tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post109146105498131457..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Dispatches from Libertopia (Another New, and I am Sad to Say Probably Recurring, Feature)Dale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-1091812676578382032004-08-06T10:17:00.000-07:002004-08-06T10:17:00.000-07:00Libertarians strike me as irrational regarding the...Libertarians strike me as irrational regarding their risk assessments, because they tend to assume that they have the ability to become wealthy or even super-wealthy if it weren't for those hated government interventions. Even in the most utopian libertarian wet dream most people aren't going to wind up rich, whereas you have a 100% chance of becoming chronically ill or debilitated just by living long enough. (I think an economic principle called "Pareto's Law" shows how just a relative handful of people wind up rich under competitive market conditions. While the odds of falling into the fortunate end of the weatlth distribution are somewhat better than winning the lottery, they aren't high enough to depend on.)<br /><br />So, unless these libertarians are already wealthy and could live off of investment income indefinitely if they became disabled tomorrow, like Christopher Reeve, they really should stop deceiving themselves about their self-reliance, personal productivity and relative invulnerability. Individual productivity of material wealth is largely illusory any way, because non-human "energy slaves" do the real work in a modern economy. We are going to see this illusion implode pretty quickly if the Peak Oil theorist are right and, as OPEC's president admitted the other day, we've maxed out on the world's ability to extract oil:<br /><br />http://www.pbs.org/fmc/book/14business8.htm<br /><I>The enormous gulf between high-energy and low-energy societies was dramatized by Buckminster Fuller when he proposed the unit of an “energy-slave,” based on the average output of a hard-working man doing 150,000 foot-pounds of work per day and working 250 days per year. In low-energy societies, the nonhuman energy slaves are typically horses, oxen, windmills, and riverboats. Using Fuller’s unit, the average American at the end of the century had more than 8,000 energy-slaves at his or her disposal. Moreover, Fuller pointed out, “energy-slaves, although doing only the foot-pounds of humans, are enormously more effective because they can work under conditions intolerable to man, e.g., 5,000° F, no sleep, ten-thousandths of an inch tolerance, one million times magnification, 400,000 pounds per square inch pressure, 186,000 miles per second alacrity and so forth.” </I>Mark Plushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03859046131830902921noreply@blogger.com