< As much as some would like to see a slowdown in the pace of growth, the socioeconomic costs of doing so far outweigh the benefits. >

Oh phoowey!

Any benefits are far outweighed by the negatives.

Come on, we’ve had very rapid population growth for a very long time…. and where has it really got us? Can you say that the quality of life in this country is better than it would have been if we’d had, say, a net zero immigration rate since 1980?

No you can’t!

And when you factor in our future wellbeing, we are much worse off than we would have been.

What do you think continued rapid population growth is going to do to Sydney and Melbourne? Is it going to make them better places to live?

Whatever the benefits of importing a constant huge supply of labour might be, we’ve GOT to get our heads around the absolute need to wind it back, and gear the country towards a stable population and a sustainable future.

I congratulate Asher for being one of the first to recognise the importance of urban design and population. It's a confusing article but makes some interesting points.

Much of the anti-people/population rhetoric is based on end of the earth scenarios of Mayan prophesy proportions, eg more people will kill the ecosystem, raise sea levels by metres (good news for lifesavers, bad news for coastal development), induce earthquakes and generally spoil our breakfasts. This is silly and I fear the anti-pops know it.

Asher's article might have been stronger is it had concentrated on the anti-capitalism/anti-humanist side of the 'get rid of the people' lobby. I'm not alone in finding it curious that Dick Smith, whose claim to fame was selling millions of dollars of cheap electrical equipment, is now their spokesperson.

The problem has never been the number of people. The problem is how to design cities for the next 100 years and the population peaks in 2050 and then declines. If the anti-people lobby were really visionaries (as they claim) they'd look at the problems of building massive infrastructure to cater for more people only to find the numbers falling from 2050-2100. That's a wicked problem.

"Put simply, our miners and farmers require extra workers; our retailers desire additional customers; and our sick and elderly need more carers..."
This isn't a terribly logical argument. In the first 2 cases, they might 'desire' more workers, but do they really need them? Only to cater for a larger market, created by a larger population...
In the 3rd instance, there are clearly enough people to cater for the sick and elderly; there are just not enough inclined to do so.
Sooner or later, inevitably, we must accept the need to stop growing. At some point in a finite world with finite resources, it will be necessary to say "ENOUGH!".
If we really believe we have a right to claim being intelligent, rational beings, surely the day to start planning for that day is today.

Perhaps Asher should read the next article in today's OLO to get a more realistic outlook on life into the future.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12067

David

Now I understand why some people believe the population can just keep growing if they perceive sustainability in terms of Mayan prophecies. All is clear, I probably would too if I leaned to those extreme interpretations.

However back in the land of reality, increasing populations creates greater demand on infrastructure and has an environmental impact.

Unfettered population growth does not have any benefits, despite the growthists belief in greater demand for goods and services (consumerism) as the only indicator of prosperity or the health of communities.

Increased skills migration and obligations to refugees could still continue as usual with skills migration based on need. Ideally skills training should be adeqaute to meet demands.

There is certainly a valid case for better planning. That is relevant now, not only in consideration of increasing populations. Decentralisation is one way to reduce the pressure on the bigger cities, by creating smaller well serviced regional cities but so far there has been only talk on this, not much action.

There needs to be flexibility in any population plan to adjust to changing conditions but ideally populations should not just be allowed to grow invincibly into the future without carefully considering the negative impacts for the many rather than the positive impacts for the few.

Asher Judah is a Research Fellow of the IPA, so it's no surprise that he follows the IPA line that what's good for business is good for you and me. (A notion which was long ago discredited.) Ludwig's response was succinct: "Oh phoowey! Any benefits are far outweighed by the negatives."

As with the arguments about climate change, there's a disconnect between the proponents of growth, and the anti-growth worriers. That is, that growth advocates like Asher Judah are implicitly and explicitly political. The IPA is an explicitly political lobby group, supporting the notion of free market capitalism.

Of course there are irrational people on both sides of the argument, but by and large, the opponents of growth are supported by good demographic, social, and environmental science. And, as with climate science, there is no way that one can infer the politics of a soil scientist, a hydrologist, or an atmosperic physicist, because they are concerned about human numbers and environmental degradation.

One has to read Asher Judah's article as a political document, and look elsewhere for a scientific (or even humanitarian) view. Judah's penultimate paragraph is chilling: "The public must keep an open mind towards innovative solutions such toll roads, infrastructure bonds, road privatisation and planning, transport and construction industry deregulation to better manage our long term growth. By harnessing the natural strengths of the private sector, government will be better placed to leverage the best outcomes on behalf of the community."

Nicco

Another clear erudite post.

Thanks

I agree with the other posters but the situation looks hopeless; we can go on and on lamenting the insanity of our addiction to growth, but it won't change a thing. The voting majority just accepts neoliberal dogmatism. Gillard has been going on all week about increases in skilled migration and growing the workforce to accommodate the boom. What we should be doing is tailoring our exports to our economic needs as they are. Indeed reducing GDP concomitant with more modest lifestyles and even population contraction. This would push commodity prices up and allow us to control population growth, rather than letting economic growth control us. In the meantime we could become more self-sufficient and less dependent on foreign investment.
The only ones benefitting from a bigger Australia, apart from immigrants, are the capitalists. The bloody scam is about elite and corporate wealth.
Trouble is, who the hell do you vote for? No political contender is offering an alternative vision for the future.
It's very depressing.

Squeers wrote....."Trouble is, who the hell do you vote for? No political contender is offering an alternative vision for the future.
It's very depressing."

There is a political party now formally registered with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) and although only now taking roots in Australian politics, I'm hoping they'll become a way for disgruntled voters to let the current two major parties know that pandering to the growth lobby, big business and consumerism is not what Australians need or want. You can check them out at.........

http://www.populationparty.com/

The Stable Population Party is also looking for participants and organisers in all regions. And yes, I know it's currently a small party and many haven't even heard of them yet, but how does that song go....? From little things, big things grow!

The trick is to "stabilise" the population and avoid an unfettered population explosion, not to try and turn back the clock.

Sustainable Population Party reminds me a bit of the old fashioned Nationals - every problem in their world had to do with the superphosphate bounty. Cats on roofs = superphosphate tax. Dead cattle = superpho tax. No roads? Superphosphate. So all of Australia's problems have to do with population. Pigs might fly.

1. Protect biodiversity and our natural and built environment - motherhood statement - protect biodiversity by educating children.
2. Relieve our over-stretched infrastructure - what? cut funding for rural hospitals! It's over stretched in Sydney and Melbourne. Sounds like slashing capital works programs.
3. Lower carbon emissions - by eliminating capitalism.
4. Stop upward pressure on costs of living (housing, food, water, energy, transport), inflation and interest rates - by praying our psychobabble economic theories bever see the light of day.
5. End sprawl and urban consolidation by cutting housing for the battlers.
6. Focus on sustainable economic development, workforce productivity and per capita GDP growth which is what we do now.
7. Save $1.5b p.a. spent on the unnecessary baby bonus (when births double deaths and natural growth is 150,000 p.a. - good point, and good luck with that.
8. Incentivise the training, education and employment of younger and older Australians - 'incentivise' did John Hewson write this? BS motherhood statement.
9. Demonstrate global leadership in sustainable population management and provide assistance to other countries - abortions for candy.
10. Protect food security by creating trade barriers.

I don't know anything about this new party, Aime, but I'm inclined to agree with Cheryl's cynicism, if not her motives.
These kinds of parties do generally seem to be ultra-conservative with their protectionism etc. And I can't say I think much of the "policies".
The fact is that this insane system will run on regardless until either its economic or its ecological limits are reached.

Cheryl has not got the message yet, populate and perish.

'Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.5 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year.'

Read the book The Great Disruption by Paul Gilding.

We have come to the end of economic growth.

And we import more food than we export, what if the supply line is closed - no more caviar for Cheryl.

Not much for me to say;

-Some member of a lobbyist group composed mostly of libertarian activists, real-estate and industry lobbyists, is telling us that we need more people because a couple of industries simply want more customers and workers, and the public should pay to help them get it.

-Cue Cheryl joining the debate (mysteriously only when it involves population or real estate), saying the article is some kind of magic solution and "debunks" the evil "anti-pops"- even when it doesn't and she never explains why, hoping that if she simply says it people will believe her.
Followed eventually by a bizarre loony rant pointing out that "anti pops" are actually secret evil nazi jew zionist communist death-worshippers who want to commit genocide on everyone.

I must be clairvoyant- I can predict these (predictable) threads before they even occur!

King Hazza, I see you've worked "Cheryl" out to a tee.

As soon as I see the childish "anti-pop" appear in Chryl's rantings, I switch off and read no further. By the way, what is an "anti-pop?" The opposite, perhaps, to a "pop?"

I do believe our Cheryl has very vested interests, whereas I had none in offering the Stable Population Party as a possible alternative.

And PeterA, I would concur that the world has indeed reached the end of economic growth. It may flounder along for a few more years, but I expect very hard times to follow and there will be no return to 'business as usual.'

Looks like the usual anti-freedom, anti-human parrots are out in a veritable squawking flock today, fresh from the defeat of their morally and intellectually bankrupt arguments in other threads, re-running the same refuted arguments.

Ludwing
Who’s “we”?

Still under the false impression that you speak for everyone in the world including those who disagree with you; and that you are a better judge of other people’s happiness than they are?

I’m still waiting for your critique of my article on economic calculation and ecological sustainability which disproves your statist superstition btw. You went quiet on me there.

Pelican
Still under the false impression that shooting people who disagree with you is morally superior? Or perhaps you’re not in favour of enforcing any policy on population after all? You went quiet on me there.

BTW, notice how both the constraints on population you mention – infrastructure and environment – are controlled by government on the basis of your belief that only government can manage these goods unselfishly? If there’s an increase in the demand for water, private providers don’t declare that human beings are a species of noxious pest – they regard it as a good thing. The fact that government can’t cope at providing the services you think it is indispensable to provide, doesn’t prove that human life is a bad thing, it proves your theory is wrong.

Hazza
Still waiting for you to say how government is going to know how to combine the factors of production so as to satisfy the most urgent and important wants of the people, as judged by the people, without using economic calculation? You went quiet on me there.

Squeers
Still under the false impression that your desire to play on the internet is more important than other people’s desire to live? Still under the impression that those clever people in government can magically create an alternative economic system based on coercive central planning?

I’m still waiting for you to say what the alternative is to the private ownership of the means of production. Collectivization of agriculture? No? Gulags? No?

What? You went quiet on me there.

Grim
Perhaps if you keep repeating Malthusian fallacies, they’ll become true eventually?

“Any numbskull can find statistics to show that if the resource base stays the same and population increases then all hell will break loose.”
http://mises.org/daily/1675

Nicco
You have it back to front. Those who think every decision should be controlled by government are the ones running a political agenda, not the ones you point out the emperor has no clothes, and who deny the presumptive wisdom and goodness of the central planning power freaks.

* * *

So. What policy did you guys have in mind? Obviously not shooting people – unless they disagree with your policy of treating them like bacteria on a Petri dish owned by government, that is.

Indeed Aime- her posts are so repetitive and off-topic I'm almost convinced that she actually has a word document full of random remarks that she simply copies and pastes to these threads.
In fact I could probably create an "email reply wizard" program myself that could automatically reply to any thread alert in my email that mentions "population"; and strings together a barely coherent phrase picking some random sentences from a list and posting them- and nobody would even know the difference.

Hume- Sorry- "went quiet" about what exactly?
Increasing use of automated machinery in industry would be a painfully glaringly obvious solution to the inability for business to expand (but not actually operate- nor profit).
After all, if "Technology" is the magical panacea to the issue of a population increase (with absolutely zero mention how to apply it), then certainly the reverse is actually MORE true: finding ways to (continue) applying ways to utilize technology to (further) substitute a human workforce would be a lot more feasible- considering we are already, you know, actually in the process of doing it, with automated checkouts, increasingly advanced robotic production lines in factories, moving towards automated energy generators, we are already cutting the need to staff stores, factories AND electricity plants.
So to put it in simple words- as technology already IS phasing out the need for human employees in many fields of work, the "need" for more workers is simply not there. What people cannot presently be substituted technologically can be filled by people who were made redundant by a machine in another industry.
The result is that employers using the machines ultimately SAVE money (no wages or workplace safety/compensation/etc considerations), it is obviously a lot better for business.
Sorry to disappoint you.

It doesn't matter how you cut it, if Oz proceeds with even modest population growth without building infrastructure and industry now, and a future fund from the current mining boom, while it lasts, then come 2020 we may well see an Oz "Dutch Disease" which will make the original seem like a holiday on Dream Island.

All this talk of the inevitability of Big Oz is getting to be a big pain in the butt.

Another day, another Big Pop promo.

All OLO seems to do these days is Big Pop and Christophobia.

"But despite the political rhetoric to the contrary, no government can stop the powerful forces fuelling this surge."

They may not control the "forces", but they do control domestic policy.
There is nothing inevitable about immigration.
It is something we can choose to do, or not do, and according to any guidelines *we* select.

When will we stop?
We can't add an infinite number of people to a finite space.

Will we stop at 50 million?
100 million?
748 million?

Sooner or later it *has* to stop.
And a lot of Australians would choose the "sooner" option.

Peter Hume,

<Looks like the usual anti-freedom, anti-human parrots are out in a veritable squawking flock today, fresh from the defeat of their morally and intellectually bankrupt arguments in other threads, re-running the same refuted arguments.>

Gee Peter,

as I recall it you've been thoroughly bested in recent threads?
And I'm still waiting for some answers to questions I put to you in our last exchange:

<'m not comfortable with an utterly governed existence either, but I don't see your opposite minimal administration via free markets as an alternative. Can you elaborate your alternative? Since presumably you don't hold with a standing army, the police force, hospitals, roads and public transport, schools, universities, welfare, prisons, insane asylums etc etc. How would this anarchy provide for anybody's security or quality of life?
You've asked me questions and I've tried to answer them. How about some answers from you?>

This thread is based on neoliberal ideology, so the perfect place for you to strut your stuff, so how about a thoughtful response to the article? Or you might even answer my questions?

"Pelican
Still under the false impression that shooting people who disagree with you is morally superior? Or perhaps you’re not in favour of enforcing any policy on population after all? You went quiet on me there."
Happy to see Peter Hume would never stoop so low as to indulge in such practices.
Once again Hume derides poor old Malthus, for not accurately predicting the actual size of the bread basket.
Perhaps your God Mises can tell us how to extract a gallon and a half out of a one gallon bucket?
Or do you seriously suggest resources on our planet are infinite?
But of course I'm joking. Mises does provide the answer: let the favored few take as much as they like from the bucket, and let everyone else go without.
This they call 'Liberty'.

No vested interests here Aime - I simply enjoy shooting down bad arguments. It's like shooting fish in a barrel with the Anti-People lobby. I post across a broad range of subjects but the one's I find most interesting are the anti-populationist rants as they sail close to delusion. They remind me of the last days of the Branch Davidian cult.

King Hazza's posts are always curious. They are often unreferenced and seem to be driven by a personal agenda to belittle and demean. There re two benefits though - they are soporific and leave the mind almost vacant, much like colonic irrigation.

Quite agree Squeers and Grim;
But lets face it, by now after learning enough about his strange views of the world (that everybody is a communist), and the fact that he only comes to make outlandish statements or conspiracy theories, and only replies to difficult points by insinuating they are actually jackbooted Bolsheviks who secretly worship trees and hold a death fetish, do you really believe many other people don't notice and still take such a person seriously?
At this point it's about as pointless to consider what he says as it is to consider Runner's posts. It's not even like they actually change either.

My, my, Cheryl, so down on the sustainable population lobby, but you offer no reasons for your strenuous stance in favour of population growth, nor any qualification as to how far you think this should go. Are you suggesting unbridled pop growth for Oz? 50 million? More?

If you are only suggesting that some population growth is inevitable, then most would agree with you. But this would not seem to justify the intensity of your deriding of any who support manageable growth - growth in line with infrastructure and service capacities for example.

Some in favour of pop regulation suggest that industry demand for skilled labour should not automatically demand satisfaction by imported labour, but that even this demand should take its place within a manageable structured plan for pop growth. Are you taking significant exception to this point of view, and if so just what are you proposing?

Perhaps you interest is magnanimous compassion for asylum seekers, and hence that our borders should be wide open, and the more the merrier?

There have been a number of articles on OLO relating to pop growth, from one point of view or another, and in each case, as in this thread, the majority of comments have been for managed pop growth, so you view appears to be in opposition to the mainstream. Hence, our interest.

You keep us in the dark, Cheryl, as to the details of your point of view, and we are interested. No malice here, just interest.

Indeed Saltpeter- if anything her reply proves that I was exactly right.
Checking;
-unsubstantiated stance written matter-of-factly
-zero reference to base argument on despite insinuating some previous argument or evidence that never occurred hoping people will believe her
-repeated insinuation of the evil "anti-pops" as nazis or crazies.

As you can see, the posts are exactly the same. She only trolls "pop" threads to sling mud on people that are obviously poo-pooing her own business, and makes absolutely zero arguments.

I'd say by this point not many people bother to even read what she writes, already expecting the same old, as actually expecting an argument out of her is like trying to get Runner to substantiate his views on the motives of atheists he usually comes up with.

Cheryl 'I simply enjoy shooting down bad arguments.'

And that applies to anything you say no substance and no reason and all that is done is shoot your self in the foot.

With an infra structure that is failing, hospitals closing, water restrictions, importing food, we cannot even support our existing population - no point in going on as it is beyond her capacity to understand.

Will just ignore in the future not worth reading her opinion.

Cheryl.....you are indeed great entertainment. Not only do you not understand the human populations problems of the 21 century, but I'll bet your religious as well. Yes, all those wonderful thoughts of children you claim to love, and you want them to adopted a planet where if there's to many people, the people will fail the people. The parasitic charities that relays on misery, will be doing a thriving business and collections for the good "will" organisation star awards for helping the poor, they will sleep like angels no-doubt, as the cash keeps rolling in.

Well....with your thinking, I think your discomfiting to know your even on this planet, let alone someone who's declared themselves as intelligent.

7 billion......23 million here right now! What is wrong with you woman? Do you not see whats around you?

Peter said it all here!

And that applies to anything you say no substance and no reason and all that is done is shoot your self in the foot.

With an infra structure that is failing, hospitals closing, water restrictions, importing food, we cannot even support our existing population - no point in going on as it is beyond her capacity to understand.

Will just ignore in the future not worth reading her opinion.
Posted by PeterA, Saturday, 21 May 2011 2:06:05 PM

And thats the facts Jack!

Shut the gates.....before its to late.

LEAP

I get heartily sick of the essentially irrational effusions from people such as Peter Hume that accept, if not aggressively demand, the continuing pathological destruction of global life systems in a blind, fan-boy deference to the notional imperatives of an imagined 'free market' ideal.

There is one, and there is only one, 'free market' on this planet that can perfectly and reliably allocate goods and services. This is the entity called biodiversity.

Whilst not generally recognized as such, biodiversity is essentially a global solar energy collection, transmission and storage grid. It is entirely self-replicating, self-maintaining and self-evolving. It reliably enables and regulates ALL of the transactions vital to our physical existence and well-being, none of which are at all possible for long with it defunct or even seriously impaired.

Humanity's technologies and notional interactive systems, such as our 'economy' and its 'markets', are entirely subsumed within the encapsulating forces of planetary biodiversity.

Our currently crazed view of our determinative ‘independence' via these notional vocations of technology and industrial economy is a product of both our incidental access to a vast and highly condensed store of fossilised solar energy and our near complete intoxication from the intense sense of power gained by its overly rapid consumption. A power as transient as it is intense.

Tragically our intoxication leads us to use this fossil power in an ever more rapacious destruction of the fabric that created it and which is the very basis of our survival without the fossil legacy. We are literally as dumbly destructive and dangerous to ourselves as an aggressive drunk trapped naked in a mirror exhibition.

At the end of this long night of over-indulgence we will have what our local landscapes can provide to us without incurring critical local depletion, either overall or within seasonal cycles. The remnant vitality of our localities and our numbers in any locality will most fundamentally arbitrate our situation and our hope within it.

Without abundant energy the globalised industrial economy, its sacred markets, and its convections of human capital and consumer sinks recede irretrievably into being the fantasy they really are

Hazza, Squeers, Shockadelic, Saltpetre, Grim, Quantumleap, wallumi

So what is it you want the state to force people to do?

How will that solve the problem that you can't have indefinite growth on a finite base?

For what would be the 48th time I've had to repeat these ideas in threads on this site when you were free to read them before:
1- scrap the baby bonus or any other financial incentive/disincentive to have children (except maternity/paternity leave).
2- Counteract social stigma of contraceptives, condoms and abortions
3- ensure all property development is at the discretion of local voters within the suburb (so that a development is only accepted if the people of the area actually need more people).
4- Counteract the culture that older employees are a liability (as I have lost count of how many people I know over the age of 50 who struggle to get employment despite being if anything, overqualified for their positions, even when the competition are complete buffoons).

And repeating 5- reduce demand for workers by continuing implementation of automated substitutes.
Beyond that, the above measures would satisfy me enough, personally. It would ensure unwanted pregnancies are vastly reduced, and numerous incentives for a "high population" are neutralized.

Sorry Hume- I know you were hoping for some kind of nazi sterilization act or Chinese one-child policy, so I must disappoint you again.

So with that in mind;
Unless Peter can actually think of a problem with that (aside from likely having a gripe with 3- as democratic accountability of having to actually answer to the people you intend to involve your projects with is just another form of socialist fascism in his eyes) I believe there is little else for me to say here.

PH, I don't think any of us want the state to force people to do anything, other than abide by the law of the land, but, if possible, to encourage people (not force them) to be honest and responsible, thoughtful citizens - and maybe even be good to one another?

One the other hand, what I think We Want is for the state to be responsible in its administration of fiscal, infrastructure, and immigration portfolios, so that Oz may continue to be a good place to live, and so that current shortcomings in services may be overcome - such as in education, healthcare, aged care, welfare, public transport, housing, environment, etc...

We expect a lot from our government, as we should, and an important part of our expectation is that Oz population growth will be managed in a responsible way (particularly with immigration), so that Oz will continue to be a stable, secure nation, all of whose population may continue to enjoy a good, and progressively improving, standard of living, security, employment and quality of life.

Hazza
If all that is done, what specific difference will it make?

1- Why “except maternity/paternity leave”?

And I presume you include scrapping public funding of schooling? No? Another exception? And scrapping public funding of children's medical care? No? Another exception?

>2- Counteract social stigma of contraceptives, condoms and abortions
How? Make it illegal to stigmatise? You are treating the state like a wishing well, a fairy godmother, a god.

> 3- ensure all property development is at the discretion of local voters
Why just property development? Why shouldn’t the voters also veto food production, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth?

> 4- Counteract the culture that older employees are a liability
How? More state-worship.
Have you ever employed an older employee?

> 5. And repeating 5- reduce demand for workers by continuing implementation of automated substitutes.
The problem is Hazza, you don’t understand the issues, and then when it’s explained to you, you *still* don’t understand them.

Saltpetre
>PH, I don't think any of us want the state to force people to do anything

>One the other hand, what I think We Want is for the state to be responsible in its administration of fiscal, infrastructure, and immigration portfolios…

(good luck with that)

>…so that Oz may continue to be a good place to live, and so that current shortcomings in services may be overcome - such as in education, healthcare, aged care, welfare, public transport, housing, environment, etc...

Saltpetre, obviously you haven’t given this five seconds thought in your whole life. So because non-one here wants the state to force people to do anything, we should abolish the tax department tomorrow, is that what you’re saying? Funding of government action in education, healthcare, aged care, welfare, public transport, housing, etc. should be voluntary, not forced?

Squeers
Your question of me is disingenuous, because you criticize “rationalism” as an intellectual method remember, and haven’t answered my *much* earlier and thrice-repeated question whether Pythagoras’s theorem can be rationally proved or disproved – obviously because you know very well that your answer will prove you a fool either way.

You answer me first.

You miss my point Peter. Human imaginings are peripheral and completely subordinate to the more essential, over-riding planetary force of biodiversity. Governments and Nation States are both as equally imagined, and as disposable in the natural scheme of things, as is the Free Market of your dreams.

To the extent that any of these contrived forms act deleteriously toward the assets and the function of biodiversity, and all of them inherently and consistently do so, they are counter-productive to the long term benefit and basic freedom of humanity. They are agencies of self-harm and potential extinction, not productive evolution.

Far from being a conduit to efficient production and distribution, the ‘Free Market’ is a mechanism by which well-leveraged resource owners can freely dominate and abuse the vast bulk of less well-positioned and/or less ambitious citizens. In terms of resource sustainability it has been said that the capitalist free market is the most effective means ever devised for turning natural resources into landfill – aka useful form into useless entropy.

Leftist cries for the many and various nanny state interventions that you (and I) abhor are entirely predictable and humane responses to the socio-economic violence proven to inevitably result from the indulgences taken by powerful players within unfettered capitalist markets.

That these interventions are futile and self-defeating due to the scale and corrupting power they give to the corporation of the state is lost on the average leftist. Their advocacy becomes an embedded facet of social identity, and possibly also an attribute of employment, rather than a clear-minded idealism.

I acknowledge the (relatively) more clear-minded idealism of the free-marketeer, which is to become economically predominant as an individual. Ultimately, however, this is a muddled view as it leads to ecological, social and, thereby, also individual destruction.

While humanity’s supporting superstructure of biodiversity burns under the torch of insatiable human greed, the political debate fiddles furiously with itself within a blinkered dialectic of left and right. It’s a complex manifest form of the simple song lyric about the village idiot amusing himself by abusing himself and catching it in his hat.

wallumi
So you are not in favour of any policy on population?

I am not in favor of policies that actively promote population increase. The fact is that population growth trends underway in this country are largely, if not entirely, due to such policy.

I am in favor of policies that engage and assist people to better understand the framework of physical reality that surrounds them. The balance between human demand and local resource capacity is one of the most vital of these realities.

The free market you advocate works contrary to both of these views by way of such functions as manipulative advertising, agglomeration of media ownership within limited range of very large corporate entities, general acts of self-interested socio-political thuggery by the large corporate players, etc.

And Peter hummmmm, the point is, where are they going to go! They see right through us:) You might be here to play, but a bigger population in or round, will end up, as you well know.

Lets put more ban-aids on a problem we knew we could of avoided.

Now your all pissing up a tree.......and starting to piss me off:(

The numbers game is up!

Your now called out.

What now with the masses......are you going to fix?

I cant wait to here this one.

LEA

Quantumleap
Is that your answer to what policies you are in favour of?

Wallumi
“I am not in favor of policies that actively promote population increase.”

Me neither.

“I am in favor of policies that engage and assist people to better understand the framework of physical reality that surrounds them. The balance between human demand and local resource capacity is one of the most vital of these realities.

What makes you think government has got a better handle on any of those issues than anyone else?

“The free market you advocate works contrary to both of these views by way of such functions as manipulative advertising, agglomeration of media ownership within limited range of very large corporate entities, general acts of self-interested socio-political thuggery by the large corporate players, etc.”

And governments don’t?

Earlier you referred to “…socio-economic violence proven to inevitably result from the indulgences taken by powerful players within unfettered capitalist markets.”

Usually when people allege the “violence” of “unfettered” capitalist markets they cannot find one single example of an unregulated market; and the only violence they can example that is not illegal under a system based on the private ownership of the means of production – capitalism - is violence by the state, not markets.

But maybe you’re different.

So what’s an example of the “violence” you allege?

And what’s an example of an unregulated capitalist market?

Wow, Hume’s a fumin’! Old Peter comes along and headbangs everyone, ‘cept Cheryl!?

Well, it has certainly spurred this debate along, so I s’pose it’s a good thing!

<< Ludwing >>

Huh! Whoo dat?

<< Who’s “we”? >>

D’ho come-on, it was perfectly obvious. Us Australians…. yes, including those who disagree with me!

So um, what do you say to my statement:

< Can you say that the quality of life in this country is better than it would have been if we’d had, say, a net zero immigration rate since 1980? No you can’t! And when you factor in our future wellbeing, we are much worse off than we would have been. >

I went looking for your strange economic calculator article again, the one that no one responded to, but there seems to be no way within the OLO setup to get to it. Can you provide a link please.

Yeah life would be better without the leftist, commie, bleeding heart nanny state.

http://www.gocomics.com/comic/explore/470760/6

We want anarchy!

When do we want it?

Now!

Peter:
"What makes you think government has got a better handle on any of those issues than anyone else?"

What makes you think I’m referring only to Government policy?
Ideally natural communities of common interest, preferably locally connected ones, will determine and enact such policy for their own benefit. In fact they will need to as both corporate government and corporate business are highly unlikely to do so. Such forms of knowledge would directly weaken the keystones of their powerbase. Notwithstanding this improbability, it is the policy genre I would advocate from them. In fact the educative process will occur less via policy as such as through a process of revolution or survival in the context of breakdown in the capacity of the current global market to adequately provide for the adult dependents it now systemically breeds. Deep dissatisfaction and anxiety will turn them restless toward their corporate guardians. Some, hopefully, will choose intelligent options of self-determination.

Peter:
"And governments don’t?"

They do and I’ve intimated as much in expressing my disdain for nanny state interventions. Corporate form and function, both public and private, is one of the most distinctly destructive mutations born of ‘free market’ capitalism. The scale and action of government and unions has escalated (too often disingenuously) to match the demands and threats, and to pursue essentially corrupting opportunities, made by corporate market activity.

wallumi,

I agree with the things you've been saying. In case you missed it, can I direct your attention to this recent article: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=12070

I'd be interested to read your response.

We've got some Glove Puppet responses here - one anti-pop has a hissy fit and then all of then get on line and have a hissy fit.

Remember 2001 a Space Odyssey? These guys are the apes.

So far they have failed to ascertain that $35M is too many people by 2050.
They have failed to ascertain that we'll even have $35M people by 2050.
$35 M people is what was projected back in the 1980s.
They have failed to refute that their anti-population project is simply socio-biology writ large - with all the attendant right wing/control ideology that goes with that position.
Even they admit that if their goals are not achieved, then they will resort to coercion = violence and a one child state.
Their manifesto as produced by the Sustainable Pop Party is on the one hand, totally embarassing in terms of modern economics and on the other, is anti-capitalist.
They embrace the benefits of modern capitalism, it's just the people they don't like.
Their spokesperson, Dick Smith's claim to fame is being a successful capitalist.
They have failed to mention urban design in ANY of their posts.
They look at the world through the single lens of population - they are not serious about society, economy or resource preservation. They just want less people without possessing the deep structural analysis of knowing why, beyond having a 'feeling'.
They gather, fearful whenever anyone challenges their opinion and they especially hate it when women have a go at them.

I'll leave others to say what sort of personality profile this conjures?

Cheryl, can you please explain to us poor ignorant souls, how we are going to preserve resources while we have an ever increasing population.

Incidentally can you please also point to any posts on the present topic which have specifically advocated a "one child" policy.

David

The dishonesty of "Cheryl" is staggering. That this bloke, with acknowledged financial interests in the real estate trade, should be sanctimonious about "women having a go at them" is nauseating.

Meanwhile, the obsessive P Hume seems unable to conceive of any mode of thought outside the simple binary "government control" versus "free market liberty, hooray!". P Hume seems to be unaware that in democracies, governments are elected. Certainly there's room for improvement in our electoral systems, and in our bureaucracies, but for the most part the Australian systems do a reasonable job of delivering the governments we prefer - and getting rid of them as well. Progress is slow, but real: only the thickest of our pollies are unaware of the debates about climate, population, and biodiversity - for example. And given that the debates are happening, we should take the trouble to feed facts into the system, and attempt to comb out ideological intransigence and market-driven disinformation.

I have no association with the real estate industry.

Lets have a quick look at the least contestable side of the Sustainable People Party and one which all anti-pops are in agreement on - the removal of the Baby Bonus.

King Hazza and the Glove Puppets say that the BB is a defacto inducement for women to have kids.

It is no such thing. It is a payment for those families earning less than $75K to help bring up their kids. The BB is $5,294 or about $200 a week for 26 weeks and then ceases.

It recognises that women won't be able to work and the initial expense in the first year is great, although anyone who has had kids knows that $5K doesn't go far.

So the Glove Puppets say that this payment alone is having Australian families going gangbusters popping out kids? Get real.

When Costello first introduced it, there was a small blip in the pop numbers but it was so miniscule, as to be statistically insignificant.

Are you guys going to launch a political party based on the sort of rhetorical rubbish that you publish here? The public will carve you a new colon.

Cheryl, my apologies, mate. I had you confused with someone else, who shares your views, and is associated with real estate or the building industry.

Cheryl, Ok, you've posted some serious responses to our questions, but have fallen far short of explaining your overall position on population growth - other than to indicate that you're in favour of letting nature take its course. Does this mean you would regard any intervention by our government to manage our population growth as misplaced, illegal, even anti-humanity, or possibly, deluded? Or would you possibly consider any intervention futile? You've already stated you'd consider this "socio-biology writ large" - meaning racist I presume - and anti-capitalist. Isn't this just a little bit disingenuous?

Ok, your point about the baby bonus is well founded, and I think a diminishing majority of the Oz public would support building our Oz population by natural increase. Before you accuse me of racism, my dad migrated to Oz in the 1920's, and I'm not against immigration, just open-slather immigration. We already have a housing shortfall, and a welfare blowout - or are such things inconsequential to you?

You mention 35 million by 2050 - around a 50% increase - and make no opinion as to whether you consider this to be a viable or preferable target, or whether you consider this too little. Do you favour big Oz because of local security concerns, perhaps? Reds under the beds, or some northern peril? Bigger means more secure?

Unmanageable population growth can only mean economic stress and a reduction in living standards. So, do you wish for an equal world perhaps, where all sink to the lowest common denominator?

Urban design? Where does this fit in to your vision for big Oz?

If we are "puppets", just who or what is pulling your strings?

Why are you so hostile?

(PeterH, I'm satisfied you're just rattling a chain - a troublemaker only seeking to disrupt serious discussion. I'm ignoring everything you post from now on.)

When the going gets tough for the Glove Puppets they fall back to their default position which is - the world is finite and a closed system (we're all doomed).

Resources such as iron ore, bauxite and fish are finite. The earth is a dynamic, open system, being blasted by the sun creating photosynthesis and the moon which drags tides across the face of the earth. Everything that grows on earth is part of an open system. Keep that in mind, the earth is part of a great open system.

So in answer to the question - what are we going to do when we run out of copper, iron ore and zinc? We're going to die ... Although to believe that one would have to subscribe to an infantile set of assumptions such as history is linear and unchanging, imagination and technology are our enemies, capitalism is inflexible, science is static, etc.

The anti-pops decry the the numbers of people on the earth, although every single person has different consumption needs. They say a man in Mumbai lives the 'consumption life' of a man in Sydney. Utter rubbish. Their concepts of cross cultural economics and quantification are puerile and delinquent.

Their assessments are based on 'feelings, nothing more than feelings' as Barbara Streisland sang

Saltpetre,

35M in Oz is about right. That is peak population. One major prob which infects my argument and theirs is that this is a mid line projection 40 years out from the event. Error will be large.

There are some elements to which population is important - urban design.

The reason is that our two biggest cities, Melbourne and Sydney, are not equipped to take another four million people each.

I only get terse when people play the writer and not the argument.

Wow- Peter Hume and Cheryl have both tried to imply off-topic fascism in most of their answers, I must be on the correct track!

Peter;
1- Of course those are additional exceptions- what about them? (other than sour grapes that you are paying tax and I wasn't courteous enough to cut them for you too). The other measures simply ensure quality of live to existing families and children- while the BB simply encourages people to actually make them.

2- commercials and NGO volunteers in schools to promote this things and barring people making ads and permitting school volunteers who preach a contradictory message. Much in the same way we allow multicultural groups, but do not allow people who want to warn of the "dangers of race-mixing" to put up adverts and school seminars I would imagine.

3- Poor Peter, you just couldn't resist another fascism attempt. Might have something to do with voters wanting to protect their own rights when they vote what should be allowed? But please tell me why a person would want to vote away their own rights to have children?

4- Improve workplace discrimination law regarding older employees and further requirements to substantiate reasons for the contrary in the decision to turn down an old person to a young person.

5- Funny PEter- you never actually DID mention "the issues you allegedly told me and I didn't understand them back then". This wouldn't be a lazy attempt not to actually address the points is it? How exactly am I "failing to understand" a process that most leading businesses are ALREADY DOING?

Come to think of it, reading through again you never actually did answer a single one of them.
1- angry off-topic rant
2- Nazis
3- Nazis
4- Angry off-topic rant
5- vague "it just won't work, and I'm not going to say why"

Oh well. Thankyou for your answers Peter.

Wow, Cheryl, that's quite a handful. But, fish are not finite, they are part of the very dynamic system you describe, and they only depend on the natural chain of life to survive and flourish - except, of course, for mankind's ham-fisted interference in these same natural systems - through pollution, over-fishing, and disruption of the natural balance - as by removal of predators leading to an explosion of disease, etc. Natural selection is still at work, and always will be. To ignore this is to seek to test biodiversity to its extreme limits, and can only result in self-annihilation.

Species are going extinct on this planet every minute. Why do you think this is, and why do you think this unimportant?

You seem to presume that technology and science can somehow overcome the limitations of the natural system, and thus population growth is virtually limitless. This is terribly fallible. There is only one realistic path for mankind, and that is to live within the bounds of sustainability. If something mankind did ended up destroying our oceans' phytoplankton, what system of man is going to provide sufficient oxygen to the atmosphere to facilitate man's survival? From another viewpoint - what objective could be so compelling as to justify mankind's testing of the natural balance to virtual destruction? What is therefore the point of a limitless expansion of human population? To impress God with our ingenuity? God requires no reminding of humanity's misplaced self-aggrandizement.

As for living standards, many compassionate and thoughtful people would like us to strive for a level of equity for all the earth's inhabitants, human and non-human, with an objective of minimising poverty and distress, and obviating the basis of so much of the world's conflicts and disagreements.

Blind faith in the capacities of mankind to overcome the limitations of the natural balance is, with respect, a delusion. Further, it is egotistical beyond all reason, and in the end result can serve no worthwhile purpose. So, why push the umbrella? Just because we think we can get away with it? Pride cometh before one helluva fall.

Cheryl,
congratualations on being one of the most arrogant, offensive and reductionist posters on OLO. This would be forgivable, even praiseworthy, if there was any substance to your declamations. You're clearly in the Matt Ridley, neoliberal School of mindless optimism. To be fair to you and Matt, it must require considerable arrogance to carry it off. Indeed, surely only a supreme narcissist can be dismissive of evidence, argument, ethics and even basic survival instincts in a bloody-minded refusal to back-down or, unthinkable, indulge a bit of self-reflection. No; you can't be wrong can you? It's everybody else that's wrong..

Well sorry but some of us actually do care about the environment, other species, and the quality of "all" human life. And this has nothing to do with "an infantile set of assumptions such as history is linear and unchanging, imagination and technology are our enemies, capitalism is inflexible, science is static, etc."
This is just your straw man.
Of course "history" (a human conceit) is changing; are you suggesting teleology?
Capitalism "is" inflexible in two ways; endless growth, and unfair division of material needs, prestige and power.
Who says "imagination and technology are our enemies" or "science is static"?
Imagination, science and technology can be just as readily exploited in sustainable and equitable ways.
With our population about to tip 7 billion and climbing, resources growing scarce, environment degraded, habitats and species diversity threatened, why are you in favour of population growth, if not merely for profit?
Bear in mind that I'm not advocating parochialism, like Dick Smith, while hypocritically drawing our wealth from the sale of commodities and driving growth elsewhere. The only way population growth can be managed is by managing economies.
What's to be gained, qualitatively, from continuing to drive populations up?
Why should we go on pushing the envelope if we don't have to?
The answer is because "we do have to"! Because we are slave to economic fundamentalism, as mad-dog as tele-evangelists and their followers! Population growth drives economic growth drives profit!
Do you have anything substantial to contribute, or is name-calling, all you have?

Squeers

I thought someone was rummaging around in my head.

Couldn't have said better myself.

C'mon Cheryl, Hume et al, how do you support limitless growth on finite resource?

Even humble paper fibre can only be recycled a limited number of times before the fibres become too short. Not even long enough to wipe yourself with.

Squeers, I think you go a bit too far in your criticism of Cheryl, and that's not very constructive. She has a right to her opinion, and some of us have been trying to coax her into putting some more flesh on the bones, so as to better understand her position.

I want to try a different approach, in the interest of clarification. Looking purely from an Oz point of view, it is clear that for such a large and affluent country we do have a relatively small population. So, if Cheryl is suggesting we could take quite a few more immigrants from some underprivileged 3rd world countries, then I guess we could. The only real problem I have with that is if Oz in doing so would be exacerbating current world overpopulation. Of course, any such immigrants would have to meet some appropriate standards, of education, skills, good conduct, and maybe have work sponsorship, but numbers would also have to be within limits manageable by our economy. Given such conditions, if our taking some additional immigrants could be beneficial to our workforce, and at the same time help to improve conditions in their home countries, then this could be a win-win all round.

By taking additional immigrants, and at the same time increasing targeted aid to the 3rd world, it is possible that a 1st world concerted effort could be undertaken in such a way as to improve living conditions and help reduce population growth in the 3rd world. The aim being to improve general living standards and reduce overpopulation over the long term.

As we seem to have a "immigration lottery" going on at the moment, a targeted approach would have to be an improvement.

As we know that improvements in education and living standards can lead to reduction in population growth, as well as reduction in world conflict, it may be wise for Oz to bite the bullet and try a more open approach.

Saltpetre,

I felt like apologising to you for apparent plagiarism after I posted my billet doux to Cheryl, I seemed to be repeating you; but hadn't read yours of course.
I suspect your chivalry for Cheryl is Christian noblesse oblige, and not very genuine--but I only responded to the lady in kind. I get particularly upset when the voice of ascendency (neoliberalism) talks down to the rabble. And that's how Cheryl comes across to me. If she lifts her tone, I'll lift mine. Reciprocity is my motto--never did learn to turn the other cheek.

Excuse my cheek, but your thinking on concessions to immigrants strikes me as point-scoring too--Christian do-goodism whose effects are more like laudanum than a purgative.

Nope, reform is like extra rope. I'll go on white-anting the whole rotten building. Better to start again.

"Excuse my cheek, but your thinking on concessions to immigrants strikes me as point-scoring too--Christian do-goodism whose effects are more like laudanum than a purgative."

You're in excellent form tonight, Squeers.

Saltpetre,

I'm afraid I have to agree with Squeers on this one....the altruistic motives you describe seem to be straight out of some missionary women's league manual....somehow Chery's regular anti anti-pop diatribe doesn't sit comfortably within this genre of thought.
....oh and another thing fellas....vanna reckons Cheryl is a bloke called Malcolm King - so I looked it up and it seems he might be right.

http://forum.onlineopinion.com/thread.asp?article=6018&page=0

Strange...that link seems to have gone somewhere a little off the beaten track - perhaps this one will work. : )

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6018&page=0

What population and perish people, like Cheryl, totally forget is that we live in a finite world and the resources are running out and it is completely delusional that we can have infinite economic growth to support her way of life and increase the population.

As it is there is no way that the world can support the existing population and certainly cannot increase the standard of living in the less developed world to be the same as the USA.

PeterA, the problem with people like Cheryl is that they can't see that we do actually live in a closed system, and that system also includes the sun and the moon. What we get from outside of that is negligible. We might be getting energy from the sun, but that also has its limitations, both in terms of energy per unit area and costs of transmission and storage, so it doesn't come free or cheaply.

David

All
If you’re not suggesting a policy response, then no issue arises. People can just do what they want.

But anyone advocating a policy response has to show how it will produce a better outcome, even if only in its own terms, even if only theoretically.

Yet none of you has done that.

It’s meaningless to talk about whether we have too much population or not enough in the abstract, as if human values don’t count. These are not technical questions that can be solved in aggregate by white-coated experts avoiding value judgments. But given that we do have to provide for human values, what do you propose?

The issue is balancing human use now against human use in the future. Those who claim to stand for super-human values are simply phonies.

People have different values, wants, time preferences, risks and opportunities. What is a resource is itself constantly changing. And society doesn’t stop at Australia’s borders.

These values are dispersed throughout thousands of millions of human beings. They are simply not known or knowable to the Ludwigs and Saltpetres of this world, and it is conceptual nonsense to pretend to know them en bloc.

But let’s suppose that all these dispersed subjective values could be known by government. That still doesn’t mean government would be able, by policy, to conserve the resources in issue, any better than the decentralized decisions of all those human beings acting on their own values and views of the future.

Suppose a non-renewable resource is being depleted. Current consumption may be unfairly depriving future generations. By the same token, future consumption may unfairly deprive current users – for example if the resource ends up being replaced by a different resource.

A private owner of a depletable resource has an interest both ways. He has an interest in profiting from selling now to satisfy current demand. And he has an interest in capitalizing on the expectation of profit from its future sale when it may be more valuable. For what is the capital value but the sum of expected future values discounted for futurity?

2
It’s true that the private owner may err in evaluating present versus future wants, or vice versa. But so may everyone else. At least the private owner has a direct interest in the most accurate evaluation, and local knowledge, and stands to lose money if he gets it wrong.

By contrast, no advocate of policy ever explains how the government is going to know what the values they would need to know, for policy to do any better.

All we hear is that it will be “democratic”. But how are the voters, voting in the abstract, to *know* the relevant present versus future values of every given resource, any better than would be indicated by their individual decisions to buy, or abstain from buying, a particular good? Especially since the political process enables them to shift the cost onto someone else, which the market process doesn’t?

What makes you think that increasing political, or common, decision-making over resources won’t *increase* current consumption, just as it increases capital consumption?

Having no direct interest either way, the functionaries of government suffer no personal loss for getting it even drastically wrong.

The electoral process doesn’t even give signals specific for a particular resource. How does government know, from a general election, whether the people want a particular mine to produce how much zircon, now, or later, or zinc, now or later, or a different mine, and which, when? And how are they to distinguish those signals from all the other bundled-up electoral signals about schooling, and defence, and hospitals, and roads, and so on?

The answer is, they can’t.

The greens railing against governments for mismanaging public forests but they are the ones who are in favour of it. How else would democratic government decide, other than on the basis of political party deals with favoured interests?

How is population policy going to weigh the interest of a person now against the interest of a person 500,000, or 50,000, or 50 years into the future?

Why should anyone now be forced to forego the pleasure, say, of having a family, to satisfy the opinion of the Ludwigs of this world that an anonymous stranger 50,000 years in the future has an equal right to the same resource, when for all we know that particular resource may not even be used any more, just as caves are no longer used for housing nor whale oil for lighting?

Those advocating a policy response are advocating an incoherent response – and that’s why they point to government-provided infrastructure as proof. The problem is, they’re proving my point, not their own!

No-one thinks an increase in population will cause a shortage of pizzas, or bottled water, or cars, or anything else privately provided. It’s always government-provided services that exemplify the inability to cope, but that’s not because of “population challenge”, it’s because they’re government-provided.

The axiom that you can’t have indefinite growth on a finite base does *not* mean that crisis is imminent.

If we put aside the squarking of Malthusian clichés (“infinite growth/finite base”) and anti-capitalist slogans, the advocates of population policy haven’t got a feather to fly with. Their cry that the issue is about “ideology” merely shows the terminal station of their intellectual train.

wallumi
A corporation is a government-granted licence of limited liability and separate legal entity. A licence is, by definition, permission to do something that would otherwise be illegal. Thus corporations are a creation of governments, not free markets.

So what’s an example of the “violence” you allege?

And what’s an example of an unregulated capitalist market?

Saltpetre
At least be honest about your retreat into ignorance.

You have said that you don’t want the state to force people to do anything. I proved that you do. So the problem isn’t that I’m a “troublemaker”, it’s that you’re contradicting yourself.

You rail against the human use of natural resources, as if living is wrong for humans, but not any other species.

But you still evade the big question - what do you say policy should do about these human pests?

Ludwig
So you speak for everyone who disagrees with you?

Okay then, I speak for you, how about that? And I say, for the good of the population, we need freedom from your clueless prurient meddling. I trust that settles this discussion to your satisfaction?

“Can you say that the quality of life in this country is better than it would have been…[etc.]?”

I think it’s meaningless to talk about the quality of life *in general* as if the whole of society were one single person with one single interest (and you its self-appointed representative). It’s only meaningful if we talk about the quality of life *of whom*?

Besides, what about all the interesting conversations I’ve enjoyed with immigrants since 1980, not to mention the kebabs, yum cha, sushi, and tom kah gai? What about all their pleasures at the beach, and socialising, and at home? Don’t our enjoyment or life or families count?

Or are you like a friend of mine who says “We’ve got all their recipes now – we can send ‘em all home”?

I would appreciate your critique of this: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=3839

Hazza
You want to imprison people for expressing political opinions that you disagree with, but you’re not a fascist?

Squeers
Okay, we’re all consuming like crazy and it’s nothing but neoliberal ideology.

1. And your policy solution is…?
2. And you obtained knowledge of all the relevant people’s values how…?
3. And you know your solution would necessarily be an improvement on the original problem because…?

(Haven’t got a policy solution? Looks like you’re a neoliberal ideologue.)

And you’re going to start capitalism again, are you, so long as you don’t have to give up modern comforts like pootling on the internet?

Honestly, if this is the intellectual and ethical level of the advocates of population policy, why don’t you just do the decent thing and keep quiet.

Peter Hume,

Some decisions in our society are matters of personal preferences, and one person's opinion is as good as another's. Others are based on facts about the real world, and because people can get themselves into trouble through ignorance, there is a role for expert opinion and government regulation. That is why you aren't allowed to buy powerful drugs with serious side effects without a prescription. While there can be arguments about whether particular drugs should be available over the counter, the freedom to poison oneself or one's children is of no particular value.

There are many examples of really horrific societal collapses in the historical and archaeological records, and us "anti-pops" would rather avoid experiencing one ourselves. Back in 1967, India was a net importer of food, had widespread malnutrition, and had a population growth rate that was set to double the population in 30 years. It hardly required a giant leap of the imagination to predict trouble. Disaster was averted by the Green Revolution, which doubled or sometimes tripled crop yields. However, the global population and its impact have continued to grow, so that humans are now a major geophysical force, capable of affecting our planetary life support systems. See

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-scale-of-the-effect-we-have-on-the-planet-is-yet-to-sink-in-20110522-1eyqk.html

The experts have been warning us about shortages or losses of arable land, fresh water, fish stocks, biodiversity, fossil fuels and minerals that are vital for our agriculture and other technology, and capacity of the environment to safely absorb wastes. See

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7263/full/461472a.html

Open version here (without figures, unfortunately)

http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

No doubt Curmudgeon will say that Rockstrom et al., the authors of their references, the referees, and the editors of Nature are all lunatics, but Nature is probably the most respected peer-reviewed science journal in the world.

Even if threat A turns out to be exaggerated, and threats B and C have good technological solutions, this still leaves all the others. How lucky do you feel?

Squeers and Poirot, I am amazed by your selective refusal to see beyond the square of an OZ riding on the pig's back in sublime complacency, oblivious to, or disingenuously disregarding world forces which demand serious attention. You may wish to maintain the illusion of your transparently camouflaged myopic xenophobia, in feigned outrage at your hallucinatory spectre of hordes beating at the gates demanding your last slice of bread, but your outcry rings hollow. Howl at the moon as you will "Doom, doom, shut the gates, all is lost, we are doomed!" Your synthetic protestations achieve no more than the ostrich praying for salvation in opaque denial.

Squeers: "I suspect your chivalry for Cheryl is Christian noblesse oblige, and not very genuine--"; "Excuse my cheek, but your thinking on concessions to immigrants strikes me as point-scoring too--Christian do-goodism whose effects are more like laudanum than a purgative."

Think again my friend. Your quest for a "purgative" is a horse long since bolted. Ours is a minuscule cosmopolitan kaleidoscope within an over-stocked frenetic whirlpool of humanity simmering on the precipice of unfulfillment. A cursory glance at the mid-east alone serves as insight to the tip of a tsunami clamouring for justice and equity in an increasingly inequitable world-scape. Whether we like it or not paradigm change is afoot, and tenacious fortification of the western decadent utopia is merely to cling to the ethereal threads of a day-dream whose course is nearly run and whose inglorious suppositions are to be tested and found wanting. The push for equity is an irreversible tide, so face it, and find a way to maintain balance, or it will sweep you away without trace.

To suppose that Oz can be immune from the massive forces of change being played out in the world is an idealistic illusion. World conflict deriving from overpopulation and an increasing awareness of inequity and repression, can only be properly addressed by embracing change to a sustainable and equitable deployment of world resources. Oz can play its part constructively, or there won't be space to store all the boats.

Saltpetre,

bloody hell!
Can you run that by me again in one or two clear sentences please? I've been immersed in Hegel all day but I think you're prose is denser!
Based on what I think I can infer, though, you most definitely mistake me, old chum, and Poirot too I'll hazard.
Hopefully you'll give me the 'for dummies' version of your prosaic dudgeon, and I'll try to explain what I meant in those admittedly throw-away terms I couched my last in as soon as time permits.
Suffice to say for now that while I may have seemed abrupt, 'twas not ill-meant, and that I think Australia should be helping in any humanitarian way it can to address the problem's it has and continues to help create in the world.

Peter Hume,
my policy solution, off the top of my head, is that a coalition of countries powerful enough to form a block (though preferably the whole world) imposes an immediate wealth and assets cap on everyone without exception. The limit once reached being allowed to be maintained but not exceeded, and excess revenue being gathered as surplus and used to address the various ills we've precipitated, including lifting the worst-off from destitution. The wealth cap would be complemented apropos the wealthy by much lower wages so that an incentive is maintained to continue working and maintaining "maximum" wealth and comfort, and so contributing also to the surplus. In poor countries wages would be higher so that they could eventually attain parity.
Importantly though, economic growth would be gradually cut back and population growth disincentivised so that humanity would eventually start trending in reverse.

I could go on, and of course much fine tuning would be needed on the run, but I'm sure there's enough in what I've said for you to have a field day already, Pete : )

Gawd, Saltpetre, you've excelled yourself with that one.
"....transparently camourflaged myopic xenophobia in feigned outrage at you hallucinatory spectre of hordes....an ostrich praying for salvation in opaque denial....a horse long since bolted....minuscule cosmopolitan kaleidoscope within an overstocked frenetic whirlpool of humanity simmering on the precipice of unfulfillment...the tip of a tsunami clamouring for justice...tenacious fortification of western decadent utopia is merely clinging to the ethereal threads....inglorious suppositions...."

Might I suggest that your post is a fine example itself of an overstocked frenetic whirlpool.

Btw, is it even possible for an ostrich to be in opaque denial?

Peter Hume.
“It’s meaningless to talk about whether we have too much population or not enough in the abstract, as if human values don’t count. These are not technical questions that can be solved in aggregate by white-coated experts avoiding value judgments”
Yes they are. Resources can be categorised as 'renewable' and 'non renewable'. They can be assessed as 'scarce' or 'abundant'. One of the greatest survival traits of human communities has been the ability to ration themselves. In times of intense economic stress, this has been a Government ('by the people') function.
“People have different values, wants, time preferences, risks and opportunities...These values are dispersed throughout thousands of millions of human beings. They are simply not known or knowable to the Ludwigs and Saltpetres of this world...”
Actually yes, they are, and furthermore it is almost heretical for you to suggest otherwise. Have you forgotten Mises' Praxeology?
“every conscious action is intended to improve a person's satisfaction”
Probably the single thing every living creature on the planet shares, from paramecium to cows with their heads through the fence, from peasants to Warren Buffet is their desire for 'more'. Why should it be that some should be allowed more than their share (in the name of THEIR Liberty), while others starve?
“A private owner of a depletable resource has an interest both ways. He has an interest in profiting from selling now to satisfy current demand. And he has an interest in capitalizing on the expectation of profit from its future sale when it may be more valuable”
Does he? What if he has no children, and the 'future sale' won't occur until after he's dead?
“How is population policy going to weigh the interest of a person now against the interest of a person 500,000, or 50,000, or 50 years into the future?”
By according both an equal right to exist, and enjoy those resources that every human should have an equal right to enjoy, despite any accident of birth.

Peter Hume has no objection to people owning property. He also has no objection to companies of people owning property.
He only has a problem with nations of citizens owning property.
What's the difference between ownership by corporation, and ownership by nation?
One offers everyone an equal vote.
The other offers the 'favored few' millions of votes, and the unfavored no vote at all.

“The axiom that you can’t have indefinite growth on a finite base does *not* mean that crisis is imminent”
No. It means that crisis is unavoidable.

Well put Grim.
I daresay Hume has never heard of Ludwig von Mises. Others might also read some of his philosophy.

David

Peter Hume, Ok, I said I wasn't going to read your posts, but your challenges shouldn't go unanswered.

Your posts read like a soul in torment, forever seeking answers and not finding any, proposing quality of life and then denying any acceptable basis for evaluating it, criticizing democratic process and capitalism but only offering anarchy and strength of individual possession as alternatives. My assessment is that you are fully capable of answering your own questions, but are perhaps seeking either confirmation or absolute refutation of your views. You and I know you will continue to believe whatever you want, irrespective of any insights provided to the contrary, but face it, democracy is here to stay, government is elected to make broad decisions in the interest of national security and societal stability, and they won't ever get it absolutely right to everyone's satisfaction all of the time. We don't live in an ideal world, we don't live in isolation of external world forces, and we are not, nor can we be, the absolute determinants of all we survey. That is the way it is, imperfect as it may seem, it is the best available.

Peter Hume,

You posted this response to me: "You rail against the human use of natural resources, as if living is wrong for humans, but not any other species." "But you still evade the big question - what do you say policy should do about these human pests?"

We are stuck with these so-called "human pests" as you put it, but they are no more pests than you or I, just the continuing procession of survival by whatever means are available. There but for the unequal cast of the dice go you and I. Shall we therefore disenfranchise them because it affronts some misplaced inference of "worth"? You have yourself posted the question as to where may be found the answers to so many human plights, and this can only mean which of the world's multitude may have the potential, as yet untapped, to provide those answers, given the necessary opportunity to do so - for we in our western marble towers ought not be so bold as to think we have a monopoly on the capacity for innovation, inventiveness and ingenuity, or do you perhaps think otherwise?

As for other species, biodiversity and the environment, all of this represents what is truly worthwhile in our existence - the landscape of our human heritage - but it is ours to nurture, and not to over-exploit and plunder for some grandiose ambition to beat down, suppress and conquer at any cost. Loss of the amazing diversity of capacity and prospect already sustained through mankind's wanton plundering will be a source of enormous regret for generations to come. Perpetuation of our human disregard for what is truly valuable can only leave an epitaph of what might have been. Our inventiveness is at once our inglorious ignorance.

What to do? Rectify inequity, educate and support, embrace all the possibilities for realising sustainability before all is overwhelmed.

Saltpetre,
take-two of response to your post of Sunday, 22 May 2011 7:01:16 PM.

You say, "if Cheryl is suggesting we could take quite a few more immigrants from some underprivileged 3rd world countries, then I guess we could. The only real problem I have with that is if Oz in doing so would be exacerbating current world overpopulation". Altogether far-seeing and commendable I'm sure.

But I doubt this is what Cheryl had in mind, and you have to admit it does sound pollyannaish?

But then you bring us crashing to Earth with, "Of course, any such immigrants would have to meet some appropriate standards, of education, skills, good conduct, and maybe have work sponsorship, but numbers would also have to be within limits manageable by our economy".
I don't think that's quite the essence of charity as Jesus saw it, is it? Your next sentence clarifies the whole as pure expediency: "Given such conditions, if our taking some additional immigrants could be beneficial to our workforce, and at the same time help to improve conditions in their home countries, then this could be a win-win all round".
In your defence, you were trying to confabulate a generous interpretation of Cheryl's polemic.
But it really doesn't wash--much as I'm sure Cheryl would be eager to turn her house into a hostel.

Indeed, I could accuse "you" of "disingenuously disregarding world forces which demand serious attention" when you say "we seem to have a "immigration lottery" going on at the moment, a targeted approach would have to be an improvement".
Don't we already have a highly discriminatory and self-serving approach to immigration? Isn't this a bit of a cold shoulder to show to refugees? And isn't this a little inconsistent with your later comments, when you lambast poor Poirot and moi for "tenacious fortification of the western decadent utopia"? While there's a certain turgid effect to your prose (I love it when you talk dirty!), I'm bound to say that Poirot and I bent on bringing down the western dystopia, rather than fortifying it. Honest, ask anyone!

Squeers,

How right you are!

How did it get past Salty that you and I are OLO's most notorious anti- Western/Capitalist lefties?...and that in our replies we were targeting his absurdly rose-coloured approach, rather than his humanitarian aspirations.....the funny thing is that, although I went with the ostrich line to finish my last post, I had planned to finish it just the way you did with an admission of my credentials and an "ask anyone!"

"Still under the false impression that shooting people who disagree with you is morally superior? Or perhaps you’re not in favour of enforcing any policy on population after all? You went quiet on me there."

Went quiet? You hadn't responded before my comment - do you use more than one moniker?

Anyone know what this comment is about? I did not mention shooting people as a remedy for population sustainability. Do you just make it up as you go along.

As I said Peter if you have trouble understanding rational argument and that there are many non-invasive ways to sustain populations without using force (like not providing incentives for babies) then that is clearly your failing.

If I only saw shooting people as a remedy I would also be in the non-sustainable camp, but thankfully most people think more deeply about these issues. You may think resources are plentiful without need to worry about water or forestry mangement, that is your right, many people don't agree. That is what free speech and democracy is all about.

As I suggested to you earlier if my comments offend you please feel free to ignore them, you clearly don't read or understand many of the comments made, preferring to invent a meaning to suit your own self serving arguments.

Peter Hume, what a Wing ah Ling of a post you wrote in response to me!

Firstly you wrote:

<< … we need freedom from your clueless prurient meddling. I trust that settles this discussion to your satisfaction? >>

But having apparently brought an end to our discussion, you went on with several questions in an attempt to engage me in further discussion… on just the same subject!

Very odd!

You are hanging out for me to give you a critique of your economic calculator article. Well… how about not going out of your way to be deliberately rude to someone that you want to do something for you?!?!

I was looking forward to doing that, but I’m not interested in discussing anything with someone who can’t keep it civil.

Surprise! The IPA wants...
1) More privatisations...despite them being proven to be more expensive. (How do you get competition in toll roads? Where is the transparency when "commercial in confidence" rules the contracts?)
Once again they want private profits and the public to wear risks and costs.
2) The ability to trash local's rights. It seems billion dollar companies need "incentives" yet people need a big stick and no legal recourse.
3) Completely ignore ecology and economics to sustain the bandit lifestyles of a small group of cronies in a small age group. These folks want to go to their graves the most selfish and destructive generation ever.
What a dismal, unethical philosophy.

No-one has shown how government will be able to conserve resources any better considering the relevant present and future values, as against my having shown reasons why governments must necessarily be more wasteful. Thus interventions will be less sustainable not more; and therefore anti-human even in your own terms; as well as anti-freedom.

None of you (Hazza excepted) has suggested any actual policy to deal with the alleged population challenge.

Grim
1. What policy do you propose to provide every person now and indefinitely into the future an equal chance to exist and enjoy the things you think they should have?
2. How does this solve the problem that we can’t have infinite growth on a finite base?
3. Isn’t it self-contradictory to include goods made possible by industrial capitalism when you think it’s exploitative and unsustainable?
4. If we shouldn’t use a non-renewable resource now because it might reduce a future person’s use of it, then why would not any future person be under the same constraint, with the result that no-one could use any non-renewable resource ever?

“What if he has no children, and the 'future sale' won't occur until after he's dead?”
He still has a current interest in those post-mortem sales, being the current capital value of the asset.

The fact that all living things seek satisfaction of their wants does *not* mean that the aspiring central planners of the world are capable of knowing everyone’s subjective values; nor has Mises ever argued so. People don’t all seek “more” of the one same thing, or of different things uniformly, or of given things necessarily at all. Therefore your argument is wrong.

How could the equality you envisage be possible without equal property? And how could that be enforced? And even if it could, it would mean many *more* people starving, not fewer.

The wealth of businesses comes from people voluntarily handing over money. Through this process the masses, as consumers, exercise unconditional control over the direction of production, and decide who makes losses, and who profits.

Squeers and Poirot, Sorry if I overreacted. Didn't know if you were taking the mickey, and took it a bit to heart. (I was quite colourful though, eh?.)

Squeers, Interesting propositions in your last post. My disagreement with Cheryl is, yes, limitations have to be imposed, and standards have to be maintained - I just got tired of all the Cheryl-bashing (my own contribution included), and had to propose a different perspective.

Call me two-bob if you like, but some Jesuit Monk I aint. I found your proposition for wealth management interesting though, and it's that sort of approach I would propose for addressing overpopulation and world conflict - not by directly controlling wealth, but by a conscious redistribution to support economic development in the 3rd world. Some might contend that developing those economies would only exacerbate population growth, whereas the opposite has already been demonstrated.

You posted: "I'm bound to say that Poirot and I are bent on bringing down the western dystopia, rather than fortifying it." I differ only in that we need the strength and ingenuity of the western economies now more than ever, to be able to address current world economic disparity. Further balance will take its course, as the west becomes increasingly dependent on 3rd world development - in minerals, food production, and environmental repair.

"Don't we already have a highly discriminatory and self-serving approach to immigration?" Yes we do, but Oz and the rest of the developed world are still not addressing overpopulation at its roots. Refugee relocation is like an epidemic, is not very selective, and I fear is becoming a bit of a game - the queue-jumping game. Call me heartless, but I think those of low education and skills could be helped more effectively in their home countries, in a physical and life-style environment with which they are familiar, and whose deficiencies they can live with. Whereas they could participate effectively in needed development in that setting, in Oz they could only be a burden we can well do without. How's that for two-bob?

Saltpetre,
thanks for your comments.
I have to admit I wasn't proud of giving Cheryl a serve, nor on the, regrettably, several other occasions I've let fly at people, or been less than civil. Sometimes Squeers just takes it upon himself to be high and mighty, a definite character flaw I've often had words with him about. So apologies on Squeers' behalf to "most" of those I've offended.
I'm not surprised Cheryl's a bloke because the ladies on OLO rarely indulge in that kind of thing--mind you, they don't have all that testosterone swimming about making them feisty, do they? Just PMS.

I won't attempt too add anything much to my few suggestions on wealth caps etc, except to agree that I think the basic idea has merit and that something of the sort might be a way to fix the system without tearing it down. I personally will never condone a system that condones anyone or any entity possessing obscene personal/corporate wealth, let alone while obscene poverty is also condoned! Many people believe the capitalist dynamic is fundamental to a flourishing economy and society, but I think that's rubbish and that human beings could be driven by much more noble and satisfying pursuits than accumulating wealth and conspicuous consumption if they lived in a culture that wasn't obsessed with it. I'll do everything I can not to comply. The trouble is that even if large numbers refused to play the game, the government would just follow the dogma of the IPA and its minions, and bring in immigrants to grow the capital instead!
There's something radically wrong in a democracy where neither side of the political spectrum will deviate from the neoliberal agenda. My kingdom for a politician and a party with radical vision and guts--but then, s/he would still lack a mandate.

Dispite what cheryl and Peter Hume say, it seems most are of the opinion that the worlds population needs to slow down or reduce if there is a desire to avoid gross over population.

To this end I give this link to the birth rate in Iran that was reduced from 6.5 per woman to less than 2 per woman.

C:\Documents and Settings\Neil\My Documents\Family planning in Iran - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.mht

There are other sites also if you google Iran bith rates or Iran fertility.

Very interesting to see how it was done.

As for Aus, My opinion is that there is too many people here now and we need to dispence with the baby bonous and cut immigration to net zero. Our living standards are dropping each year with population growth.

Sorry, Try this link for family planning in Iran

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran

(cont.)
Grim
Before you assert that governments are more representative of people than the people are of themselves, you need to refute all these facts and arguments disproving you: http://economics.org.au/2010/08/unrepresentative-government/

Squeers
“economic growth would be gradually cut back”
ignores the central issue. *How* is economic growth to be cut back, considering the human values (unknowable to any central planner) that have to be taken into account now and in the future? Do we destroy tractors, or salt the earth, or burn inventory? How?

I submit that your idea of a global income and asset tax will be self-defeating, for the following reasons. Income tax is always levied on net income, never gross income, or the economy would collapse. As a result, businessmen can and do easily legally avoid paying income tax, by holding assets the costs of which are equal to their tax bill. So the burden of your scheme would fallon the poorer and employee classes, and less or not at all on the richer, as income tax does now, though it was originally sold as a soak-the-rich measure.

As for the asset cap, can you see how the affected rich people would be better off consuming the extra capital rather than investing it?
Can you see how people in general could only produce much less, without capital goods a.k.a. production goods?
Can you see how you are reasoning that investment in production goods makes the masses poorer?
Can you see how that reasoning is wrong?

And isn’t it self-contradictory to include in the universal basket of goods, the products of industrial capitalism which you declare exploitative and unsustainable?

Thus you have failed to
1. provide any policy suggestion to address the alleged population challenge, the “finite base/infinite growth” paradigm
2. show how government can better conserve resources to achieve all relevant human values without the means of calculating in a lowest common denominator what is a more or less economical use of resources
3. take into account the unintended negative consequences of your proposals..

4. take into account what happens if government doesn’t do what you want with the powers you grant but instead, for example, uses them to tax the poorer to pay for the richer.

Saltpetre
You have not provided any reason in favour of any policy on population, nor refuted mine against it.

Divergence
I have shown the impossibility facing any central planner in knowing the relevant values they would need to know in order for policy to produce any improvement.

You have not shown how they can. You have merely asserted and assumed that they can have superior knowledge and capacity without attempting to meet my challenge.

For example, you assume that the effect of government regulation of drugs is to decrease unnecessary deaths on balance. But how do you know that it doesn’t increase them, when both the upside *and the downside* of regulation are taken into account (e.g deaths of deserving patients awaiting official approval, deaths from drugs unclean because of prohibition etc.)?

And that is to completely ignore the ethical element.

Citing the Green Revolution would only be valid if government got the money and the knowledge from a moonbeam. But in fact all the money and all the knowledge available to government was also available to society at large. You are arguing as if government had not taken its resources from society in the first place; as if the non-government members of society did not have at least an equal interest in not starving as the government members; and as if you had knowledge of the counter-factual that you in fact do not have.

So your intellectual method is conjuring. If valid, it would justify any and every intervention by mere assumption. But if that assumption were available, government could take over all production of everything and do a better and fairer job. Now we know that’s not true, don’t we? Well you haven’t progressed the argument past that fact.

Ludwig
Okay sorry, I promise to keep it civil.

Ozandy
If privatization makes things dearer, why not just nationalize all property and production?

The other part of my last reply from Sunday
The posting rules aren't very useful to me I'm afraid. If I can't complete things as they occur, the probability then is that I won't get the opportunity again within the life or the context of the thread.

1)
Peter:
"So what’s an example of the “violence” you allege?"

Freeport mine in West Irian is reasonable example. Oil extraction on the Nigerian delta is another. In both cases, and there are many more, Capitalist ambition and power has exercised opportunities of zero restraint to exploit local resources, including horrendously violent liquidation of social capital. Maybe though your strange prism views the various involved forms of largesse to corrupt Govt. agencies as a form of regulation? Conversely I’d see it more as free market payments to a quasi shareholder or contractor base.

The regulation you abhor is a (mostly) incompetent or incomplete response by less helpless communities to limit the types of extreme damage being regularly wrought within those that are totally vulnerable.

Part 2)

Peter:
"And what’s an example of an unregulated capitalist market?"

Your demand for a notionally ‘ideal’ but practicably impossible extreme guarantees your permanent dissatisfaction with ambient conditions. It also seems to disable your concern toward how ordinary people can possibly remain placid in the face of having a relative and uncaring few market players with so much power over their lives.

In other words, why are you so unmoved by the amount of effective regulation that capitalist players have, and actively seek to have, over ordinary peoples’ lives? Is it simply because this regulatory power is delivered via the holy conduit called ‘The Market’ and kept amorphous within the zeitgeist rather than being writ plain on a statute?

In the innate market dialectic of purposeful competitive interest, public vs private interest and private vs private interest, the enactment of regulation, for better or worse, is an inevitability. Your chronic complaint upon its existence is no less pointlessly irksome than a zealous advocate for gravity complaining that his ball keeps hitting the ground.

Furthermore, the market players themselves corrupt the ‘free market’ model (which, we are wise to remina mindful of, was only ever intended by Adam Smith to be taken as an instructive model, not a reality). Where is ‘perfect information’ in a market-place driven by corporate advertising, managerial buzz-words and cartel trading?

That said the financial markets prior to the GFC, and the derivatives market still, come close enough to being disastrously unregulated markets. In the context of violence, the market conditions leading to and into the Industrial Revolution are close enough to unregulated to be an example. The utterly disgraceful behavior of capital in this period ensured the socio-political responses that gave rise to much of the regulation you agitate against. You want to go back there?

In all, the simple analysis is that you seem to have a fundamental problem with differentiating theory from reality.

Hi Squeers

Re your invite to read and comment upon the thread you linked:

Yes, Ted is on the money. Most of those who contend him simply do not understand either the vital characteristics of energy relative to our structural demand for it or the awesome demands of exponential growth.

An overwhelming proportion of negative posters simply failed to read or comprehend the totality of Ted’s basic premise. His contention was a couplet, inclusive of both renewables as base-load AND continuance of exponential growth. The poor fellow zealously advocating the viability of base-load renewables missed the second aspect entirely. Although maybe we were the poor fellows, being subjected to his unflinchingly strident myopia.

Your comment with respect to us needing a non-linear (or similar) consideration of things was correct. Complexity is a fiend that we have bred into the core of our modern dependencies. It will inevitably grow to exhaust and consume us. The energy cornucopians fail to fathom this, yet it glares openly at us all like a huge angry demon.

The human imagination is truly an amazing thing. It can emancipate us as it can also utterly imprison us.

wallumi,

I thought judging by your posts here that you might like the article. It contains a great deal of supportive information in its links and its a shame it hasn't received more "close" attention. As you suggest, some people seem too often to skim such articles, gleaning just enough to feel their prejudices are warranted, and then condemning ad hoc.

Sorry I'm late back- been very busy.

Peter Hume it's not nice to lie- or try to make a nazi insinuation on someone who doesn't agree with you

"Hazza
You want to imprison people for expressing political opinions that you disagree with, but you’re not a fascist? "

No I don't- and it's really sad that you are so poor at debating that you actually have to make this lie up; as I have never said such a thing.

For someone that's fast becoming another forum outcast like Runner, you're doing a good job of making yourself look even less credible.

wallumi
You need to make your argument stand on its merits, not on my supposed personal problems.

I am merely asking for government interventions to be justified in their own terms, even only in theory, which is perfectly reasonable.

But you haven’t done that yet, and neither has anyone here.

The interventionists’ intellectual technique is only this:
a) let’s assume that government can make benefits out of nothing but threats of aggression, the unethics and chaotic consequences of which are ignored or blamed on lack of regulation
but when that is challenged:
b) “Be reasonable! It must be so!” or “you have psychological problems!”
which is what you’ve just done (I’m supposedly complaining against the inevitability of gravity. Well if a policy can’t be justified, then it shouldn’t be regarded as inevitable.)

Your argument in favour of government regulation depends on you establishing that market relations comprise “violence”, but you haven’t even begun to establish that they do.

Merely saying the words “Freeport” or “Nigerian oil delta” doesn’t supply your argument for you. You need to prove the “violence” you have alleged inheres in a system based on private ownership of the means of production.

If what you’re referring to is pollution of resources such as rivers, and the resources are owned by government, you’re proving my point, not yours.

If what you’re referring to is violence unlawful under the laws of the states it’s happened in, you’re proving my point, not yours.

Go ahead, prove it: I’m still waiting?

To allege that the financial markets were unregulated is plainly wrong. The Federal Reserve? The Mint? Federal Housing Finance Agency? Securities Exchange Commission? Commodity Futures Trading Commission? Federal National Mortgage Association? Farm Credit System? Security Industry Financial Regulatory Authority? Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board? National Credit Union Administration? Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection? Internal Revenue Service?

And that’s not counting the state regulators.

There are literally dozens of bureaucracies and just*one* of these would disprove your argument.

Come on. You alleged “unfettered capitalist markets”. And is this the *best* example you could come up with?

Be honest. What would it take to persuade you that
a) these market were highly regulated
b) government might have anything to do with the problems that you have blamed on unregulated markets?

Government regulated the *supply* and *price* of money and credit at all times leading into and during the GFC. What effect might permanently inflating the supply and lowering the price of money have on the financial markets, do you think?

According to interventionist theory, only government has the competence and selflessness to regulate the money and credit supply. So they failed, didn’t they? The theory is wrong, isn’t it?

And according to Austrian theory, lowering interest rates causes artificial bubbles and consequential busts, hardship and social injustice.

So either by interventionist or anti-interventionist theory, the assumption of government’s selfless all-knowing beneficence in regulating money and credit is indefensible isn’t it?

What if you are wrong in giving government a get-out-of-jail-free card? What if, in defending the violent suppression of voluntary arrangements, you are defending the causes of enormous social and environmental chaos and injustice? Think about it?

(If *I* am wrong in saying such government interventions are necessarily incompetent, then the GFC would not have happened in the first place, would it?)

Perfection is not of this world. There is no need for real people, and therefore real markets, to conform to abstract mathematical academic notions such as “perfect information” in order to justify their right to peaceable freedom from ham-fisted blundering aggression. Neither is government perfect! The wrongness of neo-classical economic theory on the point you cite doesn’t prove that government regulation is ethically, economically, or environmentally better than voluntary social relations.

Your argument about the Industrial Revolution has been demolished here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=11993&page=0

To summarise
a) population doubled over the relevant period. So the capitalists weren’t degrading the lives of the growing population to poverty, as Marx assumed, they were elevating them from death - the first time in history any social system ever achieved this.
(That’s what you’re complaining about, remember? Does capitalism make the masses too poor, or too rich? Make up your mind.)

b) Please answer: if the government, following your line of reasoning, had passed a law to help the working class by mandating that the minimum wage be 50 pounds per day in 1820 money, do you think that would have made the condition of the working class better or worse?

Government can’t just magically create benefits by passing laws imposing costs, as you assume. You are ignoring the logical possibility that the result of government regulation was to cause *more* unemployment, hardship, poverty, and death, not less.

If you say voluntary relations are “ideal” but not “practicable”, the only reason they’re impracticable is because so many people like you keep supporting coerced and chaotic relations they can’t justify. So stop doing it and defend freedom instead?

“… [W]hy are you so unmoved by the amount of effective regulation that capitalist players have … over ordinary peoples’ lives?”

I’m still waiting for you to prove that any of such market order is based on “violence” rather than mutually beneficial voluntary social relations; or to concede the point.

You haven’t made any relevant critique of my argument about economic calculation and ecological sustainability.

In all your spirited complaints about humans being alive rather than dead, you have not made any suggestion as to how government can improve the alleged problem, considering the present and future values that are to be taken into account, and the downsides as well as the upsides of government action.

This completely disproves the possibility of your and Squeers’ interventionist dream you-know-not-how of a paradisical economic stasis achieved by centralized force and threats overriding voluntary economising of private property.

To deal with environmental problems by expanding the tragedy of the commons can only create more such tragedy.

Thus when we chase all the rabbits down all the holes, we find that the interventionists’ proposals have nothing to do with population or environment, and everything to do with their desire for forced redistributions; nothing to do with their concern for people, and everything to do with their desire to order people around – for *worse* economic and environmental results.

Hazza

1.
“The other measures simply ensure quality of live to existing families and children- while the BB simply encourages people to actually make them.”

How do you know the other measures don’t encourage people to have children they otherwise wouldn’t have if they had to pay the full costs of having them?

2.
You said “barring people making ads and permitting school volunteers who preach a contradictory message.”

So how are you going to “bar” them from expressing political opinions you disagree with? Barring means making illegal doesn’t it?

Well? What if they assert their freedom? What happens to them?

3
You said: “ensure all property development is at the discretion of local voters “
I said: “Why shouldn’t the voters also veto food production, sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth?”
You said: “Might have something to do with voters wanting to protect their own rights when they vote what should be allowed? But please tell me why a person would want to vote away their own rights to have children?”

What has this to do with reducing population? You reduce population by increasing homelessness, is that the idea?

You assume the people already agree with you, but if they did, there would be no need of your proposed policy, would there?

4- Improve workplace discrimination law regarding older employees

Since the original problem is that employers don’t rush to profit from the skills of older employees which you assume are undervalued, how do you know that they are as undervalued as you assume?

So you’re not willing to employ older people yourself, but you want to force others to?

> 5 How exactly am I "failing to understand" a process that most leading businesses are ALREADY DOING?

You’re failing to understand that businesses do it on the basis of profit and loss which governments don’t. Government cannot further or determine this process any better but only more wastefully.

I have already completely demolished your argument, or rather ASSUMPTIONS, which you have effectively conceded by your being COMPLETELY UNABLE to answer my 6 devastating last questions here: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=4305&page=0#109991

Go ahead. Try.

Peter Hume, your contention that lax government regulation caused the GFC implies that you think an entire lack of regulation would have done better and avoided both the GFC and all manner of "bubbles". Do you forget that it was the "unregulated" greed merchants and shysters who actually did the foul deed and created the GFC? So, how could you possibly think that no regulation at all would have achieved anything better?

How to reduce world overpopulation? Again I say the problem has to be addressed at its root, and that is to reduce the need for people in the third world to have large families. Why do they have large families? Partly for a workforce to tend crops and livestock, or to send off to work in factories to support the family, and partly to have some chance of support in old age, and partly because high infant mortality and general early death rates dictates having more progeny to ensure sufficient survivors to achieve the aforementioned objectives.

How then to reduce the need for large families? Education, hygiene, health care, improved agriculture, improved infrastructure and more and better money jobs. How to achieve these improvements? By a concerted effort by the developed world through hands-on and targeted aid programs, from a World Development Fund.

Why would the first world bother? Because the world's best chance to ensure food security and to reduce global CO2, or mitigate climate change, and to halt population growth is to do all this. That's why!

What to do to stop the boats? Work to relieve the problems causing people to need to relocate. Until these underlying problems are relieved - repression, oppression, hate and intolerance - there will continue to be an ever increasing refugee problem, full stop, finish.

Peter Hume (sigh)
If debates should be won by energy alone, you certainly deserve to win this one.
Since flogging dead horses has never been one of my passions, I'll just stick to the highlights, such as when you come out with such 'devastatingly' humble submissions as:
“I have already completely demolished your argument, or rather ASSUMPTIONS, which you have effectively conceded by your being COMPLETELY UNABLE to answer my 6 devastating last questions here...”
Although I note your predilection for numbering your points, I found it difficult to identify exactly which DEVASTATING questions you were referring to; so I'll just go with my favourites.

“0-1 Ethically, why should the majority be able to vote themselves the fruits of other people’s labour?”
Why should a CEO, or even a board of major shareholders be able to vote themselves the fruits of other people’s labour?”

“0-2 Practically, *HOW* are the people or the executive going to *know* how best to combine the factors of production in such a way as to satisfy the most urgent wants of the people as a whole (not just the majority) and minimise loss and...”
I would suggest they employ the same tactic the marketplace does. Trial and error. Oh that's right, the marketplace is perfectly rational, and therefore is capable of unerringly accuratedly setting the price of all items the very time.
BTW, how does the marketplace 'satisfy the most urgent wants of the people as a whole (not just the majority)”?

“0-3 *HOW* are the people or the executive going to have any incentive to do so?”
Why is it that the word 'incentive' is to you only monetary?
Do you believe the soldier who lays down his life for his country does so for personal profit?
Personally, I have always held that many of the problems with Democratic Government that you describe could be addressed by paying our parliamentarians less, rather than more.
Would that they had other incentives than just personal profit.

Oh dear Peter "demolish" lets run through these "demolishing" arguments.
-Direct Democracy does not improve accountability- let's see, if voters had the ability to veto decisions by politicians or any other interest group trying to impose its personal agenda on them- or actually HAD to be consulted in certain decisions affecting them, by virtue of its definition, then it does. As the public are the first to bear the brunt of the consequences of a policy or project- they are the most qualified to decide on whether or not to green-light it. A person who lives elsewhere but designated the area as suitable for his personal interests is not.

The implication that neither are true is so stupid it doesn't even make a good obsfucation- it just makes you look desperate to make an argument.

Moving on

1- because they are also 'laborers' and would be voting away their own rights also.
2- Same way a politician or private company would I imagine- what would make the motives any different? Putting aside that any 'assistance' would be in areas that majority would consider important, or would consider they themselves may need.
3- See 1. By setting policy to governance that enhances their own quality of life, they would also be enhancing other people's quality of life.

In short- every voted policy that would apply to everyone would be one the voters would consider beneficial for themselves.

"Just because people use a service, doesn’t mean they should be forced to pay for it,"
I'd re-read that line Peter- after a while you'll find out why it makes you look silly.

And now for the even stupider questions you felt the need to ask a second time:

1- Because paid leave is a zero-gain circumstance; There is no profit, so there is no 'encouragement'- and ultimately I'm not that bothered about its limitations beyond that. YOU are the one who's itching for some Nazi intervention suggestions, not me Peter. Similarly, the use of subsidies reduces expenditure to 0 or simply a less severe number- it's a basic business concept Peter- the fact that you don't understand it says a lot.

2- Based entirely on Anti-Vilification/hate-speech laws and advertising and school policies that prevent neo-nazis making TV ads or visiting schools for talks.
Peter- I must wonder, do you support Neo-nazis giving a speech on the need to exterminate non-white people in a public school? It seems you have a problem with existing standards preventing them from doing so.

3- It has to do with population in that it ensures a motive for lobbyists to demand an increase is removed. Simple. A community is free to reject and accept developments that suits its own needs, and if it decides to put a stop- then the kids of the voters will have to stay at home or rent elsewhere, and people from outside suburbs simply will have to find another area where people are actually needed. It also corresponds much more closely to employee demand given the circumstances of people promoting/rejecting developments. Similarly, people won't feel like having kids if they're a bunch of NIMBYs and they will be keeping them in the house.

4- Well as I'm an employEE, I am not permitted to hire anyone; of course I would be perfectly happy to hire older people (let alone 50+) with the skills I need.

5- "ou’re failing to understand that businesses do it on the basis of profit and loss"
I WAS talking about businesses in that example and they ARE profiting from that transition. I'm not sure how that simple post could possibly leave you so confused.

You really don't even know what you are talking about anymore, do you?

Saltpetre
I didn’t contend that “lax government regulation” caused the GFC; but government permanently inflating the money supply. I have shown that the financial markets were very highly regulated and therefore it is wrong to lay the blame to “unfettered capitalist markets”, and you have not shown otherwise.

The Fed alone was able to create money without restraint and without fear of losses, and to give it away to whomever it wanted without accounting to anyone including Congress. Its pet favorite handoutees were billionaire bankers, big corporations and foreign governments. The “unregulated shysters” and “greed merchants” were centred in the monopoly Federal Reserve. The privatization of profits and socialization of losses was a product of governmental control of the money supply and its bubble policy of permanent inflation by lowering interest rates below the market rate.

In an “unfettered capitalist” money market, where the only regulations were laws against fraud and theft, and the parties’ consent permitted all else, banks that did what the Fed does would go broke, and that is as it should be. The consumers would have direct control over the fraction on reserve. Each could choose his own and have the consequences – perfect security with no interest; or higher degrees of risk and return. Bubbles could still happen, but couldn’t get enormous, precisely because of profit – their competitors’ – and loss – the bubbleers’ own. And the costs of bubbles would fall entirely on those who had undertaken the risk, which is as it should be, not spread throughout the whole society, distorting the entire economic structure. There would be no so-called ‘too bit to fail’ sucking on the government teat at everyone else’s expense.

This would remedy the current system of permanently, systematically ripping off the masses of workers and savers on a grand scale, to fund paper-money speculators, instant-grat consumerism, and handouts to billionaires. The problem is the something-for-nothing mentality of unfettered socialism, let loose on the money supply, caused by government powers which you unjustifiedly support, and which unfettered capitalism would send broke in short order.

(cont.)

“How then to reduce the need for large families? … By … hands-on and targeted aid programs.”

The West didn’t reduce the need for large families by welfare handouts, did they? The West achieved zero pop growth (absent immigration) it without anyone planning for it, by getting wealthier, that’s my point. (If anything, it’s the welfare families who have larger families these days.)

It is possible that without government interventions, world population would stabilize within the limits of sustainability. Thus although we can’t have infite growth on a finite base, that does *not* mean
a) that crisis is imminent or inevitable, nor
b) that government intervention can improve the situation, all relevant values considered.

As I have shown, it can only make things actively worse both environment-wise, and poverty-wise.

If you ask the refugees, you’ll find the problem is unfettered government, not unfettered individual freedom and private property subject to a ban on initiating aggression.

Grim
Firstly, you haven’t even attempted to answer my questions what policy you propose to provide equal life-chances and equal minimum standards for all; how that solves the “infinite growth/finite base” problem; why it’s not self-contradictory to include goods made possible by industrial capitalism when you think it’s exploitative and unsustainable; and why no-one could use any non-renewable resource ever under your dispensation?
Secondly I’m still waiting for you to refute *each* fact and reasons disproving your assumption that the government represents the people more and better than the people represent themselves: http://economics.org.au/2010/08/unrepresentative-government/

“…I found it difficult to identify exactly which…”
Communication breakdown. I was referring Hazza to this thread:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=4305&page=0#109991
and to the 6 questions in my 3rd and 4th last posts.

1.
Can you not see the ethical difference between them? Tell me if you can’t, and I’ll explain it to you.

2.
The market method doesn’t just use “trial and error”; it uses trial and error *based on profit and loss*.

Are you suggesting government employ that tactic? If so, thank you for conceding the entire argument.

If not, how are the voting public or their official delegates to *know* how best to combine the factors of production in every particular service so as to satisfy the most urgent wants of the people as a whole (not just the majority) and minimise loss?

(Answer: they can’t.)

Please consider my last 6 questions to Hazza in that thread, which make clear the problem facing government, that is not facing private businesses, in providing “infrastructure” (capital goods).

I have never contended that “the marketplace is perfectly rational, and therefore is capable of unerringly accuratedly setting the price of all items the very time” (which appears ungrammatical).

So if you first acknowledge that that was a misrepresentation, I will prove that the marketplace satisfies the most urgent wants of the people as a whole (not just the majority).

3.
>*HOW* are the people or the executive going to have any incentive to do so?”
>>”Why is it that the word 'incentive' is to you only monetary?”

It isn’t and I have never contended so.

Try making your argument without misrepresentation?

People act on their values in order of priority, regardless whether monetary or not. For example, people forego income for a better family life. There is nothing about a market system that requires them to prioritise monetary values unless they choose that over other non-monetary values.

But you haven’t answered the question. A private bus service is able to know directly whether or not the people want this service, or a particular route, or particular stops, by consulting profit or loss. How are people in assembly or their official delegates to know this for any and all public infrastructure questions? Bus routes? Bus stops?

Admit it – they can’t.

Proft and loss enables all factors of production to be compared using a lowest common denominator – money prices – which enables calculation. Without that, the central planners are stuck comparing quantities directly. That’s why the Soviets watched the butter and sausage queues.

How are the people, or their delegates, to *know*? By counting disgruntled letters to the local MP?

*The West achieved zero pop growth (absent immigration) it without anyone planning for it, by getting wealthier*

That is only part of the story, Peter. The discovery of the pill,
free availability and affordibility of the pill, the legalisation
of abortion in most Western countries, all came together.

Many in the third world simply can't afford family planning and
abortion is still banned in many third world countries. So they
keep popping them out, encouraged by the dear old Catholic Church.

(cont.)
“Would that [parliamentarians] had other incentives than just personal profit.”

Indeedy. But since politicians are no more selfless than everyone else, wouldn’t it be better to tie their personal profit *directly* to the actual satisfaction of the consumers of their services, and punish them with losses if they fail or neglect their duty?

How can it be a better system to jumble up all the signals coming from the consumers so no particular signal is isolated, and to delegate people who pay no price for getting it wrong?

Hazza
I’m the one opposing coercive measures, and you’re the one advocating them, remember?

I will respond to your argument when you can present it without a load of bitter insult, misrepresentation, allegations of my supposedly supporting incitement to extermination, alleging that I am “itching for Nazi interventions”, and similar ad hominem nonsense.

I assure you and everyone else, that stripped of these dirty tactics you are unable to sustain your argument.

All
Still no interventionist has been able to shown how government is going to be able to be any improvement, and if we correct for their tactics of
a) assuming a moral superiority in government that it does not have
b) assuming a greater ability in government to allocate resources to their most urgent and important uses, that it does not have
c) blaming capitalism for problems either caused by government, or caused by nature and relieved by capitalism more than any other system.

Only

Mainstream party politicians
Corporate CEOs
Media lackeys and jockeys
Swelled headed investors
Immigrants and assorted other ALIEN invaders

would want continued immigration growth continued economic growth paid for by decreased liberty for the masses.

Because life is becoming so difficult, I ask these folk through the mindstream what they want us ordinary hard working Australians to do?

The answer comes back in the vague form of a clip from the film ID4:

DIE! DIE!

I sense a countdown is indeed in progress as oil runs out.

And Then?

Check Mate!

Well said, Yabby. I would like to see the growth advocates provide real examples of the success of their model instead of the depth commentaries on economic computer models. The irony is that the debate parallels that of the Reproductive Health Bill in the Philippines, except that over there the economists are citing the infrastructure shortfall resultant from the high population growth rate, and the Catholic Bishops are claiming that the problem is one of Government mismanagement and corruption, and has nothing to do with population growth.

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/international/church-philippine-govt-clash-over-family-planning/443553

Now, if the Philippines is having trouble providing the infrastructure for a living standard far lower than Australia's, is it any wonder to see the massive debt and infrastructure shortfalls here?

Oops- smile Hume, you just fell into my trap
-
"I will respond to your argument when you can present it without a load of bitter insult, misrepresentation, allegations of my supposedly supporting incitement to extermination, alleging that I am “itching for Nazi interventions”, and similar ad hominem nonsense.
I assure you and everyone else, that stripped of these dirty tactics you are unable to sustain your argument."
-
You do realize I just got you to word-for-word, describe your own conduct in every forum discussion? After all, YOU were the one who implied others were communists, anti-capitalists, nazis, fascists and wanted to jail people for 'breeding' and 'disagreeing' when no such allegation were made by us- particularly myself when you tried to imply all of the above on me several times.
So where does that leave you?
But in other words, you refuse to answer my questions- that's too bad.

And sadly, the rest of your replies still dance around the obvious points.
(a) When you say "democracy" one time I give you an answer that DOES debunk your argument, because your next reply you promptly stop talking about it and you pretend we were really talking about authoritative government. Nonetheless, an elected government is held to far more shareholders and civil/human rights/ethics laws than a private company- so there's your moral superiority (not to mention accountability- which you avoided ever since I told you).
(b) Most important purposes- lets see, rescue work, remote infrastructure, medical care- these three things usually don't work very well under an enticement for profit and are rarely handled at all (let alone well) by business.
(c) Again with the communist accusation. Poor Peter, you really do see the world as full of communists out to get you, don't you? The fact that you seem to actually believe people are socialists when they are obviously nothing close is really quite sad (actually it's funny).

I don't expect you to answer these questions either of course, because you are clearly trying to avoid me.

Fester, thanks for that link, it makes the point.

What chance do the poor have, when the church is fighting the
Govt and wants to keep them poor?

With examples like that, I can only express my disgust at
the church claiming to be humane. They should be ashamed of themselves, they really should.

Hazza

The logic of your argument still depends on my personality, which is why you can’t make out your argument without referring to my alleged personality defects, my alleged ulterior motives, my alleged malicious intentions, my supposed deliberate misrepresentations, my supposed willful evasions, and other ad hominem rubbish.

Let’s try some of your tactics of argument on you:
Why do you support exterminating millions of people?
Why does your mental retardation stop your from conceding what is yet to be proved?
Why do you support Nazi interventions?

How do you like it? That’s the standard of intellectual muck you’re serving up – and then have the gall to accuse me of desperation!

The issue is on policy – whether government can produce an improvement, all things considered. My argument opposes, and your argument supports, policy and the governmental ownership and control of means of production – to quote some of your recent examples “rescue work, remote infrastructure, medical care”. If you didn’t, you’d be in favour of the voluntary funding and private ownership of these, which you aren’t, which is why there’s an issue.

So to the extent you are in favour of such government ownership and control of the means of production, you are in favour of socialism, no matter matter how much you try to squirm out of it by insulting and misrepresenting me, or by calling it something else.

Similarly, the whole point of proposing policy action is that policies can be enforced, whereas voluntary action can’t. Since you are proposing policies to enforce your socialist political opinions, and since law and policy are enforced ultimately by threats of imprisonment, therefore it is not dishonest or perverse of me to accuse you of advocating the jailing of people who disagree with your political opinions – that’s exactly what you’re doing, else your proposals would be voluntary!

Thus my accusing you of socialism and authoritarianism is not based on your personality, it’s based on your argument; whereas your argument that it’s perverse of me to accuse you so, is based on semantics and personality, not on my argument.

a) Your ethical argument fails to make out a justification for the unprovoked aggression you are in favour of, and therefore your argument fails on that account.

Government is not bound by more rules than business. By definition government involves a claim of a right to impose rules on subjects from which the government is exempt; else we would all have an equal right to tax and claim jurisdiction.

For example, by law, “misleading and deceptive conduct” is illegal but only “in trade or commerce”, not in government or politics. A recent example is the carbon tax. If Gillard was a private businesswomen who took billions on the basis of a facile misrepresentation, she would be in prison for years. Therefore your argument fails on that account too.

Voting is only once every three years, it provides no vote on any particular proposed law or policy, it imposes on the minority what they don’t want, in practice a minority can impose on a majority, and the person you vote for has no legal obligation whatsoever to perform any of his promises. By contrast every single transaction in the market is subject to the law against fraud, and being voluntary, represents the wishes of the parties to it, otherwise it wouldn’t take place. Therefore your same argument fails on that account.

You have also been disproved many times over in this article http://economics.org.au/2010/08/unrepresentative-government/

Therefore your argument as to the alleged moral superiority and greater representativeness of government fails many times over.

b) The question is whether private or government services satisfy the most urgent wants of those services’ consumers, as judged from *the people’s* point of view, not *yours*, so that argument fails.

“Shareholders” is a red herring. A citizen or political voter does not, by that fact, have a right to an equal or any share whatsoever in the property of the state. A private shareholder is unconditionally subject to the decisions of the consumers of the product whether to buy or abstain from buying. So your argument fails on that count too.

Your idea that we can get goods and services cheaper by getting government to provide them, is completely and utterly disproved by the 6 questions in my 3rd and 4th last posts here http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=4305&page=0#109991
which is why you have repeatedly evaded answering them, because you know you can’t do so without making more of a self-contradicting fool of yourself than you are already.

c) The problem isn’t that I’m mistakenly identifying you as a socialist and authoritarian, it’s that I’m correctly identifying it and you don’t like it, and fly into a petulant fury of personal insult in reaction.

Since you haven’t answered my *earlier* repeatedly asked 6 questions, you are in no position to complain that I haven’t answered your *later* questions, especially since your questions presuppose what mine prove wrong, even if you had made your questions clear and unreliant on personal abuse, which you haven’t.

But perhaps more of your ad hominem argument, mind-reading, misrepresenting me as supporting extermination, evasion, lying that you’re not in favour of enforcing your proposed policies when you are, and squarking vague slogans will satisfy your intellectual standards?

Peter
In response to your customized ad hominem attacks
"How do you like it?"
Actually the way I feel about those accusations is exactly the same as the past insinuations of being a communist, fascist or final-solution Nazi that you have tried to imply upon me and others.
I'm actually starting to wonder that you don't realize you're even doing it, which is a worry.

The issue is actually about the socio-economic costs of a population slow-down, which I already demonstrated from a business perspective is not a problem at all unless you work in housing or services industries. It had nothing to do with socialist-style government-ownership or intervention at all, but for some reason you want to keep talking about this instead.

1-As I don't endorse government control of industry, I'm not even sure where that even came from (except as another example of one of your own ad-hominem insinuations that I am a pinko)

2- Again, I'm not enforcing "socialist" opinions on anyone (and so far haven't even advocated socialism in any shape or form other than the status quo of Australian services prior to the 2000s). Which means that is another ad-hominem attack.

3- Again ignoring that the original basis of government being DD, you're only wanting to Segue away from it. But lets compare.
Governments- required to coordinate aid, provide legal and medical support to people who need it, coordinate major events and infrastructure establishment and usage, fund non-profit services, and submit their leadership to votes and compelled to win votes in remote areas that struggle to attract interest from a profiteering standpoint;
Corporations- dont. Nor should they be expected to. But if they're not under the obligation to provide these, then its fair that if someone is expected to do the above legwork to keep society functioning, it must be the government.

Your inability to tell apart a "capitalist" society from an anarchist one, and an existing ACTUAL capitalist society where governments perform services and fund infrastructure (including Australia and America) from a "communist" society is the only issue here.

You actually posted additional questions in that thread?
Seems you did;

No problem

1,2- if the public voted in a taxpayer subsidized public-owned bus service, they would be volunteering to pay for it and volunteering to ride it. Simple. Of course, catching a bus isn't so 'voluntary' if vehicle access is limited. They are forced by circumstances to take that bus and agree to its conditions. And nobody is being forced NOT to take a private bus.

3- Department executive where the managers are simply paid the same or almost the same salary as the manager of a private bus service. This results in the same attraction of managers and thus the same services provided- with the only costs being expenses and salaries. The only difference is cost (my version being less as profit and calculation of is omitted).

4- See last post about government responsibilities of infrastructure to remote voters. The fact that their money is also going into it would also put them in a position to demand it. The fact that this would suffer under a profit system only proves my case and how your system doesn't work.

5,6 - Because with a public-owned service the public are both funding it AND consuming it themselves and would be able to identify unsatisfactory outcomes from both ends, and with CIR, can vote on it- just like shareholders do.

Afterwards- things I had already answered earlier, provided scenarios to, and you carefully avoided replying to. In fact these questions aren't much different from other ones I posted answers to- which is why talking to your is rather pointless.

Again, the fact that you think I'm a fascist and a communist (strangely enough, in direct response to my advocacy for democracy of all things) doesn't actually bother me because everybody else realizes that these strange perceptions exist only in your head (much in the same way answers to your bizarre accusations never existed).

Have a good day, Runner, I may be the last person on this forum who bothers replying to your messages.