[Propertarian]

[ QUOTE ]
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if wealthier people come to have access to new technologies, and if access to important goods get mediated through access to those technologies, then the poor who lack such access will find it harder and more expensive to supply their needs. You can run this one from everything from cars and out-of-town shopping centres to the internet.


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This seems like a very poor argument considering technology usually gets cheaper and more accessible as time goes by. Take cars. When first invented, they were only for the rich man. Then Henry Ford came along and suddenly cars could be had by more and more people. Nowadays, even quite poor people can own a car. Computers are the same way. Started off quite expensive, but now are getting cheaper and cheaper. The incentive to make expensive goods that the rich buy more accessible is massive considering there are far more non-rich people.

[/ QUOTE ] Your comment is a non-sequitur; it does not show that the argument is poor. All your argument says it their is some factor that makes technology cheaper at work; it doesn't change the fact that the claim being made their is true.

I wish I could give you a link to Amartya Sen's (Who recently won the Nobel Prize in Econ) original article on this in case you don't understand it fully from that statement, but it's not online.

It's funny that you mention cars, however. One of Sen's examples is that the invention of the car made things worse for people who didn't have a car, because the invention of the car (predictably) lowered the quantity and quality of other types of transportation, caused jobs to move from the city to the suburbs (harder to reach for people living in the city without a car) and even allowed the affluent who worked in the city to live in the suburbs, decreasing the property values and tax revenue within the city.

This shows how you misinterpreted the argument in another way. Your last line in your critique of the argument is "The incentive to make expensive goods that the rich buy more accessible is massive considering there are far more non-rich people". but the article said "wealthier" vs. "poor"; this factor has it's largest negative effect on those who have lower (especially considerably lower) than the average income. Their are far fewer people who have less than half of the median income (by definition) than their are those who have close to the median income or above; hence, if the market caters to the many instead of the few like you claim, that would in fact strengthen the claim (properly comprehended). In fact, in direct contradiction to your ostensible critique of this argument, generally speaking, the more people who have access to these new technologies, the larger the negative effect on those who do not have access.