What I love about this desert theory ethic is that it is anti-capitalist and anti-libertarian if you actually follow it to its conclusion, as I've explained before. At every single factor of production—nature, labor, capital, and total factory productivity—desert theory renders the conclusion that capitalism distributes things immorally....
If the "vital question" about distribution is "what gets produced and by whom," then we've got ourselves some serious problems. Nobody produced nature, but people receive the windfall value of it by excluding others from it. Around one-third of the national income each year flows to capital, the owners of which did not produce anything. Laborers do not get their personal productivity in compensation. Finally, the majority of what is produced each year comes from the marginal productivity of accumulated technology and knowledge that only dead people have some desert-based claim to.Bruenig drops a demolition bomb.
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More Desert Theory Confusion
Matt Bruenig
