{"id":96,"date":"2003-06-03T01:32:22","date_gmt":"2003-06-03T01:32:22","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:07:44","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:07:44","slug":"pinning_down_the_differences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=96","title":{"rendered":"Pinning Down the Differences"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the comments section on <a href=\"http:\/\/windsofchange.net\/archives\/003564.html\" target=\"browser\">Good\/Bad Liberals<\/a>, commenter Jonathan brought up a point which I characterized as &#8216;dumb leftism&#8217;, but something I do want to go into a bit more, because I think it helps define the faultline between the Left and Right pretty neatly.<\/p>\n<p>Basically it comes down to this. Adam Smith and Marx both talk about the hypothetical &#8216;pin factory&#8217;, in which workers make pins. Hypothesize for a minute a pin entrepreneur, who invests a machine &#8211; or a process &#8211; whereby the productivity of the five workers goes from 100 pins\/hour to 200 pins\/hour.<\/p>\n<p>Who gets the additional 100 pins?<\/p>\n<p>In college, I asked a doctrinaire Marxist economics professor (a fairly notable writer in the area&#8230;)exactly this question. His reply?<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;<i>Well, imagine that I&#8217;m a really good machine thief, and I can steal the machine that the factory uses to make 200 pins\/hour, and reduce the productivity to 100 pins\/hour. What portion of those 100 pins do <b>I<\/b> get to keep?<\/i>&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I still remember my initial response: &#8220;You&#8217;re kidding, right?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He wasn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>I believed then, and believe now, that it&#8217;s actually a somewhat complicated question&#8230;but that there&#8217;s no question that there&#8217;s no comparison between a pin machine <i>inventor<\/i> and a pin machine <i>thief<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the comments section on Good\/Bad Liberals, commenter Jonathan brought up a point which I characterized as &#8216;dumb leftism&#8217;, but something I do want to go into a bit more, because I think it helps define the faultline between the Left and Right pretty neatly. Basically it comes down to this. Adam Smith and Marx [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}