As to Lawnorder’s new arguments

As to Lawnorder’s new arguments: I’ll repeat that societies that include significant levels of self-ownership

and private property, along with a low-friction exchange system (“money”) tend to have a “price mechanism”

that creates incentives for producing, conserving and replacing scarce and desired commodities. Unless the

economies of Easter Island and North Korea included this price mechanism they’re not counterexamples. And North

Koreans didn’t starve because of a shortage of national natural resources. There may even tend to be an inverse

relationship between natural resources and wealth-creation; see for example The Future of Freedom: Illiberal

Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria:

“Wealth in natural resources hinders both political modernization and economic growth. Two Harvard economists,

Jeffrey D. Sachs and Andrew M. Warner, looked at ninety-seven developing countries over two decades (1971-89)

and found that natural endowments were strongly correlated with economic failure. On average the richer a

country was in mineral, agricultural, and fuel deposits, the slower its economy grew — think of Saudi Arabia or

Nigeria. Countries with almost no resources — such as those in East Asia — grew the fastest. Those with some

resources — as in western Europe — grew at rates between these two extremes. There are a few exceptions:

Chile, Malaysia, and the United States are all resource rich yet have developed economically and politically.

But the basic rule holds up strikingly well.”

(2) Reader Philip Brydon (letter below) has brought to my attention an article by geologist David Deming, “Are

We Running Out of Oil?,” that makes some of the same arguments that I’ve made but that contains information

that I didn’t know. Everyone interested in the subject should read this short and readable article.