Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

not at all....

You don't know any environmentalists do you...?

Well I am happy to take your word for it.
However the environmentalist movement in the US is very different to what you think it is then.
I am also under the impression the green party in australia would be happy to impose higher and higher taxes and regulation at the expence of economic activity for the benefit of the environment.
Please correct me if I am wrong.

Guess what SV, environment has to come in as number 1.... It's where we live, what we eat and what we breathe.

There are different ways to go about ensuring the protection of the environment.
Enforcing private property rights is one way.
Theft and coercion is another way.

I don't believe the environment should come before people. How far do you take that?
Kill everyone so the environment is protected from all the evil humans?
I believe humans are part of the environment.
I also believe we should protect the environment, I love nature and plants and animals, I love going bushwalking and camping and building fires and studying any animal that I find.
I also believe in liberty and freedom.

See thats where your arguments just aren't arguments. You say


Ummm, no, one of those is a totally untested THEORY, it is not a way of ensuring anything.

Theft and coercion is another way.

It's always got to be negative terms doesn't it, you could have said "regulation and policy" but no that doesn't sound scary enough, it has to be "theft and coecion". Well yep, this has been shown to work reasonably well in making many corporations clean up their acts....


That's just typical of the extremist alarmist rhetoric crap..

Its not untested at all, in its pure form maybe. But we can compare the successes and failures of more and less free societies. Australia and the US for example are relatively free countries compared to China and Russia. Which countries have more pollution ?

It's in negative terms because it is negative.
If I believe in individual freedom, yet I don't have it, how can it be positive ?
Its not about being scary, its about the truth. Sometimes the truth is brutal.

I disagree. Regulation simply makes it easier for the very largest corporations to pollute and prevent competition from the smaller companies. I can explain why private property laws would be superior to regulations to prevent pollution. To put very simply, if regulations are not right enough, everyone still pollutes and there is no accountablity on the corporation. However if a corporation pollutes in say a few hundred peoples shared river, they can take action against the corporation. With regulations, the corporation is totally protected because they followed the regulations. Without regulations, they cannot pollute in any form that intereferes with the other landowners use of their property.
It is actually in a polluting corporations best interest to have these regulations, for the protection they provide.

Another example is building construction regulations. If a builder builds a house according to govt regulations, and something they did caused the building to collapse and kill someone, they are not liable, they are protected by the regulations and the govt. However if there were no regulations and they killed someone (through provable fault of course) then the would be liable, regardless.

This happens all the time.


The whole point was to take the extreme, the question was, how far does it go ?

It's not untested at all, well ok maybe it is...

I keep hearing the same stuff over and over again...



See no that is not truth, it's opinion, and that's why these discussions just go round and around in circles because you state things as being truth and facts when they are opinions and theories..

I don't consider environmental regulations and policies to be negative...

Total B...S... in it's purist form SV, congratulations are in order .

This is just argument for arguments sake and shows a disrespect of the intended audience.

Are you going to explain why you feel this way?
Is this the first time you have seen arguments for a free market/libertarianism/capitalism ?
What exactly is total B...S...? any points in particular ?
Not everyone shares the same views and when we discuss them we can all learn something

This is just argument for arguments sake and shows a disrespect of the intended audience.[/quote]
How does it show disrespect ?
I have already explained my purposes and reasons. If you read those you would realise it is not an argument for arguments sake at all. Ill just assume you missed something.

EDIT: I still intend to get back about the depression and the gold standard. Its a great question and an interesting answer...

Your arguments are circular. You state as fact things that are your opinion. You obviously have no opinion which could be tested since you seek to question the validity of any challenges by either answering with more opinions presented as facts or ignore the challenges which refute your ideas. I think EB has hit the nail on the head and this leads me to believe that your only purpose is to extend this discussion to make others look foolish by doing so. I can only conclude that you have no respect for your audience and think they are to stupid to figure this out. This is bourne out by the fact that you selectively insult those who do not share your opinion and your attacks have largely been against their intellectual capacity.

I definitely didn't mean to insult anyone, I guess that shows my inexperience in debating these topics. It's easy to get offended and say things in certain ways, which then offends and so on..
I am sincere in my apology for that.
Of course some of what I say is opinion, and some is fact. I thought I was being clear about the difference.

I also asked quite a few direct questions to try and get to the bottom of specific arguments. These questions remained unanswered. It is important to pick each point, and get to the root. However I had the difficult task of responding to many different people covering many different topics. Most times I tried to corner one topic, it got swamped with different ones. But this is something that occurs on busy forums...

So to the Great Depression and the gold standard.





Expansion of the money supply is always the underlying cause of any depression. Or more correctly, after the money supply has expanded to breaking point, and starts to necessarily contract, thats when the depression starts.
It is during the boom period however that inflation is secretly destroying the wealth of savers, the middle class.

Instead of the "gold standard', the most ethical way to decide what to use for money is have no rules whatsoever. If someone wants to buy a house in pigs, so be it.
It is most likely that gold and/or silver will end up being used because they have all the qualities required of a real money (divisible, fungible, portable, durable, store of value..)
That why gold has repeatedly been used as money throughout our history (but other things have served as commodity money too such as tobacco, wheat, livestock, even large rocks)

The reason gold (or other free market money) would prevent depressions is because the govt can not print it. With fiat currency they can and do print trillions of dollars. This money is created out of thin air. It never existed before, and the effects of this are explained above.

EDIT: I forgot to add. One of the common criticisms of using gold is that there is not enough.
Fact: It makes no difference how much money (whatever it is) is in the economy. There could be $1 (we just divide it up) or $1 quadrillion. The important thing is that it remains basically constant. Large changes in the money supply are what causes booms and depressions.

Sorry another edit: Just a few more facts...

It is interesting that you would mention the the agricultural policy of the New Deal. It may seem off at first. However a major surplus was actually being grown. The problem that occurred is exactly what is happening right now. My ancestry in Sicily could not compete with the cheap grains being exported from the US. Without a means to support his family, my great grandfather decided to move to the US to find work. He was not alone. People were starving not because there was not enough food, it was because the food was being distributed poorly. During the Irish potatoe famine, Ireland was a net exporter of food. It wasn't because of a lack of food that people died, it was a lack of caring by the powers that be. The farming policy of only growing as much as needed stems from the understanding that producing maximum yield from your acreage every year severely depletes the soil. People counteract that with petroleum based fertilizers now. That is not exactly sustainable. Now that we are back to the policy of growing huge surplusses, farmers in Mexico can not compete. Agribusinesses love that because now they can import a cheap labor pool with no rights. The second they start talking about organizing, a quick call to the Immigration department solves the problem.

I like your posts Ronmaggi, they give me a good excuse to research the topics you bring up

Yes, wikipedia says this

However I don't believe those few reasons all of a sudden cause an overproduction of food. Farming, like any business responds to price. If there are too many bananas the price goes down, and the more inefficient farmers go out of business, and so on.
To have such an over production tells me that there was something fishy going on as far as govt subsidies to farmers, to keep producing even when the market is saturated. The US is after all the home of Agri-business, very political, very corrupt. I will bring some facts to the table regarding what the situation was pre 1930 after some more research...

Im still a little shocked about reading that FDR payed farmers to kill their pigs, and to leave their farms unplanted. Thats like the argument of helping the economy by digging holes and filling them back up again, just to keep people in a job. Its insane, because there is no net gain, just loss. The wages have to come from somwhere after all.
something else to look up quite true, well maybe it is for some crops, but as customers become aware of things like the lack of vitamins and minerals in this type of food I believe it will have to change. This is a long term view of course. And also long term as the price of oil continues on its upward trend this type of farming will become unviable, unless of course the govt gives more and more money to agribusiness..

the paradigm shifts when you realize that gold is not the most valuable thing, people are. It may seem like a waste to pay people to dig a hole, than full it in, but if you are trying to keep the resource of active people viable, than it makes a lot of sense. I can tell you that I am much fitter after digging the holes I had to dig in my system. And now when I need to dig a hole, I will do it proficiently. Having people milling about doing nothing will cause more crime. If people are put to use, the ammount you pay them will net positive compared to the loss created from crime. Now I am not saying to pay them to sit on their butt, but I have seen projects like americorps turn things around.