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?