: : Gee: Nonsense. It simply describes what was actually 'demanded' in the context of an exchange of things of mutual value.: : ???
: You cant understand it?
SDF: Oh, it's pretty obvious what's at stake. Let's go back to Barry Stoller's example:
If you have, say, cancer and cannot afford a bone-marrow transplant, the market decrees that your affliction lacks effectiveness in demanding health care.
Now let's apply Gee's definition of effective demand:
It simply describes what was actually 'demanded' in the context of an exchange of things of mutual value.
Now let's review. Person A is dying of cancer and can't afford a bone-marrow transplant. Person B is a doctor with a track record of successful performance of bone-marrow transplants, working in an adequately-staffed, equipped, and funded hospital. What prohibits the operation from taking place? I'll tell you what. It's the fact that Person A doesn't have "effective demand," that he or she cannot exchange something with Person B of "mutual value" with the value of a bone-marrow transplant. So people die needlessly under capitalism, because the production of life-saving operations must go whoring after "effective demand."
Real need obviously isn't enough. Capitalist doctors can't make a living off of meeting it, since it doesn't represent a monetary value. Of all of the demand the human race is capable of, only effective demand has a monetary value, since effective demand is defined as the product of the monetary price of a product (obviously very high under capitalist society as it is represented today) multiplied by the number of consumers able to pay. And our Person A of Stoller's example is not able to pay.
