Quote: Original post by Talroth
Personally I want the world to go back to a feudal system.
Quote: It really isn't that bad of a system when your lord can't randomly decide to raise an army and run off somewhere to plunder for his own wealth.
Quote: Original post by ChaosEngine
Fact is, capitalism is a large part of the problem here. If Company A produces awesome washing machines that cost 50 monies and last 30 years, have good labour and environmental practices, then Company B will produce washing machines that cost 5 monies and last 2 years. Meanwhile, Bob the worker earns 200 monies a year, precisely because his work is devalued by the likes of Company B who make their cheap washing machines in the 3rd world. Bob is going to buy Company B's machine and spend 150 monies over 30 years (not even accounting for inflation), because he simply can't afford 50 monies up front. Where's his choice?
Quote: But we have to at least recognise that capitalism does not evolutionarily select for traits that are conducive to ethical/environmentally friendly business practices.
Quote: I can't wait for someone to come in and explain how the free market will solve this.
Quote: Original post by Prune
A Free-Market Environmental Program
Quote: Original post by TalrothQuote: Original post by ChaosEngine
I can't wait for someone to come in and explain how the free market will solve this.
About the only way for it to work is basically to spread the word, form a movement, and have that movement fund new start up companies to produce products in a responsible fashion.
Quote: Original post by PruneQuote: Original post by ChaosEngine
Fact is, capitalism is a large part of the problem here. If Company A produces awesome washing machines that cost 50 monies and last 30 years, have good labour and environmental practices, then Company B will produce washing machines that cost 5 monies and last 2 years. Meanwhile, Bob the worker earns 200 monies a year, precisely because his work is devalued by the likes of Company B who make their cheap washing machines in the 3rd world. Bob is going to buy Company B's machine and spend 150 monies over 30 years (not even accounting for inflation), because he simply can't afford 50 monies up front. Where's his choice?
In fact, the problem is not capitalism but an incomplete implementation of a fundamental requirement of true capitalism--absolute privatization. Nothing would protect the environment more than fully transitioning its components into private ownership.
For example, see A Free-Market Environmental Program and Resolving the Tragedy of the Commons by Creating Private Property Rights in WildlifeQuote: But we have to at least recognise that capitalism does not evolutionarily select for traits that are conducive to ethical/environmentally friendly business practices.
I call BS on this, and the above papers and a ton of others I can post provide analysis why it is BS.Quote: I can't wait for someone to come in and explain how the free market will solve this.
Papers on free market environmentalism exist from even way back in the 60s. Maybe next time you'll do an iota of research before posting.
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Now, this means that our government, national and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day. Every special interest is entitled to justice - full, fair, and complete - and, now, mind you, if there were any attempt by mob-violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, and I most dislike and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.
There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.
We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs.
It has become entirely clear that we must have government supervision of the capitalization, not only of public-service corporations, including, particularly, railways, but of all corporations doing an interstate business. I do not wish to see the nation forced into the ownership of the railways if it can possibly be avoided, and the only alternative is thoroughgoing and effective regulation, which shall be based on a full knowledge of all the facts, including a physical valuation of property. This physical valuation is not needed, or, at least, is very rarely needed, for fixing rates; but it is needed as the basis of honest capitalization.
We have come to recognize that franchises should never be granted except for a limited time, and never without proper provision for compensation to the public. It is my personal belief that the same kind and degree of control and supervision which should be exercised over public-service corporations should be extended also to combinations which control necessaries of life, such as meat, oil, and coal, or which deal in them on an important scale. I have not doubt that the ordinary man who has control of them is much like ourselves. I have no doubt he would like to do well, but I want to have enough supervision to help him realize that desire to do well.
I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.
Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare. For that purpose the Federal Bureau of Corporations is an agency of first importance. Its powers, and, therefore, its efficiency, as well as that of the Interstate Commerce Commission, should be largely increased. We have a right to expect from the Bureau of Corporations and from the Interstate Commerce Commission a very high grade of public service. We should be as sure of the proper conduct of the interstate railways and the proper management of interstate business as we are now sure of the conduct and management of the national banks, and we should have as effective supervision in one case as in the other. The Hepburn Act, and the amendment to the act in the shape in which it finally passed Congress at the last session, represent a long step in advance, and we must go yet further.
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I have spoken elsewhere also of the great task which lies before the farmers of the country to get for themselves and their wives and children not only the benefits of better farming, but also those of better business methods and better conditions of life on the farm. The burden of this great task will fall, as it should, mainly upon the great organizations of the farmers themselves. I am glad it will, for I believe they are all able to handle it. In particular, there are strong reasons why the Departments of Agriculture of the various States, and the United States Department of Agriculture, and the agricultural colleges and experiment stations should extend their work to cover all phases of farm life, instead of limiting themselves. as they have far too often limited themselves in the past, solely to the question of the production of crops. And now a special word to the farmer. I want to see him make the farm as fine a farm as it can be made; and let him remember to see that the improvement goes on indoors as well as out; let him remember that the farmer's wife should have her share of thought and attention just as much as the farmer himself. Nothing is more true than that excess of every kind is followed by reaction; a fact which should be pondered by reformer and reactionary alike. We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.
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National efficiency has many factors. It is a necessary result of the principle of conservation widely applied. In the end it will determine our failure or success as a nation. National efficiency has to do, not only with natural resources and with men, but is equally concerned with institutions. The State must be made efficient for the work which concerns only the people of the State; and the nation for that which concerns all the people. There must remain no neutral ground to serve as a refuge for lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers of great wealth, who can hire the vulpine legal cunning which will teach them how to avoid both jurisdictions. It is a misfortune when the national legislature fails to do its duty in providing a national remedy, so that the only national activity is the purely negative activity of the judiciary in forbidding the State to exercise power in the premises.
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I believe in shaping the ends of government to protect property as well as human welfare. Normally, and in the long run, the ends are the same; but whenever the alternative must be faced, I am for men and not for property, as you were in the Civil War. I am far from underestimating the importance of dividends; but I rank dividends below human character. Again, I do not have any sympathy with the reformer who says he does not care for dividends. Of course, economic welfare is necessary, for a man must pull his own weight and be able to support his family. I know well that the reformers must not bring upon the people economic ruin, or the reforms themselves will go down in the ruin. But we must be ready to face temporary disaster, whether or not brought on by those who will war against us to the knife. Those who oppose all reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.
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Quote: Original post by SirisianQuote: Original post by LessBread
TLC clown car show?
19 Kids and Counting
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The original "dismal scientist's" main contribution to economics -- the theory that the growth of population would always outrun the growth of production, thus dooming humanity to crushing poverty -- was proven wrong by the Industrial Revolution almost immediately after he set his thoughts down on paper. Few theorists whose names have endured for centuries have been more spectacularly off the mark. In almost every measurable way, the world is immensely richer than it was at the time of Malthus, even in the face of a surge in global population that the economist would never have dreamed remotely feasible. For at least the last century Malthus' ideas have been routinely dismissed in introductory economics textbooks and scoffed at by most mainstream economists, whether liberal or conservative, Keynesian or Chicago School.
Not only has food production outpaced population growth, thanks to technological innovation, but the richest nations on the planet tend to be the ones in which the birth rate drops the fastest -- the so-called demographic transition. So Malthus was wrong twice.
And yet his dystopian vision that humanity's lot, our inescapable fate, will be grinding, desperate poverty, lives on. Down for more than 200 years, but not yet out, because there's always a get-out-of-jail-free card for Malthus: Just wait.
Just wait until the technological wellsprings of innovation run dry, when even the most advanced genetic modification technologies can no longer boost food yields. Just wait until peak oil puts an end to the age of cheap energy, until the oceans are overfished and the atmosphere is choked with carbon dioxide. Just wait until Chinese and Indians and Brazilians consume with the same unsustainable abandon as Americans. Malthus isn't wrong -- he just isn't right ... yet.
Malthus stays popular, he disturbs our dreams and sends mentally disabled people rushing to the local gun store, because that unsettling question -- is the Industrial Revolution sustainable? -- lurks in the dark recesses of our collective consciousness. We've had a pretty good ride, especially in the West, for the last couple of hundred years, but where is it written in stone that our great fortune is a permanent state of affairs? Who gets the last laugh? All those economists, serene in their assumption that human ingenuity will keep on innovating our way out of the bottleneck? Or Malthus?
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The study is a product of the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a think tank tasked with fixing a direction for the German military. The team of authors, led by Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Will, uses sometimes-dramatic language to depict the consequences of an irreversible depletion of raw materials. It warns of shifts in the global balance of power, of the formation of new relationships based on interdependency, of a decline in importance of the western industrial nations, of the "total collapse of the markets" and of serious political and economic crises.
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Relapse into planned economy: Since virtually all economic sectors rely heavily on oil, peak oil could lead to a "partial or complete failure of markets," says the study. "A conceivable alternative would be government rationing and the allocation of important goods or the setting of production schedules and other short-term coercive measures to replace market-based mechanisms in times of crisis."
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Crisis of political legitimacy: The Bundeswehr study also raises fears for the survival of democracy itself. Parts of the population could perceive the upheaval triggered by peak oil "as a general systemic crisis." This would create "room for ideological and extremist alternatives to existing forms of government." Fragmentation of the affected population is likely and could "in extreme cases lead to open conflict."
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Quote: Original post by ChaosEngineQuote: Original post by TalrothQuote: Original post by ChaosEngine
I can't wait for someone to come in and explain how the free market will solve this.
About the only way for it to work is basically to spread the word, form a movement, and have that movement fund new start up companies to produce products in a responsible fashion.
How will that help? Let's assume we form said movement, convince Bill Gates to give us a billion dollars to produce these responsible products and so on.
We'll still be undercut by the people who produce cheaper products in a less responsible fashion.
Not to mention the fact that by producing these long lasting products, our customers have no incentive to upgrade. Meanwhile, our competitors are releasing new and "more betterer products!", every year and monetising that. I really don't see a way to win here.
