Jay Hanson wrote:
Only three tactics can mitigate this ongoing process:
1.  Take energy resources by military force.  We did this in Iraq.
2.  Gradually move away from a political system which encourages the depletion
of natural resources and toward something like Hubbert's or my vision for a
sustainable society.  The first step would be to guarantee every citizen the
right to live without working.
3.  Reduce population at least as fast as available energy resources fall.
Jay has produced a beautiful popularization of the principal ideas he has gotten
from my papers on dematerialism, especially "Energy in a Natural Economy", which
is linked to http://dematerialism.net/ .  Rather than graciously acknowledge the
source of these ideas he has banned me from his Yahoo groups so as to avoid any
competition in the intellectual sphere.  That isn't very nice and I don't know a
nice way to say it. 
Jay has grasped the principal result of the social reforms recommended by me,
but he has failed to understand the logical ramifications.  Let us assume, for a
moment, that we reject the idea of conquest and depredation to meet our energy
needs.  While striving by any and every means to reduce our population, what
must we do to guarantee every citizen the right to live without working, which
is necessary because of the energy consequences of all economic activity as
discussed in the papers written by me with which Jay and everyone else on this
forum are familiar?   In a world of shrinking energy supplies or alternative
energy technologies the output of which cannot be increased beyond a fixed or
slowly growing maximum, the amount of livelihood available to the population at
whatever level it has reached is decidedly finite.  Therefore, to guarantee
every citizen enough to live, it is necessary that no citizen consume much more
than the minimum
necessary to live decently plus whatever he needs to do the work that he has
had the good fortune to be able to do because it is necessary to the well-being
of the community.  We have a name for this type of wealth sharing in a planned
economy.  This is a name that Jay Hanson has been taught to detest; and,
although he is the last one I would suspect of becoming a product of the
"manufacture of consent" in the United States, he has been thoroughly
brainwashed, which accounts for this clear case of doublethink.
In a paper that I wrote for the Can Do Better website, I discussed the
contradictions in war socialism as envisioned by Jay as well as its obvious
similarity to Dematerialism as envisioned by me.   I copied the following from
the What's New section of my homepage:
See the extended journal entry for July 27th on “Communism and Some Idle
Thoughts on the Excesses of Capitalism”.  This and the entries of June 9th and
June 16th have been pulled together in a discussion of the differences between
War Socialism and the Natural Economy at http://dematerialism.net/hanson.htm. 
Thanks to James Sinnamon, this is available at http://candobetter.org/blog/18,
my new blog on candobetter.org.
Alternatively, if time is short, see http://dematerialism.net/warsocial.htm in
which I explain why war socialism is either a point on the path toward a natural
economy and therefore a form of dematerialism or it is nothing but a huge
mistake.  I regret that I satisfy myself principally in a written piece like
this.  Hopefully, the intelligent reader will be able to grasp the main points
in the proof.  If not, please ask me to elucidate.
Tom Wayburn, Houston, Texas
twayburn@...
http://www.dematerialism.net/
http://dematerialism.blogspot.com/
http://dematerialism.wikispaces.com/




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