Thread: A primitive economy.

Originally Posted by acmegridley

Heard an interesting interview with Alan Jones and some farmer from Wyoming in the US, who had been bought over by one of the anti fracking lobby groups.The gas companies just marched onto his land and started setting up wells and fracking s..t out of the place, and as a result he now has wells all over his property ,he can't raise cattle as the water is undrinkable it is full of methane gas, they have to truck fresh water in daily,and there is a permanent smell similar to diesel fuel which permeates the air,when asked about showering he said the authorities told him to leave all doors open when he was showering,to prevent the build up of methane gas (not b...dy likely, given that the outside temps. have been minus 10 to minus 25 during the day!!)
Is this the shape of things to come? I will make further enquiries as to when and where he is lecturing as I would be very interested to hear more from him

We have a great deal of fracking going on just south of San Antonio. Recently we were returning from a trip to Houston and the air was rank with fuel, rather like the smells surrounding oil refineries I remember from my youth.
All of our water here comes from wells. When fracking first started here I installed a whole-house carbon filter in our water feeder. The other day I tasted water direct from the tap from a non-filtered source and it was horrible. It did not taste of petroleum but it was very bad.

Originally Posted by artme

Ah yes! Marx, Dickens, Engels,Hegel. What a quartet of great observers and writers!!

Hegel had very interesting views on rights, obligations and choices and I think these are often overlooked
when discussing politics and economics. For instance Hegel's point of where do your rights impinge on my
rights is an oft overlooked and extremely valid consideration that ought to be put in the front of the minds
of decision makers - at any level. Alas we see the results of this not being the case all around us.

What really worries me is the tendency of conservative politicians to repeatedly want to wind back the clock
to a new kind of laissez-faire economics. This is precisely what the aforementioned writers were so distressed
by.

Marx is interesting. As we enter a post-scarcity society this will become more common. It is not the best option though.

A true lasses-faire economy is the best option overlaid with a mix of Individual Mutualism combined with a Basic Wage movement.

This isn't communism, as yanks spit out as a vituperative, but a simple division of lesser resources to stop poverty. Let the rich be rich for they work for it, but eliminate the negative social impacts of poverty and very negative American-Style conservative capitalism.

My views on taxation are also similar. ALL taxes are evil and must be abolished. They only encourage over-governance, waste, cronyism and resource misallocation (which is the real crime).

Ye gods Evan!! You really are a radical!!!

I'm going to have brain fade trying to decide if your ideas are floated as a challenge, a joke or are workable in some way.!!!

Personally I have no objection to taxation. I object to the fact that my money, and that of others, is needlessly squandered.


( That's a start on your observations)

Originally Posted by artme

Ye gods Evan!! You really are a radical!!!

I'm going to have brain fade trying to decide if your ideas are floated as a challenge, a joke or are workable in some way.!!!

Personally I have no objection to taxation. I object to the fact that my money, and that of others, is needlessly squandered.


( That's a start on your observations)

Shhh, Evanism on the board, I'm in Secret Squirrel mode here

Many of my ideas are brought from areas that are destroyed by war.... Japan post ww2 with MacArthur, West Germany after the war...hong kong. These areas were destroyed on an apolocolyptic scale. Other areas used established governance and it took years to grow out of poverty. The three listed used a decisively different model...almost anarchy, zero government regulation, non existent taxes, free enterprise on a scale never before seen nor since replicated sprung forth. Full employment ensued where people were sucked in from every region and country. Crime evaporated. Business and investment went ballistic. I'll see if I can find the study. It will blow your mind, guaranteed.

I hate all forms of taxation. Every cent of tax is forcefully removed under threat of retaliation from productive enterprises and individuals and used/squandered by unaccountable non-competitive governments to support their own agendas.

I VERY FIRMLY believe the market, the true market, not what we have now, supplies all solutions and the right price. Taxation, government interference and subsequent inflation will always destroy wealth and surprises creativity.

Look, I'm not ignorant. My ideas and the ideas of other thinkers will go nowhere. Government is its own self perpetuating nightmare and people ultimately want to be controlled. They talk of maintaining their own destinies but this is a populist delusion.

It's my primary goal never to rely on a government, it's "services" or really be any part of the machinery. No, I'm not a Survivalist or one of those north American gun toting government hating whack jobs.

BTW, I'm a Buddhist....so I'm not supposed to get worked up about this stuff...but when someone says " the Labor party does such a good job of...." we'll, I just want to kill something!

After the war it was possible for this sort of scenario to work. A type of anarchy did exist to make this possible.

If we loosened the strings in today's circumstances I fear the "big boys" would simply take over. It would not be anarchy,
it would be a slaughter of innocents!!

Unions and their political offshoots arose to fight the unfair, and unnecessary, practices of the companies and their bosses.
In more recent times the results of unfettered industrial practices have forced governments to act in order to protect the
environment.

Now if thtat means Market regulation, then I am all for it!!!

For the first few years after the war Germany had very slow development. However, the US became extremely worried about communism and decided that Europe would make a good bulwark. So the Marshall plan was devised pouring money into the destroyed industrial areas. There was the secondary subsidy of allied troops being stationed there and spending hard currency. It also served to thumb the western nose at the eastern bloc by setting it up as a role model for capitalism versus communism.

Yes , the Marshall plan and a similar type of plan in Japan were responsible for the rapid recovery and expansion of both economies after the war.

In some ways Germany was advantaged by the fact that it had to start virtually from scratch with manufacturing. Much of their capability had been utterly
destroyed by allied bombing and the Russians simply removed whatever they could and carted it off to Russia.

To get rolling the Germans needed new machinery and this meant more modern machinery and methods. Contrast this with the older and well protected machinery in Britain.
Both japan and Germany had very industrious populations also, and this no doubt helped their efforts.

The USA was an entirely different case. It was the only nation that came out of the war richer than it went into it. It's massive industrial capacity was unscathed by the war.
In fact, as a supplier to other nations, the war actually pushed the expansion and modernization of the US economy and means of production. They were the only nation in a position to take full advantage of the situation in peacetime.

Complicating Britain's effforts was it's desire to cling onto empire, but we won't go there.