The author utterly misunderstands the nature of 'the west'. Modernity isn't the same as western civilisation...they aren't interchangeable terms.

Sure, the west created modernity but its just one factor in what makes the west Western. China enjoys the fruits of modernity but it isn't western.

There is so much more to western civilisation than just the material miracles it has enabled. Democracy, liberty, freedom of expression, rule of law, individual liberty, women's rights, freedom of religion and the whole plethora of rights and non-material human gains that the west has bequeathed humankind are as, or are more, important than 'modernity'. Modernity can be and has been transplanted into other cultures. But the fruits of the Greco-Roman civilisation married with Christianity that made western civilisation possible can't be so easily transplanted.

The error the left made throughout the 20th century and continues to make is the view that the west can be separated from its past but remain western. It can't. And whenever attempts have made to do so, its always failed and has results in misery for those the left claims to be working for.

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" Most wars have been fought, regardless of the given reason, over land, water and other finite resources. "

When the first sentence of your post is so monumentally wrong, it can only be downhill from there.

Very few wars are fought over resources. Most are fought over misunderstandings as to the intentions of the other or because of attempts to aggrandise the leaders of this or that nation, city or tribe.

Mhaze: I'm sure you're right, inasmuch as some personality cult or other, has been the required catalyst to initiate conflict!
But at the end of the day, it has always resulted in permanent or tempory expansionism and the annexing, by a hostile power, of other folk's sovereign territory.
Replete with minerals, water, power, wealth and arable land resources! The unspoken goal and outcome!
Be the catalyst this or that Tribal Cheiftian, charismatic leader or religious fanatic or both!?
Alan B.

"Mhaze: I'm sure you're right"

You should have stopped there.

" some personality cult or other, has been the required catalyst to initiate conflict! "

Well no. Not required. It has sometimes been one of the catalysts. For example, when Caesar invaded Gaul, self-aggrandisement was one of the reasons. But equally, Rome had suffered numerous invasions over the previous 4 centuries and so another purpose was to permanently remove the threat. There's rarely a single cause for war.

There are as many reasons as there are wars. But the most prominent cause over the millennia was and is the fear and uncertainty of the other's intentions and motives. Again for example, when Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, they had no territorial claims and weren't seeking assess to any German resources. They were simply fearful of Germany's motives and ultimate intentions.

That the winner in a war ends up with the loser's wealth is usually a result rather than a cause of the war.

The biggest problem for David McMullen is that all alternatives to democracy and capitalism have led to tyranny economic collapse and misery.

Only a few years ago Venezuela was being vaunted as the shining example of a non-capitalist system, from which the left whingers are rapidly backpedalling.

A very good and timely article about which I’ll make two brief points.
The first relates to your tongue in cheek comment about our ancestors harmonious relationship with nature. The harmony that existed was imposed not chosen and Nature held the whip hand. It was about survival and wresting degrees of control from nature was hard won, occurring over millennia. There were certainly lessons passed down although enjoying the ‘benefits’ of a frozen, dictatorial harmony wasn’t one of them. Romanticizing what they had to put up with dismisses their efforts – over countless generations – to turn the tables and make survival easier. This strikes me as succeeding to simultaneously insult the effort and intent of these past generations and their present successors.
The other point is about the Roman Empire and I have The Life of Brian in mind. Dead it became but it wasn’t always so. Remember the classic line: “What ‘ave the Romans ever done for us?” The answer was quite a bit, but not as the moribund entity it became. It is this process of becoming moribund, a drag, from something alive and pushing things forward that links that Rome to now. But I liked your corrective on the Dark Ages (the Dimly Lit Ages perhaps?): it taught me something I hadn’t known.
TomG

Alan B.,
What is the point of your false accusations against me? Are you really so stupid that you believe them yourself? Or do you know them to be false but think the other people on here are gullible enough to believe them?

If it is the former, please explain how you managed to come to the absurd conclusion that I'm "patently committed to industrialization and turning back the clock to the 15th century or earlier"?

I could ignore your errors. Indeed I often do, but then you have a nasty habit of repeating them.

I'm as much in favour of economic expansion as you, but I don't support government being so intrusive that it monitors every transaction, nor taxes even being on transactions (except levies on products with significant externalities), nor do I accept that people wouldn't have the ingenuity to avoid your "unavoidable" tax - indeed I've already informed you of a way they easily could. Nor do I share your delusions about the effectiveness of white elephant canals. Such projects would be catastrophic for groundwater systems as well as hopelessly uneconomic. Greater benefits could be obtained with pipelines and trains. But at the moment there's very little development in the area south of the Gulf of Carpentaria, despite plenty of artesian water being available there.

As for land tax, it would slow the rate of land price rises, as people would have less incentive to spend as much on land as they can afford. I suggest you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent to get some idea of the effects. To say I miss any element of fairness shows your comprehension is very poor, as I specifically stated that "such a tax would have to be phased in over many decades to avoid unfairly disadvantaging existing landowners". And you seem to have overlooked the unfairness of the current situation where some people make more money from rising house prices than they ever do from working.