Pat Gunning wrote:

>For John and other interested parties:
>
>I was writing about Clark the scientist. If you 
>buy Georgism, you are easily led to regard Clark as an apologist.

The question of whether Clark was attacking 
George is a factual question; it does not depend 
on whether the reader is a Georgist.

>  On the other hand, if you take the 
> entrepreneur point of view, you presume that 
> all wealth in a pure market economy is the 
> result of either entrepreneur action or luck.

Hmm. Might we not call this the "Special Labor 
Theory of Value," wherein all value is the result 
of one special laborer, the entrepreneur? It 
would be a surprise to Clark, since for J. B., 
the entrepreneur gets nothing under conditions of 
full employment and perfect competition.


>This is as true of land, space, and other 
>Georgian sources of so-called unearned wealth

"So-called unearned wealth"? Are you implying 
that the increases in land value are actually 
earned by the owner? Let's see. If I buy a piece 
of property, and it doubles in value without me 
improving it in any way, the added value is then 
somehow attributable to the marginal productivity 
of my ownership. Would then a different owner 
(with--presumably--a different marginal 
productivity) produce a different increase in value?


>The marginal productivity theory, in Clark, is 
>not an effort to describe reality, which 
>contains all sorts of indivisibilities and 
>non-economics factors. It is an effort to 
>formalize the assignment of money values to 
>resources (things and actions). In this sense, 
>it is conceptually like the theory of gravity.

I am aware that all theories are surrounded by 
starting conditions which modify the application 
of the theory. In fact, it is economists who most 
often forget this, applying rules without regard 
to the ideal conditions under which they are 
regarded to be "true." However, a law, like the 
law of gravity, must give a rule or measure by 
which the relevant phenomenon may be calculated, 
along with the things that modify the rule, such 
as air pressure in the case of gravity. Marginal 
productivity does not do this; there is no way to 
use it to measure whether the CEO and the 
seamstress are properly compensated, whether the 
former really "deserves" a 10,000 times more than 
the latter. It is not only that there is no 
possible empirical verification of the theory, or 
that the whole basis for it was destroyed in the 
Cambridge controversies. Rather, it is that

>  A person who attacks gravity theory because it 
> does not explain the rate of descent of a 
> feather simply does not understand the purpose of the theory.

Gravity does measure the fall of a feather, along 
with the forces that modify its operation; those 
who defend MP on the grounds that gravity doesn't 
explain reality either, do not understand the 
theory of gravity, and, by extension, the operation of any other physical law.

>  (It was not recognized until later, that what 
> the marginal productivity sought to do was to 
> formalize the ENTREPRENEURS' assignment of money values.)

It must have been recognized later, since it was 
not recognized at all by Clark, who assigned the entrepreneur zero value.


>Private property rights means that all consumer 
>goods and resources are appropriable and owned by some person.

It can't mean that, since all resources are not 
owned by some person; many are owned by some 
organization, and this organizational ownership 
is the decisive one in modern economies. However, 
either way this still begs the question of what 
you mean by "Ownership." Ownership has varied 
from culture to culture, and our form (as I said) 
is only formalized in law in 1660 and only 
dominant since the 16th century. The rules of 
modern corporate ownership only go back to 1876.


John C. M?daille