Baron Von PWN wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:The Bison King wrote:So no that we have boiled that down, what was the point of you thread? did you want to tease out meanie pants dog haters? Or are you a meany pants dog hater
Feeding the dogs from one bowl and letting them decide represents the free market, dividing their food equally was socialism. The metaphor needs a little work, I think I need to change it to "you had a female dog who died giving birth to 2 puppies" since people seem to get hung up on the whole "why did you buy puppies you can't feed" thing. But yeah, according to this crude analogy most of you seem to think that the free market is a bad idea.
Your analogy with the free market doesn't hold.
1) Humans don't equal 2 dogs, or any dog for that matter. Humans are capable of economizing on scarce resources--dogs just gobble it all up (i.e. 100% consumption).
2) Humans generally are capable of learning from trial-and-error, thus capable of determining a somewhat best distribution of food per utility for each dog.
3) Dogs can't spontaneously develop political, economic, and cultural institutions nearly as advanced as humans (if at all).
4) The market process isn't "food in a bowl, come get it at almost zero transaction costs for some unknown, varying amount of labor." Your depiction is somewhat more appropriate for a barter economy.
5) Where's the voluntary exchange? How does that play out in this supposedly free market v. socialism analogy?
6) The assumption that the hunter (one individual) is capable of designing the "socialism" or "free market" scenario completely misses the point of the free market. There's no central, single designer in the free market. It's about millions of individuals interacting; it's about disperse knowledge across these millions; it's about how prices transmit information, reveal knowledge which isn't as efficiently or isn't able to be articulated; it's about how profit and loss induce innovation; how privete property rights create incentives for greater growth in prosperity and innovation; ...
Etc., etc., etc.
When talking of American society people often say " it's a dog eat dog world out there"
Therefore this is a perfect analogy.
The "dog-eat-dog" analogy doesn't describe a free market, so it still wouldn't help TBK's analogy and its inaccurate depiction of the free market.
Depending on the scope of one's definition for the "dog-eat-dog" analogy, I'd take issue with it due to reasons (1), (2), (3), (4) slightly modified, (5), and even (6) because those aspects are apparent in a quasi-free market.

































































