Greetings,
Re Arthur Cordell's comment about internalizing costs of externalities, &
scarcity: I agree. Attempts to deny or will away competition for finite
habitat, energy, sustenance,... constitute the Cornucopian Fallacy. Jay
Hanson's website has overwhelming references on this.
Re Doug Wilson's comments:
> Unemployment is a good example. One constantly hears governments
> talking about job creation, as if there just aren't enough jobs to go
> around. To me unemployment is evidence that it is hard to FIND a job,
> not that there are too few jobs.
Maybe too many people?
You speak as if jobs were things to be distributed, maybe even consumed.
That isn't so far from physical reality! I can scratch your back & you
mine(barter), or this can be done by exchanging tokens for different goods
and services. However, the use of the tokens as power(means) to access
habitat and sustenance depends upon the availability of the latter as well
as the procurance of the former.
> For each individual to find a good job, society as a whole must solve
> a very difficult combinatorial optimization problem, a bipartite
> matching or assignment problem. Not an impossible problem, but we
> certainly won't solve it as long as we ignore the combinatorial problem
> altogether and try to do job-creation.
This assumes an endless supply of jobs which successfully provide access to
human needs. Has it not occurred to others that a symptom of species
overshoot is futility in fulfillment of those requirements?
Steve Kurtz
