No. What you need to do is, for a temporary period of time, discard your pet ideology and beliefs from your mind, make the slate blank, and then start evaluating the dynamics of the system.

Forget about policies, laws, and institutions. Go back to first principles. Those are human greed, the net energy available on Earth per unit time, the inter dynamic symbiosis of the Earth's natural systems, and lastly, the trajectory of the Earth's natural capital over time.

If you don't have a solid grasp of those four concepts, then just put a zipper on your mouth until you do. I suspect that all of your rhetoric is the result of absorbing material from gas bags who derive solutions based on their beliefs in certain pet ideologies. Utterly useless.

Learn about the four concepts I enumerated, and then apply intelligent analysis. Demonstrate to me that you have knowledge with regard to that, or just stop posting.

You sound indoctrinated, brainwashed, and like someone who is letting their political agenda get in the way of clear thinking. You might get past it some day. Think harder. Put aside your pet ideology for a change, make a clean slate, and think.

Consider the scenario where corporations are taxed heavily and the super rich are taxed heavily, but the not super rich are taxed very little. Here's what happens:

Corporation receives revenue. Spends money on R&D to grow. Hires employees. Pays employees. Records $1 in profit. Basically pays nothing in taxes. Employees get all the standard write-offs, tax shelters, etc. and in reality don't pay nearly as much as you think.

The employees, making up the bulk of the population, then have disposable income. They go buy stuff, Stuff like what the corporation makes. The corporation has increased demand for its products. They grow. They don't layoff employees.

Why would it be good that everyone can turn their vessels into battleships, or need to expend the money to do so? Sounds like a teenage boy's fantasy world. Seems like the current situation is better than that.

And pirating isn't the result of unregulated enterprise?

There are earnings, and there is revenue.

Add up all your sales. That's revenue.

Subtract everything you paid out to run your business. What you have left is earnings.

Assume you can no longer live with your parents (as if they kicked you out, moved to Ecuador, or something). Then do indeed go live in an Airstream trailer on two acres of land in the desert, complete with chickens pecking on the ground, and find out the answer to your question. Please report back.

Cryptonomicon is a very enjoyable book. It gave me such great pleasure to read it. It's not often that you get an epic tome of fiction that combines treasure hunting, cryptography, a grand tour of WWII, hacking, Cap'n Crunch, the South Pacific, nerds, and dot com scheming.

Truly a wonderful book.

I'm now reading The Unincorporated Man. It seems that many here might find its premise interesting.

Or maybe Frank Tipler is on to something?

Since your reply quoted here is the theme throughout your post, let's discuss it.

It's hard to pin the blame on choices the world has made. The World doesn't make unified choices. A global enforcing agency might. Otherwise, choices are made by competing entities (the heart of a free market). It's a sad fact that technology combined with greed, will and ignorance allow irreversible things to happen before technology combined with knowledge and will allow for a defense to prevent irreversible things to happen.

How do we care about a problem? It starts with education and awareness, both in understanding the consequences of actions and understanding that certain actions are happening at all. Who is 'we'? As it turns out, 'we' is an entity with enough foresight and resources to step in and do something. Sometimes it requires a conglomeration of entities. Otherwise, it only takes one group (whalers, poachers, whomever) to quietly go about their business.

Ownership works to a point, I agree. But is ownership of migrating whales as feasible or desirable as what really allowed the Blue Whale to make a comeback in the latter half of the 20th century? Is ownership a better model than what really was implemented? Which solution was doable? Which solution was enacted?

Who is to say what an owner will do? Different owners value their property for different reasons. Ultimately, the current owners of whatever will cease to be the current owner. Then what? Parents spend their children's inheritance, and why shouldn't they? Likewise, who is to say that an owner won't decimate what posterity would value?

Regarding upstream and downstream: isn't that like the air we breath, which you acknowledge is not an easily solved problem?

Nobody's going to be owning migrating blue whales anytime soon. As for wolves, you have to understand how what happens upstream (literally) affects you downstream (literally). Ownership is not a tenable model there. Private ownership of old forest growth is helping (the Nature Conservancy). But it's not happening fast enough, and it ultimately requires cooperation with multiple entities at the global level. Private ownership of Sumatran forests is not likely enough to prevent poaching.

As for oil - well, who knows? There are so many issues there.

Sorry, but the theory doesn't work so well in reality. As resources become more scarce and prices rise, there is still a minority that can afford the last of the resource, and it disappears forever.

The free market did not save the near Blue Whale extinction from occurring in the mid 20th century. Regulations did. You might want to research Sumatran rhino horns to see how things really unfold.

The reasons?

1. There's enough individuals who don't care if a resource is depleted as long as they can get their take. (Japanese whalers)
2. There's enough individuals who are ignorant of the future value of said resource for other uses. (Old growth forest depletion)
3. There's enough individuals willing to harvest the last of a resource precisely because of its super high price. (Sumatran rhino horns)
4. There's enough individuals who will insist that the resource isn't near being depleted. (Oil)
5. There's enough individuals who believe they need the resource eliminated to be successful in their business model (*Ranchers vs. wolves)

* See wolves and riparian zones for number 5. This is actually a case of number 2 as well.

Demonstrate it to yourself by simply digging a little deeper with regard to the authors of material denying Global Warming. This is not difficult to do. If your ideology insists that Global Warming isn't happening, then you won't bother digging deeper. I can't help you if you don't want to learn.

True. But when you can demonstrate quite clearly that those who argue against Global Warming constantly engage in falsifying data, typically have limited scientific credentials, are often associated with also being paid by the tobacco industry to claim cigarette smoke does not cause cancer, and are funded by Exxon/Mobil, then that should raise some flags.

- Falsifying data: Oregon Petition
- Limited scientific credentials: look up the credentials of the editors of such rags as Environment and Climate News.
- Limited scientific credentials: Google the credentials of the signers of the Oregon Petition
- Tobacco industry ties: learn about the background and history of Frederick Seitz
- Funded by Big Oil: look where the funding comes from regarding every report against Global Warming

Challenge #1: Find credible reports calling into question Global Warming that does not meet many if not all of the above that equal even five percent of the scientific studies saying Global Warming is real.

Challenge #2: State a classic Global Warming denier argument, and it will be explained why it is false or misleading. A classic example is the statement "Icebergs have already displaced the water, so even if they do melt, the sea level will not rise, and thus rising temperatures will not cause a sea level rise."

Please explain your theory within the context of the key concepts I enumerated four posts back.

As long as there are buffoons who think the principles of greed and exploitation via an unconstrained free market are more important than the state of the Earth, then yeah, there will be a perpetual argument.

Saying it doesn't make it so. Attempt to demonstrate the truth of your statement.

Yes - I understand your general lack and depth of understanding.

It is a bad analogy. Technology and it's increasing rate of innovation is the key which has allowed the free market to exploit the Earth's natural resources at an ever faster pace.

Key concepts:

- Overkill hypothesis (an example of technology causing massive changes to the environment)
- Sumatran rhino (an example of diminishing supply failing to diminish demand)
- Singularity (an example of accelerating trends which lead to increasing consumption)
- Poaching (an example of resource depletion until there is no more)
- Steady state economics (what is needed)
- Big Oil (an example of the free market hindering progress and encouraging resource depletion)
- Marketing/consumption vicious circle (an example of the free market sustaining its own excessive consumption)

You need to apply the bigger picture. Read this: See link: http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/rethinking_growth/