Category Archives: Economics

Peak Everything?

Thoughts from Ron Bailey, on running out of stuff. I found this interesting:

The folks at the GPRI point out that the phosphorus in just one person’s urine would be close to the amount needed to fertilize the food supply for one person. So why not recycle urine? In fact, NoMix toilets have been invented which allow for the collection of urine separate from solid wastes, allowing phosphorus and nitrogen to be recovered and used as fertilizer. In addition, crop biotechnologists are exploring ways to produce plants that dramatically increase the efficiency with which they use phosphorus, which would reduce the amount fertilizer needed to grow a given amount of food.

Urine recycling would be not just handy, but perhaps crucial, for space settlements.

On the broader point, as long as we have affordable energy and knowledge there’s no reason to run out of anything. The biggest problem is the overabundance of stupidity on the part of those who would rule our lives.

A Green Tea Party

That’s what Pulitzer-Prize-winning authoritarian-government admirer Tom Friedman thinks the Tea Partiers should form. I always love this:

I’ve been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement. Sounds like a lot of angry people who want to get the government out of their lives and cut both taxes and the deficit. Nothing wrong with that — although one does wonder where they were in the Bush years.

They were there all along, and few of them were very happy about the spending, but they weren’t idiotic enough to think that the Democrats would be better. And sometimes quantity has a quality all its own.

Anyway, I think that what Beijing Tom really wants is a watermelon tea party.

Permission To Survive

Some thoughts on the health-care debacle, in Massachusetts and the nation:

Insurance companies in Massachusetts are thus required to offer numerous benefits as determined by politicians and lobbyists, but they may only charge what government bureaucrats permit. It would be akin to the government requiring restaurants to sell $50 steak dinners, but only allowing them to charge $25.

When similar price controls and “guaranteed coverage” laws were imposed in South Dakota and Kentucky, many insurers left these states rather than be slowly bled to death. As similar laws are phased in nationally under ObamaCare, the government could drive private insurers out of business altogether, enabling it to herd unwilling Americans into a “public option.”

ObamaCare thus places a noose around insurers’ necks. Insurance companies will be allowed to survive only at the arbitrary pleasure of the government.

…The trend is becoming clear. First, insurers must seek government permission to survive. Then, patients must seek permission to receive some forms of medical care. Will we soon need government permission simply to live?

That’s what seems to generally happen at the end of the road we’re on. A quarter of a billion people were, after all, murdered by their governments in the last century.