On 28 Dec 2007, at 15:04, sean neill wrote
some good stuff . . . .
> The flaws of the market have been known for decades and were fluently
> expressed in Hardin's 1950s paper 'The Tragedy of the Commons'.
> Hardin's
> point was that where there was a 'Common' - a good which all benefited
> from but no-one owned - without some regulation for the common good,
> the
> market would ensure that the resource was destroyed.
snipped here
> pecifically, I do not feel that Adrian, as a
> Canadian, should be speaking for the interests of market forces in the
> UK waterways, at a time when the Spanish owners of BAA appear to be
> subordinating the UK national interest in favour of their own
> market-driven cashflow. The history of whaling shows that, where a
> resource grows slower than market interest rates, the market favours
> destroying the resource and investing the profits elsewhere. BAA and
> BW
> executives will probably move on once they have taken their profits
> and
> destroyed the resource.
Much along the lines I was about to post {;>)
Thanks Sean.
There have been some mutterings in another place about the moorings
auction which caused me to consider whether I would rather be
1) The successful bidder paying £5000 pa for a mooring won in the
auction through my ability to pay and taking the place of many other
local folk who may have been on the waiting list for several years.
or
2) The boat next door paying a bargain £2000 pa (was £1600 last year)
whose long time pensioner chum used to occupy the adjacent berth but
had to sell the boat for peanuts because he could no longer afford the
fees
There is no contest - I'd rather be somewhere else entirely.
Beeky
