Grousing more about value-added and welfare disdain

Value-added, or maybe better phrased, utility-added, needs to be the determiner of price-added. This would have prevented such things as the American burst of the housing bubble, and the broader example described in Newsweek's "A Looming Disaster: Europe"
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/20/a-looming-disaster-europe.html

But to do so would go against the accepted game of determining price as what the market will bear: the game so finely exampled in auctions.

Thus in the "housing bubble" people would buy up all the housing, then demand a much higher price than they paid for it, (without improving the properties) and so the next bunch of buyers had to pay the higher price, either to be in that game or to have a place to live. Eventually, like the old "pyramid game" people would stop buying into it, and the winners were the ones who did the game early and then got out of it with their freely gotten money with no value-added involved, and the losers were the ones who owned the vastly overpriced property when the "bubble burst."

It is a game of scarcity and of people's needs. And of hoarding to demand a higher price that the needy will have to somehow pay. It goes back to fabled soybeans. And beyond.

If price were directly linked to utility-added, that kind of value-added, the way economics would be conducted would change a lot. But establishing the increased value or utility is not as easy as establishing price according to what someone will pay for something.

Another theme in the above-mentioned article is that welfare expenses had dragged the nations down into ruin. It seems to me that there is an old saying that the people of a country are its greatest asset. People on welfare can be productive, if enabled to do so. But demanding private businesses to take on that task has not succeeded at all, due to the smaller part of the big picture that little businesses have to deal with, daily profit in their hand is all that counts, never mind the resulting decay of their country's capability to utilize the country's assets, especially human assets.

Thus it appears that a national government (the kind with the best interests of the nation as its guide, instead of just boosting wealth of a few rulers, or of a few wealthy conglomerates) needs to take the responsibility for figuring out how to get all those "welfare" folks (read: retired folks too) into the productivity pool, even if only a few cents a day at first. The focus on each person being useful to the whole nation each day, will bring attention on that aspect of life, and ought to produce a trend for greater value-added to the nation. Part of it, even if only the proverbial digging holes and filling them up again, is to increase skills and strength, and to see that their individual efforts are actually having an effect on the larger world, each person and each moment.

This is quite different from the attitude of those who have a wealth-producing company and their employees riding some wave of customer demand, disdaining all those folks who are not similarly being useful, and saying those "welfare recipients" are merely a drag on the economy and the implication is that all would be better if they did not exist. How different an attitude. And how different the long term results. Snobbery is quite different from helping the others on the ship to be helpful and productive too.