Comment by fluoridation | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fluoridation | Hacker News Reader

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>What's lost is opportunity.

Surely it's my problem and my problem alone if I want to lose the opportunity to spend my money in something fruitful to instead spend it in something pointless and worthless.

>while we could have had a new hospital or brigde

Well, no. It was my money I spent. Regardless of what I was going to do with it, building hospitals and bridges was never in the cards.

Let's say that I made my fortune... whatever, selling tickets to football games. Well, the opportunity to do those things was lost little by little every time someone bought a ticket. So what do you want? Do you want a centrally managed economy where individuals cannot make purchasing decisions? You do your government-assigned job, you get in line for your government-approved meal, and for entertainment in the afternoon you can attend a play about how great the ruling party is and how everyone must do their part for the good of the nation. There, that's what an economy with no misallocated resources (by the parameters you've set) looks like. No one can incorrectly spend their money because there's no money to spend. The government has complete control.

No one is saying you should be banned from digging holes. The point is: if too much capital keeps flowing into holes instead of hospitals, bridges, or innovation, the economy produces less long-term value. That imbalance is what we call a misallocation of capital.

In other words: criticising waste != demanding central planning. It just means recognising that not all spending contributes equally to future prosperity.

>if too much capital keeps flowing into holes instead of hospitals, bridges, or innovation, the economy produces less long-term value [...] not all spending contributes equally to future prosperity.

Mmh... In an absolute sense, sure, there are actions that destroy wealth. Like I if I buy huge reserves of minerals and smelt them together so someone else has to spend vast amounts of energy to recycle them back into a usable form, that's definitely harmful. Or as a more realistic example, if I build a factory to churn out millions of worthless gadgets no one wants, where the raw materials could have been put to something useful. These are things that objectively lower the total wealth of the planet, because they increase entropy, which requires more energy to reverse.

But if I dig a giant hole... I don't see how the same applies. If nothing else, I paid for the wages of the workers. How is the world poorer after I spent a trillion dollars to keep a few million workers busy for a few years? To bring this conversation around, in what way does a player transfer make the world poorer?

>How is the world poorer after I spent a trillion dollars to keep a few million workers busy for a few years? To bring this conversation around, in what way does a player transfer make the world poorer?

It feels like I answered this many times already, and we keep beating the same dead horse. It's is like a DDOS for the economy, this hole metaphor. The world is poorer because the time, labour and money which went into hole could have been spent on something productive. Instead of a player transfer money could have went into something like a fusion reactor, which brings cheaper energy instead of a show-off. Of course, everyone is free to do what they want with their wealth, just as I am free to criticise their decisions, because I want my kids to live in a world of prosperity, not in a world of excavators.

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