Re: The Cost of Preventing AGW
- From: Les Cargill <lcargill@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2008 01:09:43 -0500
Sevenhundred Elves wrote:
Peder B. Pels wrote:
ta <padlrnc@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jan 1, 3:49 pm, "V-for-Vendicar"So, if a man wanders into the wilderness without packing any rations,
<Just...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"ta" <padl...@xxxxxxxxx> wroteMany people might starve to death without it, and are incapable of
If the two companies colluding are the only sources of corn for thoseYou could always grow your own corn. Or avoid eating corn.
customers, then the customers are forced to pay the price.
growing their own.
The difference between that kind of coercion and holding a gun to
someone's head is only a matter of how quickly the people will die.
and eventually finds himself starving to death, he is a victim of
coercion?
No. But if you should happen along in that wilderness, with some food
for sale to hungry travelers, he is _forced_ to buy that food at a
thousand dollars per meal or more, as long as he can pay for it. If the
alternative is dying of starvation, he doesn't really have a free
choice.
That's a very fertile analogy. I mean "fertile" in the bovine
effluent sense. Anybody who charges a thousand dollars a meal
had better be prepared for violently defending that arrangement,
because starving people get a bit testy.
Even in the worst actual example possible - a sharecropper
in the Missisippi Delta on the 1910s forced to buy at a company
store - people had enough sense not to foement violence. You
can keep Jean Valjean; he's ficitonal anyway - food suplies
were *up* right prior to the French Revolution. It was the
concentration of unused people who revolted.
In the non-critical regions, the linear regions of price curves,
supply-and-demand signaling works fine. Outside of that... well,
nothing's perfect.
And if he doesn't have enough money, he obviously can't choose to buy
your food. In that case, he doesn't have a choice, not even the
previous, forced choice.
(Follow-ups set. Feel free to change them back. My newsreader has
decided to stop me from cross-posting
Good.
unless I set follow-ups to just
one group. I guess I'll have to check its settings one of these days.)
S.
--
Les Cargill
.
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