ken henry talking sense, page-70

  1. 2,710 Posts.
    Malthusian theories of over population have been around for over 200 years. People who support these theories, and I have read articles from environmentalists suggesting 100 million is the ideal world population, continually underestimate the ingenuity of mankind.

    Your example of Easter Island is hardly indicative of the world generally and if I remember correctly the collapse of the Easter Island population was due to rampaging pirates and the introduction of diseases they had no immunity too. They did not eat each other out of existence.

    Your statement "Unfortunately your utopian dream that capitalists grow the pie and encourages more people to share it is fantasy, reality is they grow the pie whilst doing everything in their power to share least amount possible..." is wrong. History shows otherwise.

    In precapitalist times you could say 99% were oppressed and the ruling elite were the 1%. This scenario hardly changed for millenia. Until the 18th and 19th centuries when some philosphers we probably would now call economists started thinking about property, trade, prices and production. They concluded that society is much more productive if private property was consistently respected. If you care to look up their work, they include Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, and Say. Their ideas caught on through people like Cobden and public opinion changed to embrace liberalism.

    And the results were amazing. Liberal ideology engendered the Industrial Revolution and this Age of Liberalism lasted from around 1815 to 1914. At the end of this Age the 99% lived better than the 1% of times past.

    Unfortunately, since 1914 we have slowly reverted back to a statist mentality which is directly responsible for our current woes both economic and geopolitical.

    True capitalism, not this crony-capitalism we currently have, and libertarianism support the advancement of the individual. Statists fear such freedom.


 
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