That's right, it
took a 30 year process to bring a sandwich to the store shelf for your
convenience just before you decided to walk in and grab it. You might think this
is a bit of an exaggeration, it is not. Of course, the number is made up but I
think it's actually much higher. And what's more, nobody knows how to make one.
Do you? I certainly don't.
Here is what I do
know though. For the slice of ham to end up in your sandwich, you first need a
whole piece of ham, which had to be held at a cool temperature in a facility
that needed years of research and development to make it cool at exactly the
right temperature. Before cooling, the ham had to be cooked somewhere after it
was chopped off a pig. The pig had to be raised at a farm that had to be built
years ago by engineers who specialize in farm building, the farmers needed to
gain knowledge for generations about how to raise pigs, they had to save money
to build barns and buy fodder and so forth. The ham needed to be transported
with a truck which requires tires that again needed years of research
and development, you need an internal combustion engine that had to be invented
and then bettered for decades so that it could bring the ham to the sandwich
packing place. To run the truck you need gasoline that had to be refined from
oil, which had to be pumped out of the ground through a hole that had to be
drilled with a high tech drill... You get the picture. Now these are the things
I know off the top of my head. I don't know how to farm pigs, build trucks, make
tires, refridgeators or how to cook a leg of a pig so that it transforms into
ham. And this is just the ham part. Then there is the bread, cheese and butter,
perhaps also some lettuce...
It takes millions
of people and years and years of savings, investment, experimentation,
development and production just to place a ham sandwich on a store shelf at the
exact time and place you happen to wish for one. And the most fascinating part
is that it's all done voluntarily. No one is forcing anyone to raise pigs or
build trucks. People come together with their self interest, looking for a way
to make a profit with the knowledge and skills they have, responding to prices
and consumer demand. They produce and exchange without a central planning board
or committee. They look for profit and respond to where consumers are directing
them.
So what about
fraud then, does that exist on the market? Of course it does. But there are
several checks to prevent that very efficiently. Firstly, if you commit fraud
on a regular basis, you will be caught out fairly quickly. People talk, they
inquire and inform themselves, they share experiences. If you do not take good
care of your customers in the long run, you are going to run out of them. That
is why careless, incompetent or fraudulent entrepreneurs tend to go out of
business and thereby remove themselves systematically as a risk to consumers.
Also, consumers can protect themselves. They can look for third party
assessments about the quality and safety of the goods they are purchasing.
Absent government, people would look for stamps of approval when buying food,
some sort of certificate regarding the quality and safety by an independent
third party and would be willing to spend money for it according to how
important they think food safety is. The only reason they do not do this today
is because they expect the government to do it for them. And of course the
government does a poor job at it precisely because of the lack of profit and loss
incentives. If they fail to deliver, nothing happens, nobody loses money. They
receive funding regardless of how successful they are because they receive it
via budget allocations by political means, not from satisfied customers. In fact,
if they do a poor job, they can always claim it was because of a lack of
resources and demand a higher budget for next year.
So the effects
are exactly the opposite. If private institutions do badly in satisfying
consumer demand, if they fail, they lose money. If a government agency fails to
do its job, it usually gets more money next year. The fact is you can never eliminate risk
and injustice, the question is only which form of social order does the best
job minimizing it – free markets and capitalism or government intervention and
socialism.
The whole premise
of government apologists is that because some people are sometimes corrupt,
we need government to protect everyone. But who is government made up of?
Angels? Gods? No, the very same people that they claim can sometimes be
corrupt. So how is that going to help? The only difference is that free market
organizations collect your money through voulontary exchanges, you give it up
because they have something you like more than your money. The way government
collects your money is by sticking a gun in your face and saying »pay up, or
else...«
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