Re: Considering standard of living (was Re: Land of let's only talk about whats wrong with the US)

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Aug 23 2003 - 22:09:42 MDT

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    On Sat, 23 Aug 2003, Matt Welland wrote:

    > This thread strikes an interesting cord for me. In my opinion one of the
    > unaddressed (and unintended) consequences of unbridled capitalism(*) is that
    > over time natural resources, i.e. land, slowly ends up in the hands of a few.
    > Carried to its inevitable consequence all the land is owned by a few very
    > rich people who literally can deny life to the remaining population. For an
    > in-depth exploration of one way to solve this pop over to www.henrygeorge.org
    > and do some reading.

    I'm not so sure. Dole doesn't buy land in Nebraska because one generally
    cannot grow pinapples there. The land they own in Hawaii may be enough
    simply due to constraints on how many pinapples one can market. Refer back
    to the conversation with comments by Damien and others regarding tariffs on
    agricultural products. Even if you owned the land in a lower cost producing
    "state" one might not be able to sell the products (so it makes no sense to
    own the land). If this argument held together people would be snapping up land
    in northern Canada and Russia and using genetic engineering to produce crops
    that would grow there. Or one would see massive efforts to build desalination
    plants and pipelines to supply the U.S. southweast with fresh water. And
    of course there is North Africa and the Mid-east. Yet one doesn't see
    efforts of that nature.

    Instead one sees a greater concentration of "wealth" in the hands of those
    who own the "Intellectual Property" and "human resources", e.g. IBM, Intel,
    etc. But one only owns the IP for 20 years and the human resources are
    generally free to move about.

    The "land" is ultimately important if we get into a massive population
    growth situation (say a world population of 20-100 billion). But there
    are solutions to this -- from more efficient agricultural methods (see
    Mark Walker's recent post) to solar power satellites.

    It is relatively accepted by economic theorists that as "natural resources"
    are exhausted that substitutions occur. I have not looked at the web site, but
    if it does not examine (in detail) substitution phenomena, then it doesn't
    have a grasp of the "big picture".

    Robert



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