Scott Stephens wrote: You have a rich and vivid imagination, but little grasp of human economic history ... comments throughout follow: > The US worships Mamon; the God of greed. I am continualy amazed Our Lord > Greenspan is able to show such self control with the balls of the beast - No, the US "worships" the priciple of self-determination: that you have a right to your time, your body, and your work product. You also have the right to freely associate as you see fit and combine your efforts with others of like mind. *That* is how corporations come into being. Pretty much every material possession you enjoy is because someone was "greedy" and wanted to make a profit. Throughout the 10,000 or so years of recorded human history it was only the onset of capital markets and private enterprise that brought a meaningful middle-class into being. Prior to Adam Smith and the Enlightenment thinkers *all* there were was (mostly) poor and the (very few) rich. "Greed" set in context of free markets has produced more good for more people in a shorter period of time than all the prior 9600 years of collectivized economies combined. What you say is mostly nonsense. A *few* people at Enron in collusion with a *single* Andersen partner managed to crater Enron and fleece the investors. This had the second-order effect of destroying Andersen, one of the most prestigious accounting firms of all time, because the Congress and The Peepul needed someone to blame. I am virtually certain that the bulk of Andersen partners did not have anything to do with this nor did they participate themselves, but Andersen as a whole pays the price. In any case, this did not happen with the collusion of the President, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Fed or any of the rest of the government bunch. It is simply criminal behavior no different than someone robbing a bank. Congress, especially, is mostly not smart enough to participate in this kind of fraud at any meaningful level - they're too busy giving my money away to people in exchange for their votes. > Make no mistake, the greedy evil-doers want high energy prices and high > profits. Once upon a time the earths atmosphere had no oxygen. We are doing No, the supply/demand curve for petroleum products dictates the prices we now have. The demand remains fairly constant (high) and the blithering idiots in government, influenced by even bigger blithering idiots in the "environmental movement" (aka the neo-Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-freedom, anti-human movement) see to it that the supply does not increase (which would reduce prices) by doing things like ANWR drilling and building more nuclear power generation facilitites. Just for the record, I grew up in Alaska, and it is fair to say that the majority of the people in the region strongly favor ANWR drilling. But no, we get to have US energy policy dictated by a bunch of city-dwelling, sandal-wearing morons whose closest contact with nature is watching 'Bambi' on the Disney Channel and who think Moose, Elk, and Deer are 'cute'. No entity - private or governmental - in all of modern economic history (since the Enlightenment, say) has ever had sufficient power to dictate pricing in free markets. The only way market pricing can be overcome is by means of violence - *forcing* someone to buy something at the price you demand. As far as I know, Exxon, Shell, BP, and the rest have not yet resorted to sticking guns in our ears. You are perfectly free to not buy petroleum products if you think they are "overpriced." > the planet a big favor by recycling all the carbon that is buried. If we > don't volcanoes will. All the CO2 volcanoes can spew out gets turned into > carbonates - limestone by sea creatures or hydrocarbons by plants, and gets > buried again. Global warming is global greed - Europeans screaming the US Global Warming is a political cause with barely tenuous science to support it at best - or at least, barely tenuous science to support that a) Human action is responsible for the observed warming and b) Such warming is bad for the planet. For able refutations of the Global Warming Gasbags, see: "The Sceptical Environmentalist", Bjorn Lomborg (http://www.greeningearthsociety.org/Articles/2001/vca41.htm) "The Satanic Gasses", Ballings & Michaels There are also many web resources which lay to waste the religion of Global Warming. Just a few: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=718860 http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2001-08/uoia-wpi082001.php http://www.heartland.org/environment/apr01/evidence.htm I wrote a brief summary of why the current Global Warming nonsense is more like religion than science at: http://www.tundraware.com/Musings/EnvMyths/environ-myth.html -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tim Daneliuk tundra@tundraware.com -- http://www.piclist.com#nomail Going offline? Don't AutoReply us! email listserv@mitvma.mit.edu with SET PICList DIGEST in the body