Comments on: Comencement Advice Worth Giving

By: Karlo

Karlo — Thu, 22 May 2008 05:34:21 +0000

We could move the test case down from Bhutan to the small village in India or Indonesia or Mexico. If I had my pick, I’d rather be reborn Bhutanese than a random Indian, Indonesian, or Mexican in my next life.

By: HispanicPundit

HispanicPundit — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:19:13 +0000

Not the richest - to be the richest, theyd need the world to trade with. In other words, the more trade the better.

By: Karlo

Karlo — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:06:16 +0000

I guess we need to find a good test case–some remote village in Bhutan, let’s say–where the villagers all work hard all day long and exchange their goods free of government interference at the local market yet don’t get much in the way of fossil fuels. According to the Libertarian view, these people should be some of the richest on the planet.

By: HispanicPundit

HispanicPundit — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:14:01 +0000

No doubt that ‘cheap’ energy sources help increase the standard of living but that cant be all, or even a majority, of the story. Take a look at this updated view on world poverty, surely all those gains couldn’t have come from ‘coal’.

By: Karlo

Karlo — Sat, 17 May 2008 16:36:13 +0000

One of the main reasons is because we started using fossil fuels like coal and oil. (The industrial revolution began on the basis of coal). If we consider fossil fuels as a limited resource, as a kind of “money” that nature stuck into our collective bank account, much of our wealth has been built by using this “money.” I’d agree that this isn’t the entire story–much productive economic activity involves renewable resources (for example, human labor). As for the world getting wealthier, I don’t see that as so straightforward. Much of the world still lives in dire poverty.

By: HispanicPundit

HispanicPundit — Fri, 16 May 2008 01:17:14 +0000

If you believe that wealth produces poverty than how do you explain the very real fact that the world has gotten so much more wealthier - across the board?

By: Karlo

Karlo — Thu, 15 May 2008 22:41:50 +0000

“There’s nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino’s box.”

Most people on the planet end up living in the box. Wealth does require resources and many of those resources are finite and limited. There may come a time in human history when we’ve overcome limitations and are sending spaceships to the stars using cold fusion, but at the moment, wealth does produce poverty. The rest of the world has less oil to burn because America burns more. We can say that those who burn more DESERVE greater access to resources, but this is a philosophical position, not a fundamental economic principle.