From: seawasp+@pitt.edu (Ryk E Spoor)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: Rhetoric: Soap box
Date: 10 Apr 92 15:45:55 GMT
Organization: University of Pittsburgh

In article <1992Apr10.231526.7366@waikato.ac.nz> hgm@waikato.ac.nz writes:
>Animal Rights
>At first, I thought the government would set aside a share for other species
>before calculating the human share. I then decided this is too big a decision to
>leave to government. How much you think should be set aside for other species
>is essentially a cultural or ethical decision. The majority opinion of a poorly
>representative government cannot justly be imposed on minority cultures. I
>think this should be left to individuals donating to non-governmental
>organisations who will thus be able to lease resource quotas to set aside
>reserves where they and their supporters deem appropriate.

	"Oh, ouch! 'Farewell, and adieu to ye fair Spanish ladies', as
Cap'n Quint would say. Since you maintain a distinction of countries, and
there's no practical method of eliminating them, you now make it up to  the
countries to set aside preserves. When each preserve takes away from all
the people within the country. Say farewell to the tropical rain forests.
Hell, say goodbye to almost EVERYTHING. I still see very little which will
prevent people from using everything they control as fast as possible
and then "going on the dole" so to speak. Or will you just cut someone off
once they've splurged? Let 'em starve?

>Kuwait will not build up big reserves of money while the oil is there, unless
>they are outstandingly efficient at extracting it. When the oil is gone we will

	Kuwait already HAD built up huge reserves of money. 

>all lose the resource value of the oil. Kuwait will still receive the value of
>all other resources for each of its population so they will not need to live
>for as long as they can on their savings (and then what?). They will be in a

	The idea was that they would save enough so that  the  entire
population of the country could be supported FOREVER by the savings -- i.e.,
the interest and investments would earn  as much or more than the population
used. Anything else would be used to create more moneymakers for the 
Kuwaiti -- industry, etc. 

>Inheritance
>Your right to a share of resources only exists while you live. You cannot pass
>that on but your decendents automatically get their own share from birth or
>from conception.

	Another STRONG, STRONG  motivation for me to USE IT NOW! ALL OF  IT!
Party On, dudes and dudettes, 'cause I can't give my children any of it
when I'm dead, so I'll give it to them NOW.

>See under money above. Money, derived from labour, will not be able to buy the
>right to prevent others having access to resources. People who are sitting at
>the bottom crying are doing so because they have no access to materials to
>apply their labour to. Without access to materials you cannot make the material

	No, a lot of them have no access to jobs. One person  cannot apply
his or her labor to materials without the help of a lot of others. At least,
not above the Bronze Age level. If you nominally give everyone in the world
a "resource share", exactly how will this benefit a Chinese peasant out in
Tibet? Are you going to  ship him his share of iron, coal, oil, food, etc?
How will you GET all this stuff to him, or will he just have the empty 
consolation of a piece of paper? Or will he have to trade some of his share
in order to  get stuff from other people? Be serious, there is no way you 
could even START to get the distribution done. And many of the uneducated
wouldn't even UNDERSTAND the system, so their shares would quickly be 
given away to anyone who'd give them a tenth of their value in something
concrete. Bingo, instant tycoons.

>Corruption
>There are virtually no decisions to be made in the resource compensation system
>so less scope for corrupt decisions. Creating extra persona or electronic money
>will be no easier or harder than at present.


	See above. I think I could go  to  China or India right after you enact
this system and become more rich and powerful than anyone else in the history
of the world. Just take the resource shares from a few million suckers in
exchange for giving them a tangible useful thing (worth one-tenth the  actual
value) for that year. They stay a little better off than they were -- getting
more food or whatever -- but I have all the rest that they SHOULD have had.

>Breeding, this will not severely affect them as each child will have its own
>income. It will affect everyone as the amount of our share of all resources
>will be reduced. Resources will become more scarce and the value of resources
>compared to labour will be higher. I do not favour state intervention to
>restrict breeding. I believe that a combination of increased affluence and
>increased equity (which are the variables which correlate best with reducing
>rates of population growth), social pressures and a cultural change brought
>about by eventual realisation that although you get more dividends the more
>children you have each one is worth less as population grows.

	"I FINALLY figured out what bothered me about this. You have just
created the world's largest example of the Prisoner's Dilemma -- cooperate
or betray. And as every experiment on this thing shows (even the massive
one done by the Scientific American several years back, with presumably
all well educated and thoughtful participants), BETRAYAL is the way that
most people go. 'Get mine while I can' is what you will see -- have lots
of kids NOW, before the resource share DROPS too much. And so on."


>Cultures have developed with high birth rates for good survival reasons and I
>believe that when these reasons are removed they will gradually adjust.

	Yep. You'll just give them the above, spanking new reason -- similar
to the old argument about Welfare. Even though being on welfare with lots
of kids hurts the country overall, it's better in the short run for those
people... so that's what they do.


>I think that unless you have 6 cars and a 'lifestyle block' (do you use that
>term in your part of the world?) you will be at least as well off with resource
>compensation as you are now.

	"Nope, don't know that term." says the Wasp. "I DO know that my mom
and dad are considered to be too wealthy to get aid for their kids, but
they still drive used cars and worry about the budget. My dad would not be
consoled by the presence of title to some untapped resource, or even one
which was potentially tappable. Right now he'd like a couple hundred grand
and a chance to relax. I doubt that your resource sharing, after costs
were extracted, would come out to over $40,000 per year. I'd bet more on
about $15,000."

					Sea Wasp

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Interphase Accomplished. 
Sea Wasp docked, Outring Sector 5.
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