From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Sep 12 2003 - 10:43:53 MDT
matus wrote:
>...
> Do all transactions require someone to lose and another to win? Are all
> exchanges zero sum or are they not?
Yes. But they are harder to construct, and much more theoretically
intractible than zero sum games. In fact, the last I heard the only
ones that could be effectively dealt with on a theoretic basis were the
ones that could be decomposed and transformed into a much more
complicated pair of zero-sum games. But that this covered only a
fragment of the available forms. (OTOH, this was 3 decades ago, and at
the undergraduate level.)
>...
> Does the Earth have a limited amount of Wealth? Last I checked, we
> werent running out of Food or Energy, since we have more of both now
> than ever in the entire history of humanity.
At any particular time the earth has a limited amount of wealth.
Actually, on theoretical grounds one could maintain that there was a
finite limit on the possible amount of wealth deriveable from the earth
over any specific finite span of time. But I don't know how one could
estimate how close we were to the theoretic limits. And knowledge plays
a big role here.
>>And yes, there are alternative value economic theories, Marx is the
>>standard, I like the modifications by Istvan Meszaros.
>>
> Ah, and so many extropian list members thought there were no communists
> on board. Jeff Davis, you have a buddy, someone who shares your idea
> that a moral communist state can exist. Sure, it may, but no communist
> state has ever come close to being moral, and Robbie, I am surprised to...
>
> Michael Dickey
And you can come up with an example of some other government that was
even approximately moral? I can't. The more history I studied, the
less moral governments appeared. Stalin was unusual in that prior
"incarnations" had to use cruder technologies. But you could ask the
Comanche about the morality of the US. Or the Mohicans, if you could
find any. Or the Iriquois. Or... But finding another government that
was any better would be quite difficult. Canada, perhaps. But then I
haven't studied their history. Nepal. But then they've never had the
power to be evil on a large scale.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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