Jardine, I find it quite fascinating that you are going to considerable lengths to assert that government could not manage a regime of sustainability.

Sorry, but the logical flaw rests totally on your side of the argument here. Of course government could do this.

Governments in the Nordic countries are arguably pretty close to it, as they are in some small island nations where all the factors concerned with sustainability are much simpler and more obvious.

Indeed, it WILL happen in Australia sooner or later.

Please allow me to step past your copious questions and try to explore why you are so intent on government not being able to direct us towards a sustainable society.

Firstly, do you or do you not think that we should be doing this, as opposed to blundering forth and forever increasing the discrepancy between demand and supply capability for many of our basic resources and services?

I’ll assume that you do support sustainability in principle, as support for the alternative would just be completely nonsensical.

So then, how would we achieve it? If government was taken out of the picture, and business operated entirely on market forces with no legal regulation, where would we end up?

Crikey, government is not really a separate entity from the rest of society, it is society’s organisational tool. To somehow take it out of the picture would be to return us to an anarchic existence where the strong, unscrupulous and short-term-focussed elements would come to dominate…. even more than they do now under our weak government.

What we need is strong governance, which can separate itself from the enormously powerful vested-interest fraternity, listen to the scientists and other experts and act accordingly in the true interests of a healthy future.

That is their job. And it is the job of concerned citizens to be pushing them to do this.

Once again, taking government out of the picture, or insisting that they cannot do what they are fundamentally supposed to be doing, is surely entirely the wrong approach.

A familiar tactic of yours, Ludwig...

>>Please allow me to step past your copious questions...<<

That, and the revisionism you bring into play every time you are caught out saying something silly...

I asked, "Which part of that is 'cods'? to which you replied...

>>The bit about businesses being fundamentally concerned about sustainable resources.<<

Which is of course the most free interpretation possible of what I actually said, which was...

"... businesses that rely upon the supply of a particular input, will always record in their annual reports the sustainable nature of those inputs".

Businesses are very much, even "fundamentally", concerned about the sustainability of the raw materials that drive their business, whether it is water, oil, iron ore, or even people. Especially people - skilled, competent, reliable people, in sufficient quantity to keep the business operating at a level that is itself sustainable.

Your knowledge of business and how it operates is almost as chillingly small as that of our government. It allows you to make statements such as this one...

>>Aggression wins! A business that lays back on its purchase of a particular good because of concerns about a sustainable supply will simply be usurped by a more aggressive business which will purchase more, in an unsustainable manner.<<

...which is, at every level, completely nonsensical. Who mentioned "laying back" on anything? The sensible objective is not to "lay back", but to actively work to ensure supply is sustainable. Which is what the vast majority of companies do. And I'm not just talking about water. If supply of a material upon which you rely for your business' future is threatened, you take steps to correct the problem.

Your thought processes are typical of someone who has never worked for a commercial concern, I can understand that. But this saddens me greatly.

>>I am not on any form of pension. I’m nowhere near retirement age!<<

The people I know personally who think like you are invariably in their dotage, and carry on like two-bob watches about how the country is being overrun by immigrants.

Pericles,

You remind me of an anecdote of Paul Ehrlich in a talk on Radio National some years ago. Ehrlich was talking to a Japanese journalist about Japanese whaling, which was then on a much larger scale. Ehrlich said that some whale species were clearly being driven to extinction. Surely, it would make sense for the Japanese whalers to cut back. Then they could go on killing whales for dog food or whatever indefinitely. The journalist replied, "Your problem is that you think like a biologist." He then showed Ehrlich that the going return on investment was greater than the reproduction rate of whales. It was economically rational for investors to wipe out the whales, and then take their profits and put them into something else. This sort of thing is especially likely now with globalisation, where elites see themselves as citizens of the world and above patriotism.

So far as more people are concerned, you yourself have admitted that population growth is not a necessary or sufficient condition for good economic performance or human well-being. The Productivity Commission has found (see link in my previous post) that there is no good evidence for a significant per capita economic benefit from mass migration, even if you happen to benefit. For example, mass migration might help to give you more customers, a cheaper and more docile work force that you don't have to train, and higher rents from your investment property. The extra people and maybe your expanded business activities increase the demand for water. Sydney has outgrown its natural water supply, so a desalination plant has to be built, producing water that will now cost 4 to 6 times as much as dam water. The profits from the mass migration go to you, but the costs of the extra water are shared with the whole community. "Privatising the profits, but socialising the costs." The diseconomies of scale and additional costs for infrastructure and public services are just too great to be fixed with "better planning". Where is the money to fix the $770 billion infrastructure backlog (according to Infrastructure Australia)?

You have provided an interesting example of what I call "no-context" example, Divergence.

>>It was economically rational for investors to wipe out the whales, and then take their profits and put them into something else.<<

Acording to Ehrlich's records, the "justification" provided by the journalist went as follows

"You are thinking of the whaling industry as an organization that is interested in maintaining whales: actually it is better viewed as a huge quantity of [financial] capital attempting to earn the highest possible return. If it can exterminate whales in ten years and make a 15% profit, but it could only make 10% with a sustainable harvest, then it will exterminate them in 10 years. After that the money will be moved to exterminating some other resource"

Two observations.

One, that the reported speech is equally open to be interpreted as an attack on the whaling industry - if you deliver the above paragraph with a sneer, or in a sarcastic tone of voice, its meaning is completely reversed. The give-away is the appearance in the last sentence of the phrase "exterminating some other resource", as if that is the complete raison d'être of commerce.

Two, the interviewee is a journalist, not a businessman. The mathematical "logic" he employs would never be heard in any boardroom. The first question would be "Ok, so under your plan, whales become increasingly hard to find. How do you propose to maintain our 15% profit margin as the yield decreases?"

Colour me unconvinced. It's just a story, told to frighten the kiddies.

>>This sort of thing is especially likely now with globalisation, where elites see themselves as citizens of the world and above patriotism<<

Pure paranoid fantasy, I'm afraid. Whales are far, far more likely to be protected in a globalized economy, one in which the actions of one party are quickly felt by another.

In fact, our more globally-linked economy is probably the reason why there is far less whale-catching happening today - as you yourself point out...

>>...Japanese whaling, which was then on a much larger scale<<

Divergence
Notice how the example you give depends on a resource owned in common? That means you're proving my case, not yours.

A very similar thing happened in 19th century America. Bison, which were publicly owned, were hunted almost to extinction; while cattle, which are virtually the same species, were privately owned and rose in numbers to huge unprecedented levels. Sometimes the hunters would kill a bison for the tongue. Can you imagine a farmer doing that to one of his stock?

For another example, the near extinction of rhinos in Africa *in common ownership*. Governments makes it illegal to own rhinos, whereas the obvious thing to do if people are hunting them to extinction for their valuable products, is to farm them and sell the products, just as we do with other animals. Want to save the rhino? Easy. Simply pay farmers to raise as many as you want! But first, stop states criminalising private property in them – the root cause of their extinction!

Like Ludwig, your understanding of the tragedy of the commons is back-the-front. The tragedy is that holding resources in common makes it rational to degrade them; in economic terms, to consume the capital. The moral of the story is the opposite of what you have misapprehended: we need less common ownership, and more private property rights in scarce resources.

We have not even begun to discuss the reasons why private ownership is more sustainable, because there is only blank and circular ignorance on the statists’ map where that discussion should be.

The statists would rather worship and enlarge the state, even at the cost of extinguishing species, than learn to understand the *reasons* why they are wrong.

Ludwig
You have not answered any of my questions because you can't, which means that government is not capable of doing what you want it to do; and everything else you say merely begs the question.

"Firstly, do you or do you not think that we should be doing this...?"

1. What's "this"?
2. Who's "we"?

"government is ... society's organisational tool"

Prove it.

<< A familiar tactic of yours, Ludwig...>>Please allow me to step past your copious questions...<< >>

Pericles, you old hypocrite! You are OLO’s consummate question-avoider. Tis me who has had to chase you up on numerous occasions to get you to answer my questions!

This has indeed been an oft-employed tactic of yours, which has lessened with time, as you have come to realise that I will chase you up, repeatedly, if you avoid addressing important questions.

And another old familiar Pericles tactic raises its head yet again: When one is caught out, one just avoids that particular point (as expressed at the end of my last post to you) and moves quickly on to something else, anything else, just to get away from the embarrassing faux pas!

And what about this assertion that I am on a government pension? Wow, methinks you have cooked your goose with this one. This is a total invention of yours, pulled out of thin air and then asserted as fact. Really, that is about low as you can go on the debating spectrum.

<< Businesses are very much, even "fundamentally", concerned about the sustainability of the raw materials that drive their business… >>

Peri, open ye eyes and look at the real world! For goodness sake, you are asserting something which is patently and obviously not the case (which you are wont to do, often).

As I said; if this was true, then all would be hunky-dory – we’d be entrenched in a paradigm of sustainability, instead of being a million miles from it.

Um…. what’s this about dotage?? Interesting comment coming from one who has always been a might irrational… and seems to be rapidly losing his last vestiges of rationality!