From: Matt Welland (matt@essentialgoods.com)
Date: Sun Aug 24 2003 - 10:32:53 MDT
Intellectual property is a related and interesting aside, but...
Isn't it one of the Seven Habits to seek first to understand...
On Sunday 24 August 2003 12:09 am, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
> 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
-- Be strong, have patience, pay attention and live well.
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