Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Nikov]

Eh, actually, I misread Nikov's post since I didn't read the context around it.  Never mind.

I was about to say, what?

Yeah Canada. Enjoy getting invaded during the inevitable Potash Wars when your nation's 11,000 million tons of precious, precious potash is required to feed our gluttonous American industrial corn fields.

[Sir Pseudonymous]

I support reducing the size of government in order to save people money because government is inherently wasteful.

Except it's not. Private contractors, whom the government hires to appease the "gubmints be wasteful and evil!" crowd, are where waste and exploitation get introduced. Bureaucratic institutions, generally decried as the epitome of waste and inefficiency, are horrendously understaffed and overworked, and still manage to function enough that no one thinks "hey, maybe we should increase their capacity to perform this service we all depend on".

With the lower level of regulation I believe that voluntary consumer unions be formed to protect the average Joe from corporate abuse, as unions protect workers.

Unions in this day and age are protected by law, and form comparatively tight groups of people. Unions fought a long and frequently bloody struggle to get that protection, what with the penchant of tycoons of old to just have their leaders assassinated, and supporters beaten and all. Multinational corporations still use those tactics against anyone who dares oppose them on a local scale in third world countries, and they use lawyers to fight consumer advocates in a legal version of that in first world countries.

Consumers are also too varied and disparate a collection of people to effectively organize to deal with monopolies. So you need a government capable of saying "bad monolithic agrocorp, stop putting rat poison in your bread!"

I support a small well equipped military capable of defending the nation until aid from others arrives.

That works great as long as you have exceedingly reliable allies who don't embrace your military spending policies but rather have a bloated, interventionist defense institution.

I think he was probably envisioning some sort of "everyone has a small military, and they all gang up to brutally purge anyone that tries invading anyone else", which fits with the incomprehensible libertarian ideal of many small states with no obligation to one another aside from self interest, as though fragmentation and strife should be fostered...

[Zrk2]

Yes, yes I did. I think they could still function without everyone in them. I think they would work best with everyone in them, but one should not force people into one.

[Leafsnail]

"I won't eat until you lower the price of your food!"

"I won't go to work until you lower the price of your fuel!"

"I won't clean myself until you lower the price of your soap!"

Etc.

[Zrk2]

But en masse. It could actually work.

[Leafsnail]

I dunno, do mass die-offs count as "working"?

[Aqizzar]

But en masse. It could actually work.

I suppose you've never heard of the concept of oligarchism then.  I can't start my own airline company.  There's only a handful of airline companies.  People need to fly.  If they all charge similar prices, and stay within very small price levels of each other, they can charge as much as they want.  No consumer union could do anything about it, because you have to fly with somebody, so they just all charge similarly high prices.

But the thing is, there are no "other stores" to go to when you're talking about pharmaceutical companies or airlines. You want it cheaper, you don't go to any of them. The airlines hold a oligopoly (thank you Wikipedia for this word), as do the pharmaceutical companies.

We could form a union!  It would be a big group of people, so let's call it... hmm... a "party".  And since it would have political influence, I guess it would be a "Political party".  Now, we'd have more influence over the country if we had government representatives.  So we could start fielding candidates to contest each seat, and trying to get the president to be a member of this "party".  From that position, we could then get the president to pass laws to prevent companies from screwing us over!  It's a perfect plan!

I return to my original post in this thread, that no new ground is ever covered, because nobody ever changes their minds, but nobody ever remembers what's already been over.

[Zrk2]

I know, but I occasionally feel the need to bash my head against the wall. I do admit that as this is not a perfect world some government intervention is needed to ensure that the amoral do not seize power and fuck over the average person.

[Sowelu]

Hey Nikov.  Didn't want to derail the Tunisia thread since it was past that stuff by the time I got there, but I like that you're sane and clueful when it comes to the resource-management side of economics.  I might disagree with you on policy or other stuff, but damn it was nice to see you smacking people down with a clue-by-four last Friday re: copper and farming.  Credit where due.

[Leafsnail]

I dunno, it works as long as the world has infinity resources and extracting/ using these resources cause no problems.

[Sowelu]

Nah, in a lot of ways he's essentially right.  We're not going to run out of stuff.  The price will rise, but capitalism WILL drive us to find more efficient ways to use or reclaim things, just like how gas costs like $7/gal in Europe so they all drive tiny cars.  It'll hit us here before too long, so buckle up for the ride, but hey that's life.  It won't run out, it's just that we won't be able to do what we've been doing so cheaply, for all resources.  That's especially true for metals.  Recycling is barely efficient for a lot of things right now, but it IS for metal, and will only get better.

Incidentally, I'm usually an environmentalist but I'm all for Arctic drilling...LATER.  As a strategic oil reserve.  When the prices rise, and we need a crapton of oil for war or going to Mars or whatever, we'll be really glad we saved it.  Environmentalism has no part in that.  Federal funding for alternative energy source research is just a smart investment, so we can keep our cheap-energy advantage.  Also, I'm all for factory farming for exactly the reasons Nikov stated; it's vastly more efficient in terms of land use and pollution control and it feeds more people.  There's always problems that need to be avoided, the dangers of monoculture for one, but hell...organic farming is wasteful, and in some cases even borders on immoral.  If you can farm organic food to make a hundred people feel all goody-goody about what they eat, but let a hundred other people starve because you can't produce enough, aren't you kind of a bastard?

[Levi]

I hate it when people just toss themselves into a political label like left-wing or right-wing and then form their opinions based on the consensus of those labels.

People should form their own opinions about any issue they talk about, and frankly I wish politicians would do the same.

I also hate the fact that Canada seems to be getting closer and closer to a two-party democracy and that citizens barely have any real involvement in what their government does.

In short, I complain a lot about politics and don't actually do anything to make it better. 

[Leafsnail]

Nah, in a lot of ways he's essentially right.  We're not going to run out of stuff.  The price will rise, but capitalism WILL drive us to find more efficient ways to use or reclaim things, just like how gas costs like $7/gal in Europe so they all drive tiny cars.  It'll hit us here before too long, so buckle up for the ride, but hey that's life.  It won't run out, it's just that we won't be able to do what we've been doing so cheaply, for all resources.  That's especially true for metals.  Recycling is barely efficient for a lot of things right now, but it IS for metal, and will only get better.

Yes, we can change to smaller cars... for a while.  I guess it won't be us who are hit by it, but somewhere down the line...

And that's assuming that burning all this oil isn't going to continue to have bad effects on the atmosphere.  One thing capitalism can't magic away is negative externalities that hit everyone.

[Sowelu]

Well, it would be good to see progressively tighter emissions controls.  Not economy-destroying, but more of a continued gradual improvement.  California is...not a sane place when it comes to regulations.

[Nikov]

Somewhere down the line? It has already happened. Nations have run out of resources multiple times due to artificial forces, such as wars, and found substitutes. More expensive and sometimes less effective substitutes, but substitutes. For example, nitrates are a critical component in explosives. For a long time, saltpeter was the only industrial source of nitrates. When WWI broke out, Germany had no accessible source of nitrates and had to improvise. Although the army had burned out its stocks of gunpowder in only four months, chemists would develop synthetic gunpowder fast enough the Germans never missed a shot. They would also develop synthetic rubber, which was once considered as strategic a resource as oil is today.

All in all I have real confidence in the ability of scientists and inventors to innovate new solution so long as they follow the money and not the politicians for direction.