"ricochetboy" <philzberg@e...> wrote:
Commodity prices accross the board are rising
Commodity prices fall over the long term, especially as measured in the
amount of human labor required to exchange for them. I suggest you read
chapters one and two of Julian Simon's Ultimate Resource
(http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/), one of the most
important books of the 20th century. In 1980, Simon challenged
natural-resource doomsayer Paul Ehrlich to pick any five commodity metals
for a 10-year bet on their price. Ehrlich picked copper, chrome, nickel,
tin, and tungsten, and lost badly. After ten years, the inflation-adjusted
price of all five (and the absolute price of three) had fallen. Ehrlich paid
Simon, and declined Simon's offer to repeat the bet. Details at
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/People/julian_simon.html.
How old
are you, I had parents who lived through the depression and I came of
age in the seventies. Younger folks have an illustion of stability
because that is all they have known.
It's a fallacy to think that just because some people have personal memories
of a calamity, the calamity is likely to be repeated. If you were somehow
old enough to remember the Black Death of 1348, that wouldn't negate the
fact that since then we've discovered the germ theory of disease.
The Great Depression was a one-time event. See the business cycle graph at
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TCEH/Image46.gif: As economic historian
Brad DeLong writes: "The Great Depression has central place in twentieth
century economic history. In its shadow, all other depressions are
insignificant. Whether assessed by the relative shortfall of production from
trend, by the duration of slack production, or by the product-depth times
duration-of these two measures, the Great Depression is an order of
magnitude larger than other depressions: it is off the scale. All other
depressions and recessions are from an aggregate perspective (although not
from the perspective of those left unemployed or bankrupt) little more than
ripples on the tide of ongoing economic growth."
Brian Holtz
Yahoo! Inc.
2004 Libertarian candidate for Congress, CA14 (Silicon Valley)
http://marketliberal.org/>
blog: http://knowinghumans.net/>
book: http://humanknowledge.net/>