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?