January 8, 2007
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Hell Yes.
The Geostationary Banana Over Texas.
Perhaps to go along with The Orange Show.
Via BLDGBLOG, which you should be reading anyway.
Update: Ok, so there’s this huge monster comment section here with a bunch of really thinky stuff. And I want to point interested/confused readers to where the real discussion is happening: Over here on CaptainScurvy’s site. Pack a lunch.
Xanga kind of sucks for that kind of discussion, by the way.
Comments (16)
i totally dig that banana!
and when it re-enters, it can rain fried bananas down on that Lone Star State.
ryc: The Battle of Algiers is so brutal, but so important. I think I asked people back in 2003 to watch it – before the war – because very few Americans had any idea of what this kind of war meant. Americans like to laugh at the French, but it is strange that they have exactly duplicated the insanity of the French in Vietnam, and then replicated Algiers in Baghdad. Seems the people who don’t learn are the dumb ones. But Cultivate the Leap – I love it. That doesn’t usually come via threats, it comes because we are betting that humans hold on to some level of humanity.
RYC:
Resources are the most important part of capitalism. You’re arguing that, for instance, concerns over the supply of petroleum are silly because there will always be petroleum.
No. The most important part of capitalism is the innovation of men that give value to resources in the first place; resources are completely worthless without men giving them value. Read here for a basic introduction to economic value theory.
I also do not argue that we will always have petroleum. I argue that men will always find ways to meet energy demand. Whether that is with petroleum, non-conventional hydrocarbons, or a combination of various other means makes absolutely no difference, because wealth is not fundamentally rooted in a quantity of resources.
One can argue (and many have, successfully) that nature is a service provider.
Nature is no such thing. Nature does not streamline its services based on supply and demand; it is man’s mind that gives value to resources from nature and rearranges them to create capital. If nature was a service provider, as you claim, then these so-called “ecological” problems would never arise; it would be able to meet the “demand” placed upon it by streamlining its services.
If every economic actor that pumped out CO, for instance, had to pay for those molecules, rather than simply relying on trees to turn them back to breathable air, the economy would shift overnight to sustainability.
I suppose you have a formula for calculating the “economic impact” of a certain quantity of CO “on society,” and translating that into a price. You have to be a Keynesian.
…the market itself is what caused the problem and is very slow to wake up to the solutions.
Implicit in your statement is the idea that the means of production should be regulated only to produce so-called “sustainable” technologies. This raises the questions as to what is sustainable and who decides.
As a student of physics, I can tell you that the answer to the first question is totally unanswerable with our present knowledge; a climate scientist, for example, will probably just laugh at you if you say you have a valid means of determining what is “sustainable,” or even what is necessarily “better for the climate.” You can offset some of the harmful effects of production to another arena, but generally speaking, we know so little about what makes the global climate tick (and therefore next to nothing about what is “sustainable”) that so-called “sustainable technologies” could just as well be as harmful as anything else we do. LOHAS is mostly just a marketing gimmick.
The second question sets the stage for technocratic socialism, and we all know how that turns out.
Now, the idea that the market “caused all these problems” is entirely fallacious; the Soviet Union was a communist country without a market, and the meltdown of Chernobyl was something of an “ecological problem.” Similarly, the idea that the market cannot provide solutions to these problems is also untrue; in the aforementioned scenario, it was the assistance of a market-driven economy (i.e., the U.S.) that contained the disaster.
re: gaming Xanga
Heh, yeah. I wrote a small script to visit all of the newly updated Xanga pages. What most people do manually to get traffic–spending hours commenting on random sites–the script does automatically. It generates a lot of traffic, and therefore a lot of feedback, which helps with figuring out how clearly my writing communicates. I also get some pretty cool and insightful responses, and some of the resulting discussions have been interesting and informative.
RYC:
If you start a war to bolster the war-making economy (most wars that have been fought, in fact), people will die.
Overthrowing governments and starting wars are functions of statism, not capitalism. “State favors to businesses” have no place in market economics, and I would refer you to Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich for explanations as to why. These things are outcomes of mixed economies.
Or, put another way, if part of your business is to dump pollution into a river, then people will get cancer as a result.
A prerequisite for the market economy (though anarcho-capitalists like Rothbard would disagree–I myself think anarchism and capitalism are mutually exclusive) is a limited government that protects individual rights; dumping harmful pollutants into a river is a violation of the rights of anyone who comes in contact with those pollutants, and state action in this case would be justified. Capitalism does not mean “no government.”
Again, the idea that “capitalism is too stupid” implies that central planning is preferred. In The Road to Serfdom, which I *highly* recommend, Hayek shows how central planning ends up being far more “stupid” than any blundering corporate venture.
Capitalism, incidentally, is not failing us. Look around you. The standard of living for members of market-driven societies continues to rise year after year because of the innovations spurred by the market and its profit incentive. Most people in developed nations tend to take this trend for granted, completely unaware that it comes from the economic framework of capitalism. In a way, this is a good thing–it means they haven’t lived under the opposite ideal (statism). In another way, it is tragic, because those who do not know the source of their prosperity can also lose it in an eyeblink.
Wrong. Capitalists overthrow governments.
You didn’t read the link I sent you.
You miss the point in three ways here.
1.) “Limited government” does not mean “powerless government.” It means government limited solely to the defense of individual rights. Force is sanctioned against rights violations such as poisoning others.
2.) You didn’t read the link I sent you. People only spend money on lobbying if the government has the power to legislate in their favor. This is a problem with a mixed economy. In an economy where the market was separated from the state, this would not occur. Again, check out Mises and Hayek.
3.) Money is made from pollutants–from their safe disposal.
Not in the least.
Yes. You prefer central planning to the market, or else you would not be calling capitalism “inadequate.”
And that’s all the authority I need, or anyone else needs in order to make the criticism.
No it isn’t. Just because everyone “believes” that something is true does not mean that it is true, and such a fallacious belief gives no one any authority over anyone else. In logic, this is called the “appeal to popularity.” In politics, it’s called “communism.”
I wanna hear more about the banana
Big. Giant. Banana.
!
Socialist Technology has given the world a few things of value, from higher math (how to calculate the flight of canon balls) to maritime clocks (how the British Navy found longitude) to computers (US Naval Artillery tables) to nuclear power to solar power cells (NASA) to jet engines (the RAF and German Air Forces), to velcro, to concrete technology (Roman government roads originally). It has even created safe and efficient cars in most nations, developed high speed trains, pushed aircraft design. And the research and development done at public universities far exceeds the quality of that done at the behest of the marketplace.
CaptainScurvy falls for the American Religio-Economic myths hook, line, and sinker. Which requires a complete blind eye to his own national history.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about.
The fundamental dispute here is over the defining characteristics of capitalism. You are attributing to capitalism characteristics that do not exist in market economics; i.e., you are rewriting a centuries-old and widely-accepted definition of what defines the market economy, adding “government favors” and “starting wars” to the list of its attributes. These are features of interventionist economies. If you want to continue this discussion, you really need to read some of the literature on market economics, because your limited understanding of very basic economic concepts is preventing you from making a single coherent argument.
Again, I recommend The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek if you think that government can “solve market problems” in any way.
So you sail across seas protected by your huge navy into ports built by government and take advantage of a government created economic environment and ride railroads built with government grants and then move out into territories seized for you by the government and protected by the army, and, voila! you declare yourself a free capitalist who did it all himself.
Defense is a valid function of government under market liberalism, and your railroad claim is flat-out wrong.
I blame the schools.
You may need to find a dictionary CaptainScurvy. “Defensee” perhaps does not mean clearing trade routes across the ocean, or seizing other nations (be they Ireland or Australia or Hawaii or a third of Mexico). And if you do not know how American westward railroads were built (via government land-grants, sometimes government-backed loans, and of course that ultimate evil – eminent domain), then, even if you went to a terrible school you can really only blame yourself for your lack of knowledge. Here’s a sixth grade-level primer.
Your linked “research” conveniently forgets things like military protection, mail contracts, free use of government surveys, and, obviously, the cost of the land acquisition and management itself. The untruths you have found on the internet are staggering.
You should have said “pack a lunch and a score card.” Interesting discussion, though.
Thanks for the link!
I’ve actually *read* ‘Road to Serfdom.’ It’s a polemic on the virtues of market capitalism versus planned communism. That’s all it is. It ignored history, too, seeking to reframe hundreds of years of capitalist imperialism as beneficial to those conquered.
And, what’s this? CaptainScurvy has disappeared.
chased from the scene by triumphant socialist rhetoric.
Scurvy was just playing a game on Xanga anyway.
Comments are closed.