On Jun 23, 8:30 pm, "
[email protected]" <
[email protected]>
wrote:
> On Jun 23, 2:53 pm, SLAVE of THE STATE <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > On Jun 23, 1:59 pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
> > wrote:
> > > It is an Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, not an Arctic
> > > National People Refuge. The whole point of it is that
> > > nobody wants it. Other than oil prospectors.
>
> > And so they should not be precluded from working land that no one else
> > wants.
>
> "Want" is a funny word, isn't it? The way you use it
> there is an excluded middle - you either want something,
> or don't want it, leaving it valueless.
The way you use it is the way a child demanding a chocolate bar uses
it. I mean it to the point one is willing to act on the wants through
their own efforts -- to put visible self-created investment into
acheiving the want. Saying "I want to retire a multi-millionaire at
age 50" means nothing unless one is willing to do something about it.
To have some idea about the values people hold, we can only look at
their actions and attempt to make reasonable judgments about what the
values behind those actions mean. IOW, talk is cheap. Assuming that a
reasonable judgment could be made, there is next the cost of viewing
and assessing the information. That study itself could have a high
transaction cost -- perhaps unfundable. A low cost way of teasing out
a hint of values is to look at what people are willing to pay (in
money/time/resource) for X, as it is a form of action/transaction. It
is very imperfect, as price is not value, but the sad reality is that
any other method of assessing value faces even graver difficulty in
the ironic attempt to drive the subjectivity out of a subjective
matter. I mean that despite all its problems as a "value viewer," the
price system is the best thing available. I think polling -- asking
people what they value -- has worse problems, although I do not claim
that it can never give a decent answer. IOW, talk is cheap. (That
politicians specialize in talk should give that one away.)
So if you want to have some hint of how valued something is -- that
landscape from valued to valueless -- look at what the going price
across markets are in money/time/resource/blood. And make sure that
the entity doing the spending is spending _their own_ money/time/
resource/blood. And note that is never the function of The State, who
never spends its own money/time/resource/blood, since it can only
seize those from the population under its regime. Yes, The State
always destroys the price system wherever it decides to "supply a
good." If you want to have an affordable hint about values, the worst
possible thing you could do is destroy the price system. Sad but
true. Don't be a commie unless your basic goal is to obscure human
values and insert your own in place. I mean, if you value tyrrany...
You want X, you value X? What are you going to _do_ for it?
> I don't personally
> want or wish to possess the mountains a few miles from
> my house, but that doesn't mean I think the state should
> sell off the park to people who will bulldoze the saguaro
> for condos.A
Yeah, the guvmint stole the land fair and square, so "they" should
decide how it is used. You want to possess a view of the mountains
or something else about the mountains, but you can't really describe
how you gained title to the mountains or how you paid for them. So
you use the hammer of the state to seize the land for your purposes,
denying others of more direct and obvious use. When you say "the
state," you really mean yourself owning that land. You want to take
control of that resource by fiat, since "owning property" is
essentially a matter of answering the "who controls the physical
thing" question.
Your way of looking at it has to do with the way you were trained to
think about it. The language is your (as with anyone) tool of
abstraction -- your way of framing the world. Your frames control the
boundaries of your conceptions and perceptions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_framing
I'm not going to give you any hints. You might become dangerous.