Of course, he really hasn’t read anything else that we’ve given him, nor does he apparently read any of our arguments for comprehension, so it’s likely a waste of time…

Oh well, here’s the condensed version of Road to Serfdom on the off-chance that jim will impress us all by actually studying something we send him. :)

http://www.mises.org/books/TRTS/

It’s also great because it’s more a work of political science than of economics, even though Hayek was an economist. If Hayek can’t convince Jim that economic liberty means far, far more than simply allowing people to be greedy. Indeed, he agrees with this quote of Jim’s, at least in theory:
“If it were possible to get beyond the need to be compensated for every exchange of service or goods maybe we could actually be even more free than we feel we are today.”
…Except that Hayek goes on to show that the free market (and specifically the exchange of currency for goods and services) is precisely what allows us to get beyond the need to be compensated for every exchange. He shows that the exchange of currency (ie, any fungible medium of exchange)for goods and services is precisely what allows us to set our own priorities and live our own lives without having each of our choices dictated to us by some supposedly omniscient government authority.

Thanks for clearing that up. Of course life has been one happy hot air balloon ride for most people throughout civilization.

Wages were high in the New World? Tell that to the slaves and the indentured servants. What there was in the NW was lots of opportunity, freedom and actual labor. The real need to get things plowed and produced created fair value. These days so much of what we produce is completely unnecessary. You spend more money convincing people they need it as you do producing it. It’s an artificial market. But look at the consequences of all that unbridled expansion in the so called New World for the people that were already here. F*** them though right? Get on board or get run over by the free market. Nature is here to serve us. Harmony is for pussies. Right? The free market includes our right to take what we want regardless of wether or not someone has it first. Hey, things are what they are, but lets not pretend the growth of this great country took place in an environment of righteous justice.

With out oil life is hard and dirty. That’s all. Without oil or an as yet unknown equivalent there would not be anywhere near the number of people on the planet as there are today. And the approximately 30% that are living in the developed world would not be living as high on the hog as we all are. Rich and poor. There are still plenty of people on this planet that are using biomass for fuel. Cow dung, sticks, slash and burn agriculture. What evidence is there that we would have gotten to the atomic age with out something like oil?

Don’t try to get me to argue against freedom. What kind of idiot is against the concept of freedom. But if you are in a lifeboat, with a couple of other people your absolute freedom will need to be curtailed for the sake of survival and harmony. We have this one planet. We all have to live here. Adults learn to get along and compromise there freedoms for the sake of peace, prosperity and survival.

Yes commerce is great. But to what extent should it surpass a life well lived. If it were possible to get beyond the need to be compensated for every exchange of service or goods maybe we could actually be even more free than we feel we are today. Maybe not. But thanks for letting a kid like me chat with ya.

At that point it is not an energy source. Plus the further you go down in the well the oil gets more heavy and more sour (sulfur). This requires different more expensive extraction processes and special refineries.

At that point we will be using some other form of energy and the scarcity of oil won’t matter. My money’s on nuclear. They might figure out ethanol…probably not so long as the government’s running it, though. Brazilian ethanol is promising but I don’t know that there’s enough of a supply of sugar cane to supplant oil.

Since when did the cost of energy not effect the over all economy? Where you around in ‘79?

I was in the third grade. And that was a short term spike in prices affected by a cartel that the free market eventually rectified (since OPEC was never going to be able to maintain their embargo indefinitely).

Nuclear isn’t going to provide enough electricity and it’s way more expensive than oil and you still need to find and mine it. It’s a finite resource and the waste is highly toxic. But mostly it’s going to take a lot of cheap oil to build the 100’s of plants and extract the uranium. Again the problem is economics. If we are going to do Nuclear we need to start now before everyone officially admits to a peak, before the cost of oil will prohibit our being able to do it. Capital man! I know you know what that is.

I have no idea where you’re getting your nuclear information from, but you’re way off. The problem with nuclear power in this country has been excessive regulation that has made it impossible to build new plants for a quarter century…and the ones that still operate provide a disproportionate amount of our electricity. Once we need an alternative fuel source badly enough, those regulations will begin to disappear and we’ll see more plants built and we’ll see more innovations in that field.

If you know of an alternate to oil that is as energy dense easy to transport, can be used in our cars without retrofitting them and costs the equivalent of $25 a barrel, please let me know.

When it reaches the point where we need to worry about that, I have little doubt that the market will provide an alternative. The primary reason we haven’t found that alternative yet, though, is because it’s not in our self-interest to do so and it’s not financially feasible to do so…therefore it’s not really a concern at this point.

Your history is fairly deficient also. The industrial revolution started with coal

No, sport. You were making the assertion that cheap oil is responsible for the rise of the middle class. I pointed out that the rise of the middle class predated that which occured when Standard Oil monopolistically made oil 10X cheaper than it had previously been.

And yes, the middle class arose even before the ubiquitous of coal. Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography discusses debates he took part in England on the subject of why wages in the New World were so much higher than wages in the old world. You might be interested to note that the consesnus amongst successful businessmen in the New World was that wages had to be very high in order to keep the laborers from quitting their jobs and going somewhere else or starting their own businesses! Living standards exploded in the New World, despite the Navigation acts and the other mercantilist policies England pursued to keep Americans dependent on English factories for their manufactured goods.

Again, what I find very interesting is that you are postulating that without oil there would have been wisespread poverty. This is very wrong. You are committing a grave mistake in economic analysis that was most eloquently warned against by the 19th century economist Bastiat who wrote:

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen;

In essence, you are ignoring that which is not seen and focusing on only that which is seen. I strongly recommend that you read the entire essay. It demolishes many of your misconceptions.

In answer to your main argument, which seems to be that without cheap oil, free societies would not have produced a middle class, I respond that your argument is bunkum.

In the absence of oils something else would have been used. Yes, it would have been less economical. Yes, we would all be poorer than we are now as a result. However, your assertion that we would be stuck in a feudal age falls flat on its face. We would still be better off now than we were then. Even with the same technology as in the late middle-ages, when the closest thing to cheap plentiful energy were water-wheels on fast moving streams, the standard of living for the very poor was growing at the limit of technology in free countries, while in unfree countries, often with access to better technology, the latest scientific advances, and access to higher levels of capital, like Russia, feudalism and despotism remained.

Furthermore, the ballooning of the Earth’s population is in large part due to the fact that people have more kids when they feel economically secure. Actually that is not correct.; they tailor the number of children they have to match their economic circumstances. When people view an additional child as a burden, they take steps to prevent getting pregnant/resort to abortion/infantacide/farming out children for adoption. When more children are viewed as a benefit (either because of high mortality rates or due to living in prosperous times) people have more children.

It is freedom that allows people to best make the most of the available resources. It is not the lack of freedom inherent in implementing widespread socialism.

Face it, your theory about how societies economically evolve are flat out wrong. You have yet to come up with a single causal claim that has not been refuted. Your theories may feel right, but you are going to have to move beyond that if you wish to enter the world of adult discourse.

You’re right we will never run out of oil. But there will come a time when it will take one barrel to get one barrel. At that point it is not an energy source. Plus the further you go down in the well the oil gets more heavy and more sour (sulfur). This requires different more expensive extraction processes and special refineries.

Since when did the cost of energy not effect the over all economy? Where you around in ’79?

Nuclear isn’t going to provide enough electricity and it’s way more expensive than oil and you still need to find and mine it. It’s a finite resource and the waste is highly toxic. But mostly it’s going to take a lot of cheap oil to build the 100′s of plants and extract the uranium. Again the problem is economics. If we are going to do Nuclear we need to start now before everyone officially admits to a peak, before the cost of oil will prohibit our being able to do it. Capital man! I know you know what that is.

If you know of an alternate to oil that is as energy dense easy to transport, can be used in our cars without retrofitting them and costs the equivalent of $25 a barrel, please let me know.

That doesn’t mean that brings joy and goodness to the world.

Everything that has ever brought joy and goodness to the world is a result of somebody doing something for profit and their own self-interest.

Evolution does not always mean technology. We can evolve as people.

Technology will evolve, people may evolve, but the law of supply and demand has never changed…and it makes the sudden disappearance of oil a virtual impossibility.

I’ll take an honest “I don’t know”, and I’m perfectly OK with being asked to think outside the box to find something that works.

I get annoyed when people try to put forward an inconsistency without acknowledging it, because that usually turns a debate into a cluster ****.

Well, see, there you go. That’s the only way it works. Everybody has to do it. (conserve) Not just the poor folk but the wealthy as well. Free market forces would simply exclude the poor from using expensive oil and the wealthy will buy it regardless the cost.

Oil shale is a bust. I’m not going to go into detail but Exxon put billions into turning those rocks into oil and the energy expended to the energy gained is not good. like 3 to 1. Shale is not oil. It’s a rock that has kerogen in it. You need crap loads of energy to heat it up and further crap loads of fresh water to finish up. We’ve known about it for at least 100 years and no technology has been able to exploit it at a profitable price.

So what?

http://economics.about.com/cs/macroeconomics/a/run_out_of_oil.htm

The whole idea about peak oil is that the days of it being super cheap are over.

Adjusting for inflation and an overall increase in absolute wealth, we’re not actually paying that much more for gas now than we were back in the ’50s.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6440

The implications for our economy are cataclysmic.

No, they aren’t.

http://economics.about.com/cs/macroeconomics/a/run_out_of_oil.htm

Oil sands and heavy oil tars do not have the flow rates of sweet bubbling crude. Shell has just spent 14 billion in Canada and their getting 100,000 barrels a day for that. One oil well in the Saudi hay days pumped that easily. The Alberta oil sands are predicted to produce 3 million barrels a day in 10 years. We use 25 million barrels a day now. Not to mention you need to heat it up with valuable natural gas and finish it up with again crap loads of fresh water that should be used for agriculture. Then you need to mix it with sweet crude anyway to achieve the synthetic oil product. Waste of money and resources. Not to mention the mess it leaves from the strip mining to the waste product.

All irrelevant the second oil becomes less financially viable than some other source of energy.

There is no one alternative that can come any where near the energy density of oil. No one alternative and arguably not even all of them put together can sustain the worlds population or even our own.

And I, with great force, throw the bullshit flag.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power

it’s not about you being able to afford it, see? i’m simply implementing for you the nation/world/system that you want, dude.

oh btw, i’m *not* a libertarian.

We’re not out of oil. We’re out of cheap oil. I can afford it.
So Libertarians like to silence debate?
I’ve looked into living in New Zealand. It looks promising.