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