Join us this Wednesday, Oct. 23, from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m., in Auerbach 320 or online, for our next meeting of the University of Hartford Philosophy Club as Brian Skelly presents for discussion: The Principle of Sound Investment Applied to the Public Sector: What Can Be So Capitalist (in a Good Sense) about “Government Spending”—a reworking of a paper presented at Sept. 5 meeting.
Click here to join the meeting online.
Questions? Contact Brian Skelly at bskelly@hartford.edu or 413.273.2273.
Most of us understand why you can’t just sit on money – you have to invest it; do something with it. This is not just for the sake of one’s individual prosperity, but for the sake of social prosperity as well. In all of our investing of wealth, time, and effort, we cannot afford to lose sight of this dual teleology. For example, there would be no good reason to have a stock market unless it were a boon to society as a whole and not just to individuals. Even more to the point, it is not really for the sake of individual prosperity per se that we have stock markets, but for the sake of permitting our economy to develop on a wider base of ownership. Individual investment in the stock market does the work of sharing or spreading out, and to an extent even dissipating, the risk of failure, and providing a more stable basis for growth. If you invest and lose, you are still doing that work, so all is not for naught. At any rate, for this transcendent purpose to be achieved, the investment game must keep the odds in favor of the individual investor, and usually does.
The key notion here is that the human species develops toward the ideal of universal socialness and world community largely by cultivating and maintaining habits of continually investing our time, effort, and wealth in greater causes and enterprises - both individually and in groups; both in the private and public sectors.
Free market mavens do well to proselytize this cause, but unfortunately many lack vision of the breadth of the investment that needs to be done. At times we focus on the short term at the expense of the long term, whereas it is long-term investment that most keys development. More often, we obsess about monetary returns at the expense of returns in the form of other kinds of human good. Most often, we fail to see that the public sector has a role to play in investing just as important as private sector investment: the development of human resources, the ultimate source of all wealth. Familiarly, the chief forms of this kind of investment are in education, employment training, housing, nutrition and food safety, health care, law enforcement, and defense, or peacekeeping. An optimally prosperous economy requires optimal investment in all of these, since human resources are the wealth upon which the wealth of the private sector is developed.
The forms this kind of investment can or must take vary, from the institution and maintenance of public sector agencies that produce goods and services to the regulation of private-sector production of vital products and services from which the consumer has no reasonable option to abstain. Lacking that reasonable option to abstain puts the consumer unfairly over the barrel in a manner that certainly interferes with the private-sector forces that ordinarily keep prices and quality competitive. As long as sellers are made to compete not only against their competitors, but also against abstention from the product, there is less reason for government intervention. Where abstention is not a reasonable option, quite clearly government must play a mediating role (complete document attached).
The University of Hartford Philosophy Club has an informal, jovial atmosphere. It is a place where students, professors, and people from the community at large meet as peers. Sometimes presentations are given, followed by discussion. Other times, topics are hashed out by the whole group.
Presenters may be students, professors, or people from the community. Anyone can offer to present a topic. The mode of presentation may be as formal or informal as the presenter chooses.
Come and go as you wish. Bring friends. Suggest topics and activities. Take over the club! It belongs to you! Just show up!