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?