Economics: PayDay Loans- Bastards or Black Sheep?

[Montegriffo]

To be honest Shakespeare was something I read because I had to not because I wanted to.
As for his sonnets, that is many hours of my life I am never getting back.
I think his plays are best watched rather than read.

[Speaker to Animals]

I love Shakespeare's plays and sonnets.

Also, every now and again, there comes along that chick who actually likes stuff like that. You can be like, yeah, babe, I like Lord Byron too. She tells you you are just saying that to get into her pants. You lay down some stanzas. Boom.

Most chicks are not like that, though. Don't ever admit you know shit like that with 99% of them.

[Montegriffo]

I'm a little surprised to hear that you like his sonnets. Weren't a lot of them love letters to his boyfriend?

[Speaker to Animals]

I'm a little surprised to hear that you like his sonnets. Weren't a lot of them love letters to his boyfriend?

Some conjecture to that effect I think for one of them.

Most great poetry is like that. Lord Byron's So We'll Go No More A'Roving was about the fact that he was too drunk to bang whores at a Greek fair, if I recall correctly.

[Montegriffo]

Hey we'd better get back to the OP before someone mentions Puck and the hockey wars start all over again.

[Speaker to Animals]

And yet,to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.

[DBTrek]

The quality of life for the majority of consumers improves if they all want cheep ice cream, and the market gets it to them. But the quality of life goes down for a yogurt producer who's business collapses.

There are always quality of life conflicts, and efficiency doesn't solve them all, but you are making a case that 'the way society should run' is to maximize efficiency through open markets for the benefit of the average consumer. It isn't wrong, but it is an ethical position.

Obviously, basing your opinion on how the economy is doing on one individuals quality of life is silly, but so is completely ignoring that individuals quality of life for the greater good of a more efficient society.

I'm not making the case that economic efficiency should dictate "the way society is run". I'm making the case that economic efficiency allocates scarce resources with alternative uses in the least wasteful way, generally improving the quality of life of the society. Even communist China seems to have come around to agree with that.

BUT - there are cases where the most efficient allocation of resources might not be what a society wants to do. I imagine most of us are against letting the disabled, the poor, and the elderly starve to death. These people are largely unable to work at a productive level which justifies an employer paying minimum wage - but we'd all agree they shouldn't die because of that. So we put programs (economically inefficient ones) in place to address that problem. And everyone's fine with it, right?

So my goal here isn't to advocate for anarcho-capitalism. It's to get people to train themselves to use their "economic filter" when evaluating proposed legislation. People rely almost exclusively on their emotional and political filters when voting. I'm urging us to also pass ideas through our economic filters before pulling the lever at the voting booth.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

Sorry, I didn't mean to tell you what your arguments was. I should have said that the way I am reading your arguments is this:

1. Economics is a largely descriptive set of formula that tell us how resources can be used efficiently. (I feel I should point out, since much of these econ threads rely on Sowell, that one of the unsafe assumptions that lies at the heart of the Chicago school is that consumers can be relied upon to make informed, rational choices. But, we can leave that aside and say that, provisionally, this is true.)

2. Better economic efficiency is desirable because it leads to a general increase in material quality of life. This is a statement that I completely agree with, but it seems to rest on two ethical positions. The first is that general increase in material quality of life is more important than any decreases experienced by an individual (even though we may allow compassion to intervene on behalf of the indigent). The second is that a general material quality of life should be a goal in the first place, preferable to maximum individual freedom (to engage in cartels or monopolies, for instance), or prioritizing equal distribution, or any other number of goals.

Even if the first statement is relatively free of any ethical implications or prescriptions for how society should operate, the second isn't.

I am also not convinced that an economic filter replaces an emotional, moral, or political filter. It seems to me that all these filters amplify, but rarely replace each other.