We tend to speak of all products and labor as goods and services, but since some products are not especially good to have or produce, and some labor is more a disservice than a service, when I speak of the kinds of products and labor that are benefits to produce or trade I will call them Goods and Services with the G and the S capitalized. For example, if cigarettes are as harmful as many would claim, then cigarettes are simply a product, not a Good; and to call them "goods", and the advertising that promotes their sales and use a "service", and count them as such in the Gross National Product or similar measures, is very misleading. And it is misleading in a way that has harmful consequences, because it makes it appear that any legal job provides a benefit to society, since it is a good or a service; and that is just not true. Some jobs --though there may be some disagreement about which ones they are-- may be overall bad for society or provide a disservice to the community. Unnecessary products and labor that waste limited resources such as energy, or that squander timber which is not replaced, or that incommensurately pollute the environment or cause other unnecessary health hazards, are not Goods and Services. And there needs to be recognition of that fact in economics and in political economy. I myself, because I believe that reaching one's potential for doing and appreciating good is of great importance, would also classify work that has no, or relatively little, real value --even if it does no "positive" harm-- as labor and not a Service. For example, assuming that "responsibility" is taught by each kind of job, if a student who could be learning more useful skills, in addition to learning responsibility, as a plumber's or computer programmer's assistant works instead at a fast food restaurant doing menial labor that will not be especially useful to him or to anyone else, then it seems to me that the fast food job is not a Service, but is merely a service only in the sense of simply being paid labor.

Now, of course, there will be disagreement about what jobs or work produce Goods or Services, and which produce harms, disservices, or merely no relative real good or service at all; but facing that disagreement would be better than having everyone think any paid labor or marketable product is a service to society or a good thing, and that any unpaid labor or product --such as poetry that someone is unable to sell at a given time-- a bad thing. 

It seems to me, for example, that a Mozart's or a John Lennon's youthful works made a greater contribution to their development and ultimately to society, though they may have brought them less money at the time, than some other form of labor, say working in a financial institution, might have. The fact that John Lennon was eventually able to reap great financial reward from his music, and Mozart was not, says nothing about the relative merit of their music. And, marketability is not the factor which makes for real value or even the recognition of real value. Lennon's later songs did not improve just because he made more money writing and performing them. Or for example, a painter's death may make his paintings more economically valuable, but their sale price is not what gives them artistic (or personal) merit. The artist's death does not improve the quality of his/her existing, past works, even if it increases their monetary value. Paintings, once finished, do not become better as their sales price increases. And they do not go from bad to terrific because they go from unmarketable to invaluable. 

The point is that though in many cases it may be obvious that money is not necessarily the measure of real value, there are honorific terms used by economists applied to instruments which basically measure money. And this tends to hide the obvious, to our overall detriment. For example, if a higher GNP is considered better than a lower GNP, and is a measure of the "goods" and "services" done in a the country, then the tobacco industry tremendously improves the GNP not only by sales of tobacco, but by giving doctors a great deal more work -- work that pays a great deal of money. So, although no one would argue that we need more cigarettes so we can have more disease that necessitates more doctors, substantially the same argument in disguise makes great sense to many people, and has great backing, when the cry goes up about the losses to the economy (or to the GNP) if we were to make tobacco illegal. We have legitimate concerns, of course, about the loss of livelihoods to people in the tobacco industry, but that is for a reason that is different from whether they are producing a Good or a Service or not. The remedy for that concern is to support them and help find them useful work, not to keep paying them for work that essentially costs us all more.

In a market or any sort of economy that does not have a publicly or governmentally recognized measure of value apart from economic standards whose (perhaps forgotten or disguised) basis is ultimately money, then any time an industry generates jobs and monetary profits, to that extent it takes on the aura of a necessary, good, or important industry. If then there is some non-monetary reason to believe that industry is harmful or doing a disservice, the argument for eliminating the industry meets opposition (apart from self-interest of people who profit from that industry) by the amount of economic "good" the industry is doing. But in the sense of what an economy ought to be doing --increasing Goods and Services (fairly, etc.)-- the industry is not really doing any economic good. It only seems to be because we are measuring money, in the form of goods and services, not measuring (real) Goods and Services. If economics did what it ought to, and if there were reasonable ways to provide fair distribution of Goods and Services to people who were being put out of work because it becomes apparent that their work was harmful or unnecessary, then a clear argument that shows an industry to be counter-productive to the well-being of society could not be effectively met by any claim that, in spite of the harm it was doing, the industry was necessary or important or good for financial economic reasons; or that closing it down would be terrible for economic reasons. There would not be, and should not be, any such thing as "economic" reasons apart from the amount of (real) Goods and Services an industry fairly provides. 

From a purely economic standpoint --unrelated to the question about the right of people to be able to buy cigarettes and smoke if they want to-- if the tobacco industry for example is poisoning people, and if doctors are necessary to treat that poisoning, and if we all spend much more health insurance money than we need to in order to pay for smokers' medical costs, then there ought to be a way to eliminate all that cost and all that unnecessary labor by eliminating the tobacco industry; and there ought to be a way to pay for supporting and retraining tobacco farmers and manufacturers out of the money saved, and still have some left over. It cannot possibly be an economic advantage, (i.e., a Goods-and-Service-producing advantage) to have people making other people sick, tie up labor for treating people who are unnecessarily then made sick, and for everyone to have to help pay (i.e., contribute part of their labor) for that.

Now the economic counter-argument to this might be "Yes, ideally you are right; but in the real world money and profit are stronger motivating factors than 'doing good'. And in the real world, if products or services are made illegal that people want and can afford, --even though it may harm them or the rest of society-- a criminal market will arise to meet the demands that will end up costing us more (as during Prohibition or with the illegal drug trade) than if the industry is kept legal. And furthermore, you are infringing on people's freedom to have their desires met, and on the freedom of others to earn a living by doing so."

Now the answer to both parts of this argument is that there are plenty of activities, such as contract killing, that are illegal, and that we would not legalize for economic or, hopefully, any other reasons. The reason we can make such activities illegal is that there is sufficient agreement that such harmful things ought not to be done in spite of how many jobs they might provide. With drugs, alcohol, tobacco, etc. there is not such a consensus. But an industry does not need to be made illegal in order to be minimized or eliminated. Instead, the demand can be aggressively sought to be reduced. Advertising techniques can be used to discourage the use of products just as effectively as they can be used to encourage their use. In 1990 efforts began to be made to put psychological and peer pressure on people not to use illegal drugs, and not to drink if they are going to drive, use power tools, or in other ways acutely endanger themselves or others. Modern television advertising techniques, among other things, are being used. If such techniques and pressures prove more effective at making the true risks understood than just the simple past messages such as "Do not drink and drive" or "Alcohol and gasoline don't mix", they will effectively cut down on some of the dangers of "improper" alcohol use, in a way less costly and more effectively than prohibition. The drug ads are interestingly different in that they portray drugs to be a personally terrible thing (ambulance and morgue scenes of cocaine users or "This is your brain on drugs!" -- the egg frying in the pan) regardless of whether it harms others or not. (Either alcohol is not that personally terrible, the evidence is not conclusive enough, or not enough people are willing to try to say that it is.) In the late 50's or early 60's, as the health risks to smoking were becoming better understood, a number of anti-smoking ads appeared on tv that were somewhat like the drug ads are today, trying to show that smoking was not good for your own health and that it was not really as attractive to smoke as you might think. Whether more people smoke or not than used to I do not know; but I suspect a much lower percentage of people now smoke than used to --or that would smoke now-- if the ads, and other things, had not occurred. And even if I am wrong about the effectiveness of these ads or of advertising in general about products that are harmful or useless, the point still remains that there may be ways other than the illegalization of harmful industries to minimize their sales. And these ways might infringe on no one's freedom. My arguments were (1) not that all harmful or useless work be made illegal, but that it be eliminated wherever possible, and (2) that there never should need to be an economic reason or necessity to keep or promote an industry once it can be clearly demonstrated that the industry is useless or harmful. Further, it is often that such economic arguments (i.e., the need for an industry simply in order to allow jobs that distribute money) give a kind of psychologically reinforcing, though false, blessing to an industry or to a product or service; and that reinforcement makes it more difficult to show the industry actually not to be promoting the public good. 

As I will show in the next chapter, which discusses the "automobile problem" raised at the beginning of this book, the part of economics that tends to promote work which is not really helpful or that is actually harmful, is not the part effecting contribution to others (or society), but the part that endeavors to distribute the collective benefits from others (or society). Pressures for individuals seeking (distribution) to earn a living, frequently conflict with society's needs. This will become clear in the next chapter, but it is manifest also in some cases of domestic and foreign competition, where individuals or industries at a competitive disadvantage seek protectionism, which in some cases may not be in the best interest of society (in terms of paying lower prices), but which is in their own self-interest without society's making some sort of fair and reasonable provisions for them to find new and more useful work. If there were a distribution system that better promoted Goods and Services instead of just products and labor, it would make for a better economic system. Some misght argue that there can be no such better distribution system -- that to tamper with distribution will automatically reduce people's incentive to make a contribution, and therefore reduce the size of the total "pie" that is being distributed. I will give some reasons later to show why I think that is not necessarily true; but whether it is true or not is an empirical matter, not a merely logical or a priori one. I seriously doubt that enough economic and political, sociological, philosophical, or group psychological experiments have yet been tried for us to know what the best and most acceptable or most reasonable economic system is.