I've tried to consider all possible arguments against the central position of TVP, but I keep coming back to the same point.
If you have a valuable commodity, the most obvious one in the world at the moment would be oil, and it exists in finite quantities, the existing economic system dictates that you will use it up as quickly as possible in order to make money. The same would go for any other resource. It's more than probable that a small cabal of people will naturally try to dominate such resources as well. When you use up these resources, you're in big trouble. Ergo, there has to be some form of planning, otherwise the onus will be on the population to keep using resources, to keep 'consuming' in order to create 'growth'.
To suggest, as he does in the conclusion, that we need to "foster a universal respect for property rights" really has no relevance to any of the problems. Property rights are fiercely defended now, if anything that is a massive part of the problems we face. Try going to Shell and asking them to share their oil with you, or one of those buy-to-let landlords with a thousand properties and encouraging him to give a couple up to homeless people.
At some point, we are going to have to plan how to use resources more sensibly, rather than encouraging mass consumption to trigger economic growth. The social controllers of society already realise this, which is what 'austerity' is really all about. They quite simply don't want any austerity for them, but recognise that this will be necessary if we continue to consume things at the current rate.
There are just a couple of further points here as well:
Ludwig von Mises showed that money prices are not arbitrary; it really means something when a firm suffers a loss. Specifically, when a firm loses money it means that customers are not willing to pay as much for the finished product (or service) as the firm had to spend acquiring inputs.
This implies that consumer behaviour is actually predicated on choice, which is ridiculous. If you don't like your electricity bill, what are you going to do? Apart from listening to that twat Martyn Lewis and changing your electricity supplier, there's nothing you can do, except not have any electricity. It's increasingly difficult for people to avoid Tesco, NPower, ExxonMobil, etc. That's why such a huge proportion of money and resources have ended up in the hands of a such a small percentage of people.
Loosely speaking, then, a firm that loses money is one that takes valuable resources and turns them into something that society values less.
Well, yes, this is a pretty loose definition! If you control oil, to use the same example as earlier, you will make money. If you control a massive amount of oil and fail to make money, you'd have to be staggeringly inept! This is why you're seeing Monsanto go to such lengths to control food supply because once they do so...YOU HAVE NO CHOICE! Forget the free market; that doesn't even come into the equation. Once Monsanto control the food supply, are they going to make money? Yes, you would think so. Do people have any choice once this happens? No, they do not. Is it reasonable then to suggest that Monsanto are making money because "society values" their product? No, it isn't!
Mises put his finger on the fundamental problem with socialism. If the state owns all the resources, then there can be no market prices for the tractors, kilowatt-hours, barrels of oil, and other things necessary for production. Looking at the various productive enterprises in operation at any moment, the central planners won't have a common denominator for all of the different combinations of inputs going into each one. The planners won't know if a particular car factory "makes sense," because they will just have an enormous stream of data describing the various resources going into the factory, and the amount of finished cars coming out of the factory. These brute facts alone don't tell the planners if they are efficiently using the resources being consumed in the factory.
For me there are many false assumptions here, but fundamentally if you had a different economic system to that which operated today, many of the products that are produced, odd though this may seem, wouldn’t be produced any more, because they would have no social value. They have purely economic value. If you take away the need to make money, there’s no need for them. Again, this would really come into the notion of finite resources, you cannot continue to make things indefinitely using finite materials and resources just because some people want them and there is an economic incentive to sell them. Well, you can, but eventually you will have very serious resource-related problems.
