2 Wants, Efforts, Satisfactions
(EN: There's a long diversion at the beginning about the way politics creates artificial factions in society and encourages conflict between them. There are some arguments that seem economic in nature, but are based on the flawed premise that the world has a finite pool of goods that people must squabble over - when in reality the goods are not finite and more may be produced.)
Man has certain material needs for his survival, and wants certain things beyond to grant him security and comfort. The satisfaction of his wants and needs depends on his effort and ability to produce that which his needs and wants require.
It has been said, and rightly so, that the survival needs of a man are quite modest, but his wants have a capacity that is infinite. They are never satisfied, and if we gain what we want, then we find there is something else we want. We can even want things beyond our ability to consume. And we can certainly want more than we are capable of producing - which is often the cause of our frustration.
The one capacity in which all men are limited is time. We have only so much time to produce that which we want, and the time we spend producing deducts from the time we can spend consuming our product. We therefore seek to maximize our pleasure by finding ways to satisfy our wants that require less effort - to spend less time producing and more time consuming.
Our intelligence, when it is heeded, gives is the capability of assessing, comparing, judging, and choosing. We can assess the amount of time we have to produce, and allocate it to producing that which is gives us the most satisfaction in consuming. We are fallible and we may be mistaken, but we generally have a vague sense of what we want and how it can be satisfied, as well as the constraints to our time.
Those who are dissatisfied by their lack of material possessions often fail to grasp this notion: that anything a man wants may be had if he invests the time to produce it (or to produce something that can be exchanged for it). The man who is hungry can have bread if he earns it - his complaint is that he does not have it right away. But nothing exists to be had until it has been produced, so his complaining is senseless as that of a farmer who complains he has no harvest from a field he has not sown.
On that note, any material property a man has is the result of the time he has spent in creating or earning it. To steal a man's property is to steal his time - to render him a slave in arrears. The sole incentive to produce is to have the product. And in the long run, the seizure of product without compensation is destructive of the will to produce it - in time, men who expect their product to be taken will simply stop bothering to produce it at all.
And while he's gone astray: there is a great deal of consternation over the matter of inheritance, and bitterness that the children of the wealthy inherit a great many assets from their parents. This is also a foolish complaint, which suggests that there is something wrong with a parent loving and want to care for their own child. To forbid or interfere in matters of inheritance is contrary to nature. Again, the long view suggests that if inheritance is banned, then men would have little incentive to produce any wealth beyond that which they can consume in their lifetime.
He notes that economics has become overly obsessed with wealth - which represents the surplus of production over consumption. To some degree, producing a little more than is needed to consume is advisable to provide a buffer to absorb risk - but carried to the extreme, encouraging production for the sake of production is simply encouraging misery for no benefit. The man who dies with a fortune in coin has live a life that's out of balance, spending far too much time in onerous work and far too little enjoying the benefits he has earned.
In isolation, a man's needs can only be met by his own effort. There exists a personal economy, in which he must decide which needs to address and how to go about addressing them, but there is no exchange except between man and nature. In society, a man's needs can be met by the efforts of others, which requires some negotiation because these others expect something from him in return. In society, our daily activity is done to offer products to satisfy the needs of others, and we get most of the things we need to satisfy our own need from others in exchange. The indirect connection between effort and reward gives rise to much confusion and misinterpretation.
There's a bit of fussiness about the difference between the autistic economy (exchange with nature) and the political economy (exchange with other men). In particular, political economists tend to ignore that exchange with man is merely an alternative to exchange with nature. We are not compelled to trade, but do so only when it is easier than making for ourselves.
And this is the attraction of trade: it must represent a better value in order to be appealing. We must obtain of others something better than we can produce by our own effort, or it must cost us less to trade than to produce for our own consumption. If neither of these holds true, then trade is unappealing and we produce for our own consumption. This may be difficult to measure, but it should not be excluded from the scope of economics.
In general, we seek to trade with others when they are more skilled or efficient in a task than we are. And by so doing each man can do what he is best fitted to doing, and the net result is a greater quality and quantity of products for all to enjoy. Were all men equally capable of doing all things, there would be no basis for engaging in trade at all. Arguably, there would be no reason for society to exist at all.