Utility: super-general term meaning whatever a person cares about. Marginal utility: incremental change in utility when some other thing changes. The more money you have (all else being equal) the less you care about having $1 more or less.
Therefore, if you make the (ridiculous) assumptions that (1) there’s a fixed pot of money available and (2) different people have very similar utility functions, it follows that everyone should have the same amount. (Because transferring money from someone with more to someone with less makes more difference in utility for the person with less.) Which is more or less what communism is trying to achieve.
That was rather my point. What MM said about McCarthyism wasn’t completely 100% wrong, but it was ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading, on a par with the (also ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading) statements about Intelligent Design and Communism that I offered. I wasn’t endorsing them!
Utility: super-general term meaning whatever a person cares about. Marginal utility: incremental change in utility when some other thing changes. The more money you have (all else being equal) the less you care about having $1 more or less.
Therefore, if you make the (ridiculous) assumptions that (1) there’s a fixed pot of money available and (2) different people have very similar utility functions, it follows that everyone should have the same amount. (Because transferring money from someone with more to someone with less makes more difference in utility for the person with less.) Which is more or less what communism is trying to achieve.
That’s a pretty huge more-or-less.
That was rather my point. What MM said about McCarthyism wasn’t completely 100% wrong, but it was ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading, on a par with the (also ludicrously incomplete and desperately misleading) statements about Intelligent Design and Communism that I offered. I wasn’t endorsing them!
And it was very cleverly put, if I dare say so.