Topic: Politics does not matter. Only power. - page 3. (Read 3051 times)

Limits of my knowledge, that's a laugher.

The supply and demand curve does not "break down". You haven't explained or demonstrated that assertion.

The price of the resource goes up as it is used. As the price goes up, it incentivizes entrepreneurs to find alternatives, recover said resource, or find new supplies of said resource.

Nothing "breaks".

We can't move forward until we establish the limits of your knowledge. Please answer the question: So then you don't fully understand how the supply and demand curve breaks down for resources which undergo an irreversible transformation upon consumption then. Correct?

So then you don't fully understand how the supply and demand curve breaks down for resources which undergo an irreversible transformation upon consumption then. Correct?

Ya. And? You don't think I've answered your question, but I have...

Do you subscribe to the theory that as a resource dwindles, it's price goes up to the point that it will be conserved due to its high price?

Ya. And?

Supply is finite, demand is infinite, the supply/demand curve intersect at the market clearing price. What's your point?

Do you even understand how the standard supply and demand curve breaks down for certain natural resources?

Are we on an episode of the Twilight Zone? I already pointed out to you why it's wrong to state that Capitalism wastes natural resources.

You're begging the question, "How is your system any better?" It's fine to look at a scarce resource and say, "This resource is scarce.", but you a haven't made the case that;

1.) It should be used less.
2.) Reducing its use by coercion is actually possible.
3.) It can be used in a better way.
4.) You're qualified to make such a judgement.
Edit:
5.) That you can't do it in a Capitalist society.

Capitalism, through competition, places those that are most competent at the helm of the resources in which they specialize, and rewards their successes, which is determined by meeting consumer demand. Just as it should be.

You're not just biased. By sourcing your learning as you are, you're denying yourself a complete picture of the world. Now, if you wish to provide a well formed argument against what I have said in the last few posts, I will be glad to point out the deficiencies in your thought processes.

Translation: "I don't agree with you, so you must be biased. Excuse me while I don't read any opposing argument presented to me."

Stop pulling material from your favorite libertarian site and start focusing on educating yourself instead. You can't think clearly, independently, or objectively if you continue to source your learning from biased thinking.

What are you even talking about? Do you propose a system that first picks the highest hanging fruit? Do you like working just for the sake of work?

Economic calculation has determined that the value gained by "irreversibly" changing an object outweighs the cost of the landfill and the cost of making said object. Why is your judgement any better than the free market? Why are you any better at allocating resources over those people that actually work and specialize in their relevant industries, and make these decisions every day?

Are you serious? You can't figure this one out on your own? Free market forces guarantee picking the lowest hanging fruit until near the point of exhaustion. But the real problem is where free market zealots can't distinguish between natural resources which undergo irreversible transformation upon consumption and products which are manufactured from sustainable resources. One behaves according to the econ 101 supply and demand curve, and the other does not.

Here's some advice: stop treating your favorite libertarian playbook as if it were your bible, and start learning about the dynamics of resources and consumption.

Oh Christ on a stick, it looks like I've riled up the local Marxism apologist.

Please Crumbs, tell me again how Capitalism is the root of all evil, and how everyone just needs to give up money and stop being so greedy all the time.

http://mises.org/media/6225/Socialism-Utopia-and-Reality

Tell me how Capitalism wastes resources, and how they're always in it for sure term gains at the expense of future generations.

http://mises.org/community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/05/25/capitalism-the-destructive-exploitation-of-the-amazon-and-the-tragedy-of-the-government-owned-commons.aspx

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2004/04/ralph-r-reiland/shoot-shovel-shut-up/

Oh I know! Tell me how USSR and Nazi Germany weren't really Communists, they were totalitarian dictatorships totally misrepresenting what Lenin and Marx stood for.

http://mises.org/daily/6066/

Please, oh wise one, tell us how if we just tried your Socialism the right way, how everything would be great this time.

http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf

Share some more of your thoroughly debunked bullshit, I just can't wait to read it!


Oh wow, how impressive. Why don't you look up the history of Ludwig von Mises, or Murray Rothbard?

Marx and Lenin were comparatively village idiots.

I don't think there's anything wrong with concentration of power persay. It can simply be the rational way to operate. Imagine if the governments in the world tried to break up Intel and AMD. The lengthy development time, and incredibly capital requirements means these businesses just happen to get huge.

Why do you think that power gets in the wrong hands, and what would you suggest could defeat it?

Also, I think that touches on a major issue in the Bitcoin community. They tend to be way too focused on "decentralization", but the key phrase should be "freedom of entry", but I guess that's off topic..

I agree with everything you said. It did require education for people to understand what liberty meant. There were many popular writings before the revolution, and I would say that Ben Franklin's printing press probably played a huge role in getting such ideas out to the people in as revolutionary a way as the Internet is doing today.

Education, culture and technology can tip the scale back in favor of putting the power back into the hands of the people. But they have to organize, and to organize that tends to mean concentrating their power.

"Village idiot"? 
Marx: Born to a wealthy family, studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin.
Lenin:  Born to a wealthy family, law degree.
Laern 2 raed.


WTF are you talking about?  Who?


This is incoherent verbiage.  Word salad -- dumb assumptions tossed with fail & aids and served on a bed of fresh non-sequiturs.  Go, Dog, Go.

I don't know where you're getting that 10%, but I'll accept it as a rhetorical device.

It can't have moved toward a more libertarian society if not even those 10% knew what freedom meant. So clearly even in that situation, education performed a vital role.

It seems like you want to ignore all the causal factors that led up to the concentration of power in the wrong hands and say that the power in those hands is all that really matters. The power and those who wield it are a symptom of educational, cultural, and technological problems.

The mistake you're making is that you're saying that the way people interact with one another is deterministic; That the antisocial people will always coalesce in any given homogeneous society to form States.
All you have to do is look around to see that there is nothing deterministic about how humans interact with one another. Sometimes they are largely free, America between 1800 and 1900 (or maybe more pessimistically; 1783-1860), sometimes they're fascist, like Nazi Germany, and sometimes they're totalitarian, like Russia under Stalin.
The key point that anyone should be able to take from the Socialist/Communist experiments of the 1900's is that a village idiot (Karl Marx/Vladimir Lenin) can have a profound effect on the way people treat one another.
If a moron on a typewriter can instigate the deaths of tens of millions of people, it seems obvious that the inverse could also happen; A society could form around the ideas of people that are actually economically literate, like Murray Rothbard, Ludwig Von Mises, Hans Hoppe, etc and have a prosperous society.

Now, it can't be denied that violent societies have inevitably formed over the centuries. There has never been a large anarchistic society that has existed for any decent length of time. Defined perhaps like this;

An anarchist society is one in which there is free entry into the means of production and decision making of any field or geographical location.

("Free" only meaning that there are no predetermined rules; Only the voluntary interaction between participants in the society.)

The reason holding onto an anarchistic society is so difficult, besides the aforementioned ignorance, is simply that coercion is profitable.

Interestingly, with Bitcoin, coercion becomes less profitable. If a society were to adopt Bitcoin as its medium of exchange, it would necessarily mean the reduction of the State.

TLDR;
So in short, I'd say the optimum allocation of resources is seemingly inevitably subverted by the State because of a lack of education of the society on accurate economics, as well as the inherent profitability of coercion.
Saying that we already live in an anarchistic society, and that power is everything is a bit too simplistic and defeatist.