Pelican
Any time you discuss a problem of scarce resources, the principles of economics apply. It doesn’t matter if you would like them not to apply, it doesn’t matter if you are ignorant of them, it doesn’t matter if you think that you can make them not apply by physically violating people, they still apply.

Ultimately there are only two possibilities: the management of natural resources, and human social co-operation can be based on agreement (the way of a market society), or it can be based on political violence and threats (the way of government).

If we are more than just an economy, how come all the issues you are trying to solve are economic issues, and how come your solution is to use political force to try to steal economic goods from people?

Your vague idea of a ‘balanced’ system shows that you don’t understand what you are talking about. If total government control is not competent to provide the management of resources you envision – and you know it would result in both ecological and economic disaster, don’t you? - then where is the lesser, partial government control going to get the competence to properly manage resources from? The free market?

Richard Nixon once said ‘Just ‘cause I’m not paranoid, doesn’t mean people aren’t trying to persecute me.’ Attempts to implement central government control of the economy cost 100,000,000 lives in the 20th century. It is not paranoia to think that an attempt at more and more centralized government control of the whole world economy and ecology, which is what you are proposing, would lead to human deaths on a vast scale.

What is truly frightening is the ignorance of people who have available all the disproofs in theory and practice that this deluded, destructive, anti-social belief system could possibly want – and yet still setting themselves up to forcibly improve their fellow creatures by trying it all over again!

You should be ashamed of your ignorance, fool, not pretentiously displaying it.

How many people should have to die to fulfil your dopey concept of a sustainable world?

Yep, Wing Ah Ling, I've read about those 100 million lives - unlike the mays, coulds, mights, if trend continues, etcs, of the professional panickers, there is much evidence of dids and has's, and all such a short time ago! But when the 21st century's first mass depopulation measures occur (surely never again!), perhaps by depriving people of water lest we commit the sin of building a dam), these same people will put up their hands and ask, how did it happen? Alas, I don't think anything can be done about it - stupidity seems to built into the human genes. As Einstein said, the universe and human stupidity are infinite, although he wasn't sure about the universe. From my understanding the moral of Peter & the Wolf, was to stop crying wolf. Whereas these people can't point to a previous occasion where their panic was well founded, history shows that fear of centralist fascist control is well justified. If it is OK to call sceptics holocaust deniers, it should be OK to call these people fascist fundamentalist maniacal control freaks. And stupid ones at that.

Ah Wing Ah Ling, you are playing devil’s advocate, for the sake of a good cyber-stoush, yes?

If you really held the views that you are expressing and you had confidence in them, you’d express them in a neutral manner, and not in the most offensive and belittling manner that you can muster, hmmm?

I mean, you’ve completely skittled your credibility in the first two lines, with “religious fascists”, “rabid ignorance” and “morons”.

So then, I’ll take up your challenge, on one condition; that the exchanges be polite or at least neutral and address issues and not the person.

Before I bother addressing any of your points, can you let me know if you can correspond in this manner or not. Thanks.

By the way Wing Ah Ling, welcome to OLO.

Ludwig, you might consider also directing your requests at the AGWers, who threw the first stones in this debate and continue to do so. Flannery et al have called into question the morality of people who so much as question the science (that is fundamentalism), likened sceptics to holocaust deniers (hard to see how you can be both immoral AND in denial?), and make unsubstantiated comments about vested interests, associations, and mental states.
Reader poll: Is it just me or are Flannery, Hamilton and Gore starting to even look more like Hitler's henchmen.

fungochumley: << Reader poll: Is it just me or are Flannery, Hamilton and Gore starting to even look more like Hitler's henchmen. >>

Dear oh dear - why does just about every discussion at OLO lately descend into Godwinesque comparisons with Hitler, Nazis, brownshirts etc etc?

So it's not just fungochumley. Undoubtedly he'd be joined by Ding Ah Ling and the rest of OLO's increasingly rabid denialist crew.