TBC, I am sure that bike riding will catch on once again in a big
way, when oil prices rise to 200-300$. Not just bikes, but Vespas,
electric cars and so on. The market will sort it out.

* My German tyres are made in Indonesia, shipped to the UK, bought by me, flown to Australia.... for a mere $27 each!*

I have no idea why you buy your tyres in the UK.

*Again, not sustainable but with our neo-liberal system of capitalism is was decided that Australia would not have a tyre industry (along with many others), so all are imported, for every vehicle in the land.*

That is really up to the manufacturers. If they can't make them
here profitably, then it hardly makes sense to make them here.
Even with high oil costs, shipping is an incredibly efficient way
of moving cargo. People go on about food miles, but one calculation
I saw, showed that it required less energy to grow a leg of lamb
in NZ and ship it to the UK, then they could grow if for, in the UK.

There are good reasons not to make things in Australia. High tech
manufacturing has increased the cost of building and equiping a
factory to make most things. Australia is a relatively small market,
so hardly justifies all that investment. Better build one state
of the art factory and run it 24 hours a day, to produce the best
and cheapest. Then ship it to wherever.

If you can show that it pays to make tyres in Australia and that those
who invest their hard earned savings in your venture, will actually
make a profit, there is always venture capital available.

Alot of our present engineering workshops can't even find basic
skilled staff such as welders, so we would not have the labour
either.

Yabby... I buy tyres from the UK because here they cost about $65 each, plus postage.

I can get them from the UK for the 'about' $27 mark, depending on the dollar, with free postage so long as I but 'about', again the dollar dictates, $85 worth of gear.

A little discussed issue is the reason we have a lack of skilled staff here.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, Australian employers, particularly state governments, trained lots of people via apprenticeships.

Now all gone. The business are flogged off to private owners, or corporatised to make a profit, so the subsidy to industry that state governments and taxpayers made in training so many young people, has evaporated... long live profits above people.

You are correct about the single factory, most bikes are built by Giant, theirs and everyone else, apart from the really poor ones sold by K-Mart type shops.

One day we might have to find something to do here apart from digging holes, but by then it will be too late.

There's always shoe-shine work I suppose, something that's hard to export.

*Yabby... I buy tyres from the UK because here they cost about $65 each, plus postage.*

Which goes to show why we need globalisation :)

Some guy has the local agency and screws the local market for what
its worth. Give the internet a few more years and there will be
some guy in Indonesia, prepared to ship them directly to you at
a much lower cost then you pay from Britain, without all the extra
freight.

*A little discussed issue is the reason we have a lack of skilled staff here.*

TBC, so explain to me why privatised industrial economies, such as
Germany, Switzerland, USA, Japan, Korea etc, have lots more skilled
people then we do.

We still do in fact have a reasonable manufacturing industry, only
they tend not to make consumer goods, but things like specialised
mining equipment, agricultural equipment and similar. Nearly every
manufacturer I speak to say that they are short of skilled staff.
So our problem is clearly in how we train them. Many simply don't
want to be trained in the first place. In Australia working is still
optional and many survive ok without bothering.

*long live profits above people.*

So are you prepared to invest your life's savings and super into
businesses that make constant losses, so that you have nothing
left in the end?

Regarding Yabby’s post, quoting Grim

*But we don't approve of giving starving children a meal, do we Yabby?*

Grim, you are free to sell your computer to save another couple
of starving babies. As we all can see, you choose not to.”

These few lines epitomize the socialist / libertarian debate

Grim fraudulently emotionalizes his point, by introducing the random specter of starving children and further makes their starvation a collective issue by attempting to impose a responsibility upon Yabby by applying the collective “we”.

Yabby, rightly observes, Grim is free to do whatever he wants about starving children, which neatly rejects Grim’s fraudulent assumption of his responsibility.

Regarding TBC’s comments of Friday 9th July

“More the disintegration of local communities, the ones we all live in, as the rise of a distorted liberal individualism,”

And his advise of Saturday 10th July

“My German tyres are made in Indonesia, shipped to the UK, bought by me, flown to Australia.... for a mere $27 each!”

Doubtless, if he was really sincere about preventing “the disintegration of (his) local community”, he would have bought his tyres through a local tyre dealer.

Displaying once again the fundamental hypocrisy of the anti capitalists - aka the collectivists (by any name) who express the expectation

You libertarian, capitalistic individualists should do as we anti-capitalists demand and not as we do.

And if you want to know about manufacturing and the loss of skills from Australia I suggest you look at the following

1 the automation (capitalization) of manufacturing
2 the effect of economies of scale in a 22 million population
3 the negative (re reciprocating effects of tariffs and trade embargos)
4 competitive terms of employment between national economies, including employment environment legislation
5 competitive influences of EPA / general legislation

Take those factors into effect and you will see why Australia is not a place to ever consider establishing a new manufacturing plant.

Now consider the additional message which selective tax changes make when mining royalties are chery-picked and you will realize why Australia is slipping down the (competitive) list of desirable investment options.

Squeers
So far you’ve said a) you have admitted to not having an alternative; then said b) you didn’t say there is “no” alternative but indicated you didn’t have one, and c) that you’re keen to look at (someone else’s) idea of a cure, ie an alternative.

This implies, correct me if I’m wrong, that you think there might be, and hope there is, an alternative out there.

However to say that there might be an alternative but that you don’t know what it is, is not much of an advance on saying that there is no alternative, is it? In terms of defending the propositions you have undertaken to defend, I think you should come to a decision point.

I think there is no alternative (that would avoid mass starvation) for several reasons.

1.
But first:
> Since we're talking theory it cannot be finally established.

It is not true that, just because something is a proposition of theory, therefore it cannot be finally established. This is because we are able to use reason, so long as the premises are true and the logical inferences correct. For example, we can reason “Fred is mortal” without first having to wait to see whether Fred dies to see whether the proposition can be finally established, from the premises and the logical reasoning “Fred is a man. All men are mortal.”.

Similarly, if it were true that we couldn’t finally establish something because it is a proposition of theory, then there would be no way to conclude that capitalism is unsustainable. No matter how great its rate of depletion of finite resources, we would have to keep waiting for more empirical data to come in to check against the theory.

But if capitalism involves indefinite growth on a finite base, and if indefinite growth on a finite base is unsustainable, then we can logically conclude that capitalism is unsustainable, which is obviously the principle of reason you were using.

The issue is whether the premises are factually true, and the reasoning valid, and whether there is any alternative in any event.

2.
The argument from economic calculation shows by logical reasoning that any alternative system must be more unsustainable than the private ownership of the means of production – capitalism.

This is because, to be more sustainable, a system must use less resources to achieve a given result. (You may say that an alternative system should not be trying to achieve the same standard of living for the same people. But just bear with me on this point for now.)

To do this, it must have some way of knowing whether a given use of resources is more or less wasteful. Should the house be built out of pine, or hardwood, or teak, or steel, or zircon, or straw, or silver? What tools or machines should substitute for what labour?

In a system based on private ownership of the means of production, these questions are answered by comparing money prices for the different factors of production. But that is only possible because money prices provide a lowest common denominator in which all the different resources on the market can be valued.

Since prices are a market phenomenon, such economic calculation is not possible in a non-capitalist alternative system. There would be no way of knowing whether one resource use is more economical than another, other than to compare quantities directly. The builder, or governmental decision-maker would have to know the available quantity of all relevant materials in the world. The productivity of the system would be reduced to the level of barter. To achieve the same results, any alternative would require a far greater use of resources, and would therefore be far more unsustainable.

This is the rock on which attempts to replace capitalism foundered. It is is the economic reason for the mass starvations in Russia and China in the 20th century. They basically abolished economic calculation.

The only thing that would prevent this happening in a non-capitalist system, would be if the system were able to refer to prices originating in any remaining market system, just as Chinese factories used to obtain price data from American postal catalogues.