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>Could you tell us why you think scarcity is inescapable?
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>Yoshie
We will never live on the Great Rock Candy Mountain, where roast chickens grow on trees and fish jump into our frying pans. In the background there are two great facts: one is the absolute material limit on certain resources--oil, coal, gas, fresh water, arable land. There is just so much of that that exists or could exist.
The other limit is time. Human effort is itself scarce in the sense that each of us can only put out so much of it in our limited lives, so that if we use it inefficiently, wasting it, it is just lost, and much of it--that involved in merely necessary production, the stuff we wouldn't do if we didn't have to--criminally so; it's stealing people's lives to waste their efforts. That is one of Marx's deepest insights, and one of his great objections to capitalism.
Against this background, we have to make choices about how to use our material and human resources so as not to waste them. If we waste the material ones, eventually we will run out of some of the most important ones. If we waste the human ones, we will continue to wreck our lives. This just another way of saying the scaricity is inescapable.
It's so obvious that this is true that it is really perverse to deny it; I think it is a sort of ideologically induced insanity, and one that brings the left into discredit when leftists do so. It's a sort of flat-earthism. --jks
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