presage living nightmares. Economic theory can tell you how to avoid them, but not that you ought to. After all, some actually want the nightmares for the masses, the better (they think) to rule them—until the fools realize they’ve sawed off the branches on which they installed their thrones. Theory predicts what happens when you ignore or ridicule it.
As David Horowitz aphorized (after the laughably named Students for a Democratic Society, 1960-1974), the issue is always the revolution, never the “issue,” say, “affordability,” that is, never the bribes eagerly taken by the virtue-signaling, hopelessly miseducated Upper East Side ladies who gave Mamdani his primary win a few days ago. There is hope that his movement will be crushed like Fordow.
Note
[1] On the matter of scarcity, however, He has spoken in the Bible: abundance will characterize human living on earth when He governs it. Where there is abundance (e.g., of breathable air and potable water), there are no money prices governing the exchange of scarce resources. See my “Kingdom economics? A speculation,” October 15, 2019.
[2] What kind of “Muslim” can a Marxist be? Or what kind of “Marxist” a Muslim? To ask such questions is to take Mamdani’s window dressing seriously. Mamdani’s socialism is as “democratic” as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.