Topic: Politics does not matter. Only power. (Read 3037 times)

Perfect.  They make excellent all-natural fertilizer. 
*Honest?  EPA's pointing guns at people?  I always thought they were tree-huggin' wusses.  Go EPA

The EPA is not the only environmental incentive and not the most effective either. But it is the one that goes around pointing guns at non-violent people and threatening them with imprisonment, stealing their property and money.   

I see what you mean there.  The market responded by creating gob'ments, which, in turn, created agencies like EPA.  All a part of the natural and glorious fabric of life  

That is a good thing more efficient methods of production lowers cost and increases availability. What you are complaining about is the market doing its job... finding better methods and innovation is what we want. The real complaint is the rape of the natural world right?

over harvesting, C02 emissions?  

There are examples of over harvesting... but that did lead to wildlife conservation projects, seed planting initiatives, save the whales, seals, dolphins and every other animal on the planet. That is a market response to a change in demand. Which has included many completely voluntary efforts by private industries to use and promote sustainable practices.. The truth is that industry has the most at stake when it comes to the sustainability of it's market and that is what regulates markets... It is self regulated. If they over harvest price will fall and they will be incentivized to harvest less if demand exceeds supply they will be incentivized to find methods to increase production if those methods are unsustainable they will be incentivized to find methods that are sustainable if they can not they will be incentivized to find alternative products.
  
  

Do you understand how rising prices encourages more efficient, more effective, and technologically superior harvesting methods, and encourages new harvesters to enter the market?

oil

why dont you give an example where the supply /demand curve has not behaved the way that Dumbfriut has described.. Lets hear this vast list of natural resources that under go irreversible transformation upon consumption, there must be volumes filled with all of the resources man has squandered into oblivion..      

Liberal arts school, left wing, naturalist who happens to hate the largest part of nature.. Mankind, believes that governments are necessary and that force must be used to maintain order?

 

I see you're bringing up copper as well. Why?

Copper has nothing to do with my statement regarding how the supply and demand curve doesn't effectively describe certain markets. Absolute fail, even when I repeated my original post.

You have been hitting the nail on the head with every post. FirstAscent has been blowing my mind with his flawed logic, but it doesnt surprise me. All of the world has been conditioned to believe markets and profit motives are evil and are at the root of social injustice and inequality. The very thing that is merit based and allocates scare resources to the people who people who will make the best use them for the common good is demonized. Freedom, free markets , the rejection of force as a means to manipulate people, voluntarism, honest money, that is what is needed.

FirstAsent was undoubtedly educated at a liberal arts college. I love his personal attacks in regards to your understanding of economics, when he cant see why copper would have anything to do with an example of the market adapting and changing to supply conditions..
Some tree huger who believes that man is a vile creature who will destroy his own existence if not for EPA.



    natural resources which undergo irreversible transformation upon consumption----he gave an example of this- oil.

To get back on topic.


It is these types of statements that are used to centralize power to the point that you have to put up with the whims of those who gain that power based upon such premises.

Bitcoin will be able to put a stop to most of these economical centralizations but when it comes to military power and force there are larger hurdles to overcome.

Let's go back to my original and concise post, where I have bolded the already obvious components of it:

Sorry, Elwar, that was a response to DumbFruit, and his learned opinion on peak copper.

Haha... Sorry Elwar... And thanks Anon136.

I'll leave I at that.
rofl

Whatever dude...

I was very clear and concise in my first post. One merely needs to stop being an idiot for the minute in which it is read. In fact, I even counted on non-idiocy while one reads it, so the conversation could proceed efficiently from there. I expected too much.

Copper resources?

From now on all of my new threads in Politics will be self moderated.

When you're right, you're right. 
All that hysteria about world's copper resources being depleted by 2014 was just a bunch of weak-kneed liberal hooey. 
The Great Copper Crisis of 2003 was just a fiendish ploy perpetrated by communist agents and their cronies -- the brainwashed dupes of mainstream media.
That's where all the copper was going:  Child Pronz!

trying to have a discussion with that person is infuriating.

all he knows how to do is herring and strawman but hes REALLY REALLY good at it. he will make a herring argument that is related in some ways and not in others, and he will subtly steer the conversation in the direction of the non relevant aspects of his herring argument, taking careful action to insure that the focus of the conversation is changed often enough to ensure that no one claim is ever proved. he then proceeds to correctly point out that you never provided enough evidence to prove any particular claim, and claim that he won because of this. he will show the claims that he did prove, which arnt ever relevant to what was supposed to be the focus of the discussion. if you try to point out that the things that he proved dont refute what they were supposed to have refuted, than you just go back to the beginning and run through another loop of what i just described in this paragraph.

it is possible to debate against this but you have to be VERY careful not to allow him to sideline the conversation. you have to be extremely diligent to stay on track reminding with every post what it is that he is supposed to be proving. he will bring up irrelevant things and you have to prove that they are irreverent but you cant allow the conversation to branch out again, he will try to use the discussion of the relevance to redefine the thesis, then bring up something else irrelevant to this new thesis that you have to prove is irrelevant and he will redefine the thesis again.

personally i just recommend ignoring him unless you think there is value in practicing at debating against people who are really good at using dishonest tactics to "win" what they see as a competition.

This couldn't be anymore cut and dry. You wanted examples where the free market handled scarce resources without using them to exhaustion. I gave you two examples, and you pretend it's not relevant to the discussion.

You're either trolling me, stupid, or you're not very good at English. Take your pick.

I'm being serious. Try reading what I've been saying. Otherwise, you're just wasting your time and mine arguing with what you think I've been saying. Ridiculous.

Are you being serious right now?

Does anyone else think my response wasn't appropriate to what he was asking?

With Power comes everything else, money, politics, prestige, anything you can name.

Copper falls outside the domain of our dialog. Why are you bringing up copper? Once again, it appears you're suffering from reading comprehension. Maybe you should start back at the beginning of our conversation?

Two words.

Julian Simons.

Sure thing. Peak copper has been a worry for decades now, and the price has risen as a result of a more restricted supply. Partially as a result of this, processors are not made out of copper, but mostly silicon.

"Measured by mass, silicon makes up 27.7% of the Earth's crust and is the second most abundant element in the crust, with only oxygen having a greater abundance. Silicon is usually found in the form of complex silicate minerals, and less often as silicon dioxide (silica, a major component of common sand). Pure silicon crystals are very rarely found in nature." -Wikipedia

We are also moving away from using copper in wires, towards fiber optic cables which again are made out of silicon or plastic.

As the cost of copper went up (and the value of the dollar depreciated) the federal reserve stopped making copper pennies.

While the amount of recycling hasn't increased much, around 45% of copper used is from recycled sources.

So, as you can see, as the price of a resource goes up, people reduce their consumption, find alternatives, and recycle. Exactly as one would predict in a free market.


I could talk about peak oil and how every doom and gloom prediction over the past half a century has been proven hilariously wrong and how proven oil reserves just keep growing to no ones surprise that has learned some decent economics, but the subject has been talked to death...
As the price of oil has gone up, it has gotten profitable to get oil from more difficult to reach places, and new technologies have been developed to get oil (Frakking, anyone?)
If the mythical beast of peak oil ever does arrive, a free market will be able to handle it just fine. Price will go up, demand will shrink, alternatives will be found.


Do you have any examples anywhere where a private company used up all of its privately owned resources to exhaustion?


Things you're not going to read...
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Debunking-The-Myth-Of-Peak-Oil-Why-The-Age-Of-Cheap-Oil-Is-Far-From-Over-Part-1.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=MrlUAAAAYAAJ&pg=SL1-PA54#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/04/19/peak-copper-worldwatch-institute-gets-it-wrong-again/

Wouldn't it be nice if it worked like that in the real world? It doesn't. Do you understand that? Please, you have to look at real world examples, not textbook theories.

*groan*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptote


The demand on the resource reduces long before you're looking at the very last ounce of the resource in question.

It is pretty wild...

This thread is a good example of why just education cannot overcome the centralization of power. Some people vehemently support such power structures.

Like those who support fiat and Keynsian economics, they will fight Bitcoin. Bitcoin just has to be a better alternative and prove itself as such.

Ergo, the resource has been harvested to exhaustion. You just admitted it right there. The reason the resource gets harvested to exhaustion is precisely because of the high price. When a lot of money can be made from the sale of just a couple units, a great deal of effort, energy and technology is applied to harvesting the last remnants of the resource.


Notice your usage of the word 'approaches' twice. In the first case, the resource is getting to zero. In the second case, any demand above zero is enough demand to purchase the last quantity of the resource.

Ultimately, your ultimate failure in understanding the dynamics here is your desire to apply the classic supply and demand curve to two entirely different scenarios. In the case we have been discussing, the free market is a destructive force.

government didnt use to exist, now it does exist. we used to have anarchy, now we do not. government necessarily evolved out of anarchy. the only problem is your use of the word the. we are living in a natural conclusion of an anarchist state, not the natural conclusion.

No trouble at all & no.

You really went out of your way to make that joke. Could you please come back with the definition of "instigate"?


My feeling is that technology is going to make the governmental hierarchy obsolete.

It's getting harder and harder for the government to justify it's intrusion into education, mail, personal defense, money production, and anything else they want to put their grubby fingers into.

I hope that there will be a peaceful revolution as government withers away, but we all know how jealously governments guard their power.

It took two morons at two typewriters to to kill of tens of millions of people?  Well, that sure lets some air out of your balloon.
Or did each one of them slaughter tens of millions with a typewriter, doubling the casualties?
Of course, i'm allowing for the possibility that they shared a single typewriter, taking turns using it on their murdering sprees.  Was that the case?
Why were they not stopped by smarter & better armed people?  A fountain pen in the right hands...

It doesn't matter that people are willing to enter into the business of harvesting if there aren't resources to be harvested. As the amount of the resource approaches zero, the price goes up, and the demand approaches zero. The resource is in this way never used to exaustion.

Since the price is high, it indicates to entrepreneurs that finding an alternative, or finding new sources, or recovery of old sources, is profitable. So more money is likely to go into research and development of recycling techniques, exploration, artificial synthesizing, and research into alternatives. It's not "[tied up in the higher price of the resource]".

That is an apt description of both Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx.

I would say that the power gets into the wrong hands with complacency and the fact that for it to get into the right hands in the first place takes a lot of effort. Effort that cannot be continued forever.

My suggestion on how to defeat it? I have no idea, I am still mulling things over from an eyes wide open point of view trying to figure it out. But for sure, if the US government fell and it was replaced with some "libertarian Constitution", it would only last for a while as is. The new system needs to be so sound in its structure that it can compete against the current power of our government or a coalition of governments. And with the structure to continue.

We need a system that is to democracy what democracy was to kingdoms and dictatorships. Just as Bitcoin is to gold as gold is to fiat. I believe we are at a point in time where we are ready for it.

We always have and we always will. When I am getting ready for work, I sometimes think about our ancestors on the plains of Africa guarding a kill. Keeping the kill from the lionesses, rival clans, and whatnot.

Have we really changed? Isn't it that our tools today are court orders, threats of punitive monetary action, and blatant contract violations?

For evidence I offer up the political affiliation of supreme court nominees and the gyrations of SCOTUS from liberal to conservative. Consider how narrowly each case is decided and how easily the case might have gone to the minority - but for one justice.

Is that lady justice, blind, weighing the facts before her? Or is it the underlying power structure asserting their influence to keep their fresh kill for themselves?

Ridiculous. Learn to read. Point out where I said that.


Your conclusion is based on a false premise.


How does that counter anything I said?


Again, you don't really get it. 'Tis sad. When the price goes through the roof, new suppliers are willing to enter into the business of harvesting.


Why is there less demand? We're working on the premise that the price is going up. Hellloooo? Anyone home? The price is going up due to demand. If the price wasn't going up, we wouldn't be having this conversation.


It's happening every damn day.

I could say the same...

You're saying that the demand will go up as the price goes up, and production will ramp up until the resource is exhausted.

Again. That's not how the real world works.

Prices go up because it's difficult to expand production. The higher prices are, this indicates that expanding supply is difficult.

As the resource dwindles away, there are by definition less suppliers. (Because there is less of the resource to get.)
You can't just keep expanding production because the price is high. Since they can't expand production, they look for alternatives, or find ways to recover the resource.

There is also less demand.

Suppliers don't increase (directly from nature), demand doesn't stay the same, and the resource isn't used to exhaustion. It hasn't happened, isn't happening, and wont ever happen in a free market.

Maybe you failed reading comprehension 101? Wow.

Read the post again.

What the f.. I don't even... Where do I begin?

The price isn't "in the resource". People didn't wake up one day and say, "Shit, I'm missing $5.00! Oh, the price of fishnets in Kenya went up. That's where that money went."

No. Prices don't pull demand with them, in fact that's exactly the opposite of what the supply and demand curve shows.

If the price of gasoline goes to $100.00/gal people don't say, "Look how valuable that is! I better buy more!" They reduce their consumption, and entrepreneurs look for alternatives that cost $99.99/gal or less, or they drill for oil in places that is profitable at those high rates.

No dude, that's not how the real world works. Name one single privately owned resource that was harvested to complete annihilation by a private business.

When the price goes up, guess what the harvesters do? They are incentivized to up the energy, effort, and technology to continue harvesting. And it's funny that you mention that "As the price goes up" as a reason for entrepreneurs to find alternatives. Why would they look for alternatives when the money is in the resource that is going up in price? And why is that price going up? Because there is demand out there.

So what happens? The resource is harvested until it's gone! All gone! And remember that it undergoes an irreversible transformation upon consumption. So it's really gone from the world forever. Furthermore, guess what? That resource might have been attached to something else that takes collateral damage upon harvesting. So that something else is gone too. Forever.


Uhh, no. Something does indeed break.

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.

Yes, it could certainly be. 

For sure, in numerous third world counties in which such dire straits and corruption exist that there is no way Paypal could get established there, and hence, Amazon or Ebay cannot exist there.

Beyond those situations, where a separate private currency has obvious advantages (yes I am talking about someone in the US trading directly with someone in Kenya, etc) it is not so clear.

Would the emergence of a crypto currency in the USA say to the extent of 10% of paypal transactions  cause fundamental social or political change?  If so, how and what?

Well said.

I have often pondered the notion that we are living in the natural conclusion an anarchist state.  Ie, the strongest wins.  And it will always be so, though it will take different forms.

A counterpoint however is that if we look at history, we can see that forward motion has been made, and not always linearly.  I think most would agree that society has advanced beyond feudalism.  ie, it was not a lateral or backwards step from feudalism to democracy.  Yet if you could talk to the average person living in a feudal society 900 years ago, they probably would have trouble even conceiving of a democratic society and its implications.  Or if they could, they would laugh at you and say that such a utopia will never happen.  The lords and kings would never permit it.

So thinking about it that way encourages me that there is hope for a better tomorrow, for improvement of the human condition and societal organization.  Perhaps cryptocurrencies will be the sword that finally strikes a mighty blow at the root of centralized power:  control over money.

When that day comes, we may have set the stage for a new type of society, as different from today as we are from the dark ages.   perhaps even a voluntaryist one.

Whatever your political point of view, whether we need this or that, whether the government should do something about whatever or not. Whether we should be involved in whichever thing or ignore it. It does not matter. All that matters is power.

We are fooling ourselves if we believe that anything can be changed in Washington that would give power back to the people, or if that power would remain. An anarchist/libertarian society? Forget it. A communist utopia? Only if people are slaves to the masters with power.

When it comes down to it, we live in an anarchist, survival of the fittest world. But when people think of such a world they think of preppers with guns killing weaker people for their supplies and surviving because they have more guns or are stronger or whichever.

But the reality is that all things equal, two people are more powerful than one. So the two people have more power than that one person and can pretty much tell that one person how they should live. Unless that one person finds two other people so that it is three against two. Then they can determine what everyone should do. And on and on, the groups getting bigger, the power growing within each group. 1000 people against 500 people, the 1000 people get to decide how society works. All the way to millions of people with a huge military and nuclear weapons. How could you possibly think you can get the power back to that one person?

But the thing about that is that those large groups of people join forces to protect themselves from other groups, but within the group there are groups of people with more power than the rest. So even if you do not agree with what those with more power in your group want to do, your only other option is no protection.

Was our country founded on ideas alone? Or did they have more power than the British? The huge amount of effort it required for the British to send ships to America and fight a far off war caused their ideas to become the losing ideas. Not the merit of the politics, but the fact that we won the war. We displayed our power. Is democracy the best way to run a government? Is that why all of these countries are becoming democratic? Or does it have something to do with the most power country in the world flexing its muscles and pushing it on nations?

In a way, libertarians in the US are fighting a far more difficult battle than if they were in some small country with a tiny military force.

Your political ideology will only work if it includes a more powerful force than the current one in place. Giving power back to the people is great, as long as your political system has a way for them to all join that power together to fight a larger force. And that means, at this stage in human technological advances, being more powerful than a full on nuclear strike. And if your political ideology can do that, you need to make sure someone cannot control all of that power to take control of those that combined their power.

Of course, power is not just guns and bullets. It includes money. And I believe Bitcoins can help in that piece of the puzzle.