Quote:
|
Stop thinking about productivity in terms of dollars and cents, and instead think of productivity in terms of what is being actually produced or accomplished. That is true productivity.
|
Well said, which is why my Dad was so apalled when I told him of our Econ prof's opening lecture in Econ 1 at UCLA several years ago: "Countries are poor because they choose to be poor."
Talk about skirting the main issue.
However, Eric, I must say I -- paradoxically -- both agree AND disagree with you quite literally at the same time. I AGREE with the logic you say, but, embarassingly, our econ dpt at UCLA did NOT have us read Marx, and so I cannot put aside the simple concepts of competition set forth by Adam Smith: what was that famous alliteration of his? Something like, "it's not because of the benevolence of the baker, the butcher, or the bread maker, that we have our bread; our meat; and our bread."
ALSO: how do you reconcile Marxism with what happened during the early colonial days of New England? Those first winters nearly took the lives all the colonists because they were operating with a communal system: there were no private personal or real property rights as we have them today, and the colonists nearly starved. But once they enacted a system of property rights, suddenly food shortages became a thing of the past and here we are today.
So that's something I cannot look past and see it as a rather profound indicator of, while communism/socialism may work at some level, it cannot work ultimately. Just look at Russia -- it's far better off today -- at least economically -- than it was back in the day.