mises.org — He is an extraterrestrial with amazing powers. He can fly; he has super strength and super breath; he can run and perform other tasks with super speed; he has x-ray, telescopic, and heat vision; he has super hearing; and, famously, he is virtually invulnerable save for exposure to kryptonite. Why isn't he using his skills more productively?
Jul 11, 2006 View in Crawl 4
lmruaneJul 11, 2006
Well, Superman and his agents can always try to make as much money as possible, so that Superman knows he's doing whatever has the highest value (i.e. is most important), but then donate most or all of the money to charity.As for humans failing to progress, see my comment above. The fact that we rely on nature (the sun, the oceans, the minerals we find in the earth, rainfall, the land, etc.) mean that we are failing to progress? I don't think so. Superman would be like nature.
miseseanJul 12, 2006
Did you read the article? His goal is to help people: that's precisely why he needs an agent, to let him discover the best ways to help people!
excorneliusJul 12, 2006
@fjvwing"The assumption here us that The Market catches all variables and is able to express them in monetary value so as to maximizing Good."The Market is just an incredibly complex network of individual exchanges. It's not perfect, but it works better than anything else."As we can see by plainly looking around us and noticing how financiers get away with poisoning the environment and exploiting workers in sweatshops because these things are not expressed in pricing, this is obviously a flawed assumption."The only flaw here is your assumption that we live in the free market so described."The Market tells you about price. Not about benefit. "No, the market system uses prices to tell you about what people want; prices are information that results from market activity. This is one of the reasons why fiddling with prices (e.g., gas price caps, rent-control) never work as intended; it's simply trying to kill the messenger.
rdotJul 12, 2006
superman actually DID have teleportation powers for a while, back when they revamped the character and he had a blue and a red version. and no, it wasn't just super speed. he became a sort of energy entity and could actually disappear in one place and reappear in another.