01 February 2011

Having cake is more complicated than eating it

When we purchase a cake we either eat it or have it. The having is more complicated than the eating. Having too much cake threatens the property rights that were designed for the eating of the cake. The failure to distinguish between those sorts of property rights that are optimal for the eating of the cake from those sorts of property rights that are optimal for the having of the cake is the source of much confusion in neo-classical economics. 
That failure to distinguish different sorts of property rights comes of a failure to distinguish between the allocation mechanisms in the face of the scarcity of income versus the rules of apportionment in the face of the abundance that enables the storage of wealth. Fundamentalist free-for-all marketers are the ones who most wish to efface that distinction, to convolve society's understanding of rights to income property with society’s rights to property as wealth; and not only income versus wealth but also earned wealth versus unearned wealth, which is to say the temperate respect for covenantal boundaries versus hubris. 

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