From: rmarsh@waikato.ac.nz
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: More Rhetoric
Date: 10 Apr 92 18:27:39 +1200
Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

Speaker to Minerals:
>There's a problem here.  The "scarcity" of lawyers, like the "scarcity" of
>doctors, is an artificial scarcity.  In both cases, we have the practitioners
>of a field determining who gets licensed to practice in that field.  Not
>surprisingly, the number of licensed practitioners is limited to a small enough
>number that each of them can extract exhorbitant rents.  You need to consider
>that the license to practice in a field is a resource, and tax those who
>control the licenses.

  "Agreed, the fact that lawyers decide who is qualified to be a lawyer
could be a problem. If we don't *require* someone to hold a qualification
to practice law the problem doesn't arise, however. Then those who think
they can do the job can vie for custom with the qualified lawyers, and if
their service is good enough they can make money too. Certainly I think
certification is a good idea - but only to show who has passed the 
qualifying exam, not to keep people out of the field. Medicine is little
more tricky though - you wouldn't want to let a 'doctor' perform tricky
surgery if you weren't sure of his competence. This does need some
thought."

>And suppose someone squanders the resources he starts with?  What happens then?
>We already have a situation in which enormous numbers of people squander their
>opportunity for education, and then blame the rest of society for the fact
>that, having spent their time in school disrupting the efforts of others to
>learn, they don't have an education.  Somehow I doubt that your scheme will
>change this sort of behavior.  

  "Except that those who don't like school the way it is can buy the kind
of education they would rather have and instead of education being the
'responsibility' of government or some other outsider, the responsibility
resides wholly with the person hirself. That way if they decide to spend
their time and money on something other than education it's nobody's fault
other than their own, and that is plainly evident."

>Now, if your scheme says that those who squander
>the resources they control don't continue getting more, I don't think you'll
>get rid of property and poverty crime.  And if your scheme DOES require that we
>continue diverting more resources to them, you've eliminated property and
>poverty crime only in the sense that their continued theft is now legal. 
>Either way, you've not dealt with the problem.

  "To a certain extent it depends on what you mean by squander. There are
very few reasons we can think of to remove someone's right to control their
own resource share. One of these reasons is eco-crime. Just as bankrupts
today are required to take budgetry advice and have their affairs run for
them, so anyone who wantonly destroyed (squandered?) resources would have
their share admiistered for them. If you meant something else by
squandering resources then I think you may have found a(nother?) hole in 
the system."

>Actually, for a Pareto-Optimal outcome (i.e., one in which you can't make
>anybody better off without making someone else worse off), you don't want to
>use the average valuation, you want to use the marginal valuation;  i.e., the
>value placed on it by the person who wants it most.

  "Are you sure? If we put the max. value on a resource nobody would want
to own it except the person who wanted it most, and even that person would
be indifferent. What we want is the valuation which allows everyone who
values the resource more highly to control it, and those who value it less
highly to receive compensation. Admittedly this won't be the average value,
but unless there's a very small quantity of resource it won't be the
maximum valuation either."

-- 
Robert 'Stumpy' Marsh | Brought to you from the bottom of the world
rmarsh@waikato.ac.nz  | both topographically and socio-politically.
+64 7 855 4406        | Whatever happened to Godzone?
    SnailMail: 95 Fairfield Rd, Hamilton, Aotearoa (New Zealand)