Peak Oil Panic

[Dardedar]

DAR
This fellow will be one of the speakers at Shermers (of Skeptic mag) "Environmental Wars conference."

***
May 2006

Peak Oil Panic

Is the planet running out of gas? If it is, what should the Bush administration do about it?

Ronald Bailey

The Princeton geologist Ken Deffeyes warns that the imminent peak of global oil production will result in “war, famine, pestilence and death.” Deffeyes, author of 2001’s Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage and 2005’s Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert’s Peak, predicted that the peak of global oil production would occur this past Thanksgiving.

Deffeyes isn’t alone. The Houston investment banker Matthew Simmons claims in his 2005 book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy that the Saudis are lying about the size of their reserves and that they are really running on empty; last September he announced that “we could be looking at $10-a-gallon gas this winter.” Colin Campbell, a former petroleum geologist who is now a trustee of the U.K.-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre, warned way back in 2002 that we were headed for peak oil production, and that this would lead to “war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of homo sapiens.” In his 2004 book Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, the Caltech physicist David Goodstein wrote that the peak of world production is imminent and that “we can, all too easily, envision a dying civilization, the landscape littered with the rusting hulks of SUVs.” Jim Motavalli, editor of the environmentalist magazine E, writes in the January/February 2006 issue, “It is impossible to escape the conclusion that we’re steaming full speed ahead into a train wreck of monumental proportions.”

And James Schlesinger, the country’s first secretary of energy, declared in the Winter 2005–06 issue of the neoconservative foreign policy journal The National Interest that “a growing consensus accepts that the peak is not that far off.” He added, “The inability readily to expand the supply of oil, given rising demand, will in the future impose a severe economic shock.”

Even some traditionally calm voices are starting to sound panicky. In March 2005, the New York investment bank Goldman Sachs issued a report suggesting that oil prices would experience a “super spike” in 2006, reaching up to $105 per barrel. ChevronTexaco’s willyoujoinus.com campaign, featuring a series of full-page newspaper ads that urge Americans to conserve energy, flatly declares, “The era of easy oil is over.”

Such forecasts have been bolstered by a steep rise in oil prices over the last three years, going from $18 a barrel in 2002 to $70 last fall. If the price of something goes up, after all, that means it’s becoming scarcer.

The good news is that the peak oil doomsters are probably wrong that world oil production is about to decline forever. Most analysts believe that world petroleum supplies will meet projected demand at reasonable prices for at least another generation. The bad news is that much of the world’s oil reserves are in the custody of unstable and sometimes hostile regimes. But the oil producing nations would be the ultimate losers if they provoked an “oil crisis,” since that would spur industrialized countries to cut back on imports and develop alternative energy technologies.

Apocalypse Yesterday

Predictions of imminent catastrophic depletion are almost as old as the oil industry. An 1855 advertisement for Kier’s Rock Oil, a patent medicine whose key ingredient was petroleum bubbling up from salt wells near Pittsburgh, urged customers to buy soon before “this wonderful product is depleted from Nature’s laboratory.” The ad appeared four years before Pennsylvania’s first oil well was drilled. In 1919 David White of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) predicted that world oil production would peak in nine years. And in 1943 the Standard Oil geologist Wallace Pratt calculated that the world would ultimately produce 600 billion barrels of oil. (In fact, more than 1 trillion barrels of oil had been pumped by 2006.)

During the 1970s, the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth projected that, assuming consumption remained flat, all known oil reserves would be entirely consumed in just 31 years. With exponential growth in consumption, it added, all the known oil reserves would be consumed in 20 years. These dour predictions gained credibility when the Arab oil crisis of 1973 quadrupled prices from $3 to $12 per barrel (from $16 to $48 in 2006 dollars) and when the Iranian oil crisis more than doubled oil prices from $14 per barrel in 1978 to $35 per barrel by 1981 (from $45 to $98 in 2006 dollars).

In response, the federal government imposed price controls on oil and gas in the 1970s and established fuel economy standards to encourage the sale of more efficient automobiles. The sense of doom did not dissolve. In 1979 Energy Secretary Schlesinger proclaimed, “The energy future is bleak and is likely to grow bleaker in the decade ahead.” The Global 2000 Report to President Carter, issued in 1980, predicted that the price of oil would rise by 50 percent, reaching $100 per barrel by 2000.

Most of today’s petro-doomsters base their forecasts on the work of the geologist M. King Hubbert, who correctly predicted in 1956 that U.S. domestic oil production in the lower 48 states would peak around 1970 and begin to decline. In 1969 Hubbert predicted that world oil production would peak around 2000.

Hubbert argued that oil production grows until half the recoverable resources in a field have been extracted, after which production falls off at the same rate at which it expanded. This theory suggests a bell-shaped curve rising from first discovery to peak and descending to depletion. Hubbert calculated that peak oil production follows peak oil discovery with a time lag. Globally, discoveries of new oil fields peaked in 1962. The time lag between peak global discoveries and peak production was estimated to be around 32 years, but peak oilers claim that the two oil crises of the 1970s reduced consumption and thereby delayed the peak until now. Hubbert’s modern disciples argue that humanity has now used up half of the world’s ultimately recoverable reserves of oil, which means we are at or over the peak.

The prophets of oily doom are opposed by preachers of energy abundance. Chief among the latter is the energy economist Michael Lynch, president of the Massachusetts-based Global Petroleum Service consultancy. “Colin Campbell has the worst forecasting record on oil supply,” says Lynch, “and that’s saying a lot.” He points out that in a 1989 article for the journal Noroil, Campbell claimed the peak of world oil production had already passed and incorrectly predicted that oil would soon cost $30 to $50 a barrel. As for Matthew Simmons, Lynch dismisses him with a sneer: “Petroleum engineers know a lot more about petroleum engineering than a Harvard MBA.”

One petroleum engineer— Michael Economides of the University of Houston—calls peak oil predictions “the figments of the imaginations of born-again pessimist geologists.” Like Lynch, Economides, who worked in Russia to boost that country’s oil production in the last decade, rejects Simmons’ analysis. Saudi Arabia, which currently produces about 10 million barrels of oil a day, “is underproducing every one of their wells,” he claims. “I can produce 20 million barrels of oil in Saudi Arabia.”


The Tank Is Still More Than Half Full

So who’s right? Fortunately, it looks like humanity is at least a generation away from peak oil production. Unfortunately, there could be another “oil crisis” any day now.

The world consumes about 87 million barrels of oil per day, or nearly 30 billion barrels of oil per year. How much oil is left? It’s hard to be sure. Proven oil reserves—i.e., oil that is recoverable under current economic and operating conditions—are estimated to be 1.1 trillion barrels by the industry journal World Oil, 1.2 trillion by the oil company BP, and 1.3 trillion by the Oil and Gas Journal. In March 2005 the private U.K.-based energy consultancy IHS Energy estimated that the world’s remaining recoverable reserves, excluding unconventional sources such as heavy oil or tar sands, are between 1.3 trillion and 2.4 trillion barrels.

But are proven reserves all that’s left? Several analyses put ultimate reserves at much higher levels. For example, the USGS undertook a comprehensive analysis of world oil reserves in 2000. It calculated that the total world endowment of recoverable oil is 3 trillion barrels. (Its figure is higher because it includes estimates for undiscovered resources and projected increases in already producing fields.) In addition, the total world endowment of natural gas is equivalent to 2.6 trillion barrels of oil, plus 330 billion barrels of natural gas liquids such as propane and butane. The USGS figures that the total world endowment of conventional oil resources is equivalent to about 5.9 trillion barrels of oil. Proven reserves of oil, gas, and natural gas liquids are equivalent to 2 trillion barrels of oil. The USGS calculates that humanity has already consumed about 1 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, which means 82 percent of the world’s endowment of oil and gas resources remains to be used.

In its 2005 Energy Outlook, ExxonMobil estimates “global conventional oil resources total 3.2 trillion barrels…with non-conventional ‘frontier’ resources such as heavy oil bringing that total to over 4 trillion barrels.” In November 2005, the International Energy Agency, an organization created in 1974 by 26 industrialized countries to assess global energy issues, released its annual World Energy Outlook report, which accepted the USGS numbers and concluded that “the world’s energy resources are adequate to meet projected growth in energy demand” until at least 2030. The report predicted that oil production would grow from the 2004 level of 82 million barrels a day to 115 million barrels a day and that any “peak” would occur after 2030. It suggested that world oil prices will decline to around $35 per barrel (in 2004 dollars) by 2010 and eventually rise to $39 per barrel by 2030. At the Montreal Climate Change Conference in December, Claude Mandil, head of the International Energy Agency, declared: “We don’t share the tenets of the peak oil theory. We feel that they underestimate technological developments. For many decades to come there is no geological problem.”

Probably the most respected private oil consultancy in the world is Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) in Boston. On December 7, 2005, CERA senior consultant Robert W. Esser testified at a House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee hearing on the peak oil theory. “CERA’s belief is that the world is not running out of oil imminently or in the near to medium term,” Esser said. “Indeed, CERA projects that world oil production capacity has the potential to rise from 87 million barrels per day [mbd] in 2005 to as much as 108 mbd by 2015.…We see no evidence to suggest a peak before 2020, nor do we see a transparent and technically sound analysis from another source that justifies belief in an imminent peak.” Instead of a sharp peak followed by a production decline, CERA’s analysts foresee an “undulating plateau” in which global oil production remains more or less steady. “It will be a number of decades into this century before we get to an inflection point that will herald the arrival of the undulating plateau,” said Esser.

Peak oilers discount these rosy scenarios, insisting the relevant fact is that new oil discoveries have been falling during the last couple of decades. But the petroleum optimists, such as the analysts at the USGS, say there is more to it than that. They point out that reserve growth and new discoveries have been outpacing oil consumption. (Reserve growth is the increase in production in already discovered and developed fields.) From 1995 and 2003 the world consumed 236 billion barrels of oil. It also saw reserve growth of 175 billion barrels, combined with 138 billion barrels from new discoveries, added a total of 313 billion barrels to the world’s proven oil reserves. In the U.S., oil field reserves typically turn out to be four to nine times as high as the original estimates. The increase in production is a result of improved recovery technologies, further discoveries in the field, and improved field management.

Consider the Kern River field in California, which was discovered in 1899. In 1942 it was estimated that only 54 million barrels remained to be produced there. During the next 44 years the field produced 736 million barrels and had another 970 million barrels remaining. For geological reasons, petroleum engineers cannot pump every drop of oil out of a reservoir. But by 2004 technological advances enabled them to recover 35 percent of a conventional reservoir’s oil, up from an average of 22 percent in 1980. If this recovery factor can be increased by another five percentage points, that would boost worldwide recoverable reserves by more than all of Saudi Arabia’s current proven reserves. Economides points out that in 1976 the U.S. was estimated to have 23 billion barrels of reserves remaining. In 2005 it still had 23 billion barrels of oil reserves, even though American oil fields produced almost 40 billion barrels of oil between 1976 and 2005.

Matthew Simmons claims to have found that the Saudis are greatly exaggerating the size of their reserves. If true, this is bad news, because the Saudis have more than 30 percent of the world’s reserves and have served as the world’s supplier of last resort for a couple of decades. Simmons argues that the Saudis and others are exaggerating what they have because the supply quotas set by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) were tied to the size of a country’s reserves—the bigger its reserves, the more oil it was permitted to sell. But the desire to boost quotas cannot account for the fact that non-OPEC reserves grew nearly three times faster than OPEC reserves between 1981 and 1996. And whatever incentive OPEC members had to lie about their reserves should have dissipated as the price of oil rose during the last couple of years. Economides notes that the Saudis are investing $100 billion in new production projects, which undercuts the notion that they know they are running out of oil.

At a November meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations, chief International Energy Agency economist Fatih Birol responded to the assertion that Saudi Arabia can’t raise its oil production by outlining a scenario in which he assumed that Saudi oil reserves were 35 percent lower than claimed. Birol noted that experts believe forcing water into reserves to maintain pressure would raise the cost of producing oil by 70 percent at most. In his analysis, Birol assumed it would raise the cost by 300 percent. Considering that it costs about $1.50 to produce a barrel of Saudi crude oil, that means the cost would rise to $6 per barrel. Even with these two assumptions, Birol argues the Saudis could easily produce 18 million barrels of oil per day by 2020, up from the current level of around 10 million.

So if the world has adequate oil supplies for the next generation, can we all go back to driving Hummers? Not so fast.

The Real Oil Crisis

Simmons has been wrong so far: Gasoline does not cost $10 a gallon. Oil prices hovered between $55 and $65 per barrel in late 2005 and early 2006, down from $70 in September 2005. The U.S. Energy Information Administration believes gasoline prices will remain below $3 per gallon in 2006.

What about the future? The International Energy Agency calculates that $3 trillion must be invested in oil production and refining facilities during the next 25 years to meet world demand in 2030. In principle that target could easily be met, since producing 1 trillion barrels at $30 per barrel yields $30 trillion in income over 25 years.

[...snip...]

THE REST

Ronald Bailey, Reason’s science correspondent, is author of Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution (Prometheus)

***


DAR
Background on Bailey:

FACTSHEET: Ronald Bailey

Adjunct Scholar, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Adjunct Scholar, Cato Institute. Science Correspondent, Reason Magazine. Science and Technology reporter for Forbes 1987-1990. Competitive Enterprise Institute's Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism in 1993.

Bailey has written widely in criticism of climate change science and is a producer for television shows "Think Tank" and "Technopolitics."

Bailey was editor of "Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death," "The True State of the Planet" and "Earth Report 2000: Revisiting The True State of The Planet," all of which were published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He authored "Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse" and "The Law of Increasing Returns." Bailey received funding for Eco-Scam from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Bailey has long-standing connections to the Wise Use movement and was a speaker at the 1997 Fly In for Freedom, the annual gathering of "wise use" activists sponsored by the Alliance for America.

BA in economics and philosophy at University of Virginia.

[Hogeye]

The Princeton geologist Ken Deffeyes warns that the imminent peak of global oil production will result in "war, famine, pestilence and death."

LOL!!! Environmental alarmism at its worst. I have news for this guy - peak oil is just a rather trivial threshold which will go unnoticed. It may have occured years ago. Peak (petrol) oil is about as significant as peak whale oil was in the mid-1800s, and peak camphene, and peak kerosene, etc. Jeez, get a grip!

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Free markets only work if everyone in them is free - but as to private ownership of public resources, that's the "free market" scenario that enriches the few at the expense of the many until the resource is gone, the few head for greener pastures with their megabucks and the many sit bereft, saying, "but they said..." - Not that this government isn't a division of Exxon, but that can change.

I'm with Hubbert on this one - peak of discovery has already occurred. That we periodically do enough conservation to extend peak of production doesn't lessen the problem of finding the stuff and getting it out of the ground in the first place. The expansion of recoverable resources has not occurred because we've found more fields, but because we've developed more efficient extraction technology - which gives us more petroleum (at a higher cost) up to a point. What Bailey didn't mention is that once a certain amount (I think it's 60%) of the crude is removed by whatever technology (& as he pointed out, we don't have the technology yet to do that, we're batting about 33%), the geologic formation will collapse. This is not just a problem with oil, by the way - we're busily trashing our major aquifers the same way. So we probably, with increases in technology, have just under twice the oil the doomsayers think we have. That gives us a little more time to get off it, without having to go through the wars, starvation, etc. If we keep letting the Simmonses and Economideses convince us (and our society is SO willing to be convinced) that peak predictions are "the figments of the imaginations of born-again pessimist geologists", we will blow off this opportunity to move our energy to non-wasting assets (the sun shines and the wind blows whether we turn it into electricity or not - and will continue to do so until the sun novas - by which time, if homo sapiens still exists, they will have much more to worry about than whether or not to drive civilian models of military vehicles).

The guy who wrote The End of Oil (I don't remember his name, but he's associated with the Rocky Mountain Institute) said that fuel itself wasn't the problem - that between petroleum, natural gas, and coal (for synfuels) we could go for another century or so - it's the "atmosphere as carbon sink" situation.

My own opinion - just an opinion, mind you - is that using up a resource that takes millions of years to produce, whether it be in 1, 2, or 3 centuries, is stupid. It's worse that cutting down a 3500 year-old sequoia to make toilet paper - you can't get 3500 years worth of toilet paper from a 3500 year old tree, therefore it's a stupid use of an excellent carbon sink and oxygen generator. Petroleum and coal are wasting assets - and we are definitely wasting them. They sequestered carbon, and were doing a fine job of keeping excess carbon out of our atmosphere, to make breathing easier for us oxygen-breathing types. I want them to continue in that valuable work.

[Hogeye]

Free markets only work if everyone in them is free...

No, history shows that many people have enjoyed the prosperity and peace resulting from voluntary trade without totally free markets. The US, Western Europe, Japan, and now even China have enjoyed rising standards of living even though they have nothing close to free markets. A perfectly free market is like a perfectly crime-free world - a pure "theoretical" goal to be striven for rather than something that can be accomplished. Don't you agree that the following is more accurate: Markets work to the extent that peaceful and voluntary trade replaces aggression. Needless to say, the worst aggression hampering the market comes from States, as opposed to private criminal organizations.

As to private ownership of public resources, that's the "free market" scenario that enriches the few at the expense of the many until the resource is gone...

What you are calling "public resources" I would call "government owned pseudo-property." The phenomena you rightly denounce - the few with government-bestowed privilege making a killing and destroying the resource - has a catchier name: fascism. Apparently, we see the same phenomena - an unholy collusion of State and privileged special interests - but come to different conclusions about its cause.

To me, the State is the primary cause, with current rulers rent-seeking to score booty while in power. Someone in office for a short term has no incentive to look at the long run - "git while the gittin's good" as they say. If the govt pseudo-property were privately owned, the owner would have incentive to keep up the value of his property. But mining rights, logging rights, and water rights leased from the State generally end up damaged or ruined resources. Barbara, when you figure out why Weyerhauser uses modern sustainable forestry methods on land it owns in Arkansas, but "mines" trees on land leased from the USEmpire, you will understand what is going on. Private property provides good incentives; government provides perverse incentives. It's that simple.

[Doug]

Private property provides good incentives; government provides perverse incentives. It's that simple.

DOUG
From what we've seen of your responses on this forum, your view seems to be that private property provides incentives in so far as it mimics a small government. But if the government model is a good one in miniature, show that it would not work on a large scale. You have been unable to show this.

[Hogeye]

Your view seems to be that private property provides incentives in so far as it mimics a small government.

??? I have no idea where you got that idea. My view is that private property provides an incentive to the owner to protect its value, whereas government "property" eliminates such incentives. So-called government "property" reduces to either de-facto commons (resulting in the infamous tragedy of the commons, cf Grand Prairie aquafer), or an object of plunder for rent-seeking politicians, depending on how hands on the rulers are.

Perhaps you are saying that households or individuals who own property have a right to (or are able to) govern their property. This, of course, uses "govern" in a totally non-political sense. I suppose one could refer to a family as a "small government," but of course this has nothing to do with government in its usual political sense, i.e. a State. As I recall, you've had trouble distinguishing "government" qua State from "government" qua voluntary coordination before. Anarchists like me oppose the former and favor the latter.

[Doug]

Your view seems to be that private property provides incentives in so far as it mimics a small government.

??? I have no idea where you got that idea. My view is that private property provides an incentive to the owner to protect its value, whereas government "property" eliminates such incentives. So-called government "property" reduces to either de-facto commons (resulting in the infamous tragedy of the commons, cf Grand Prairie aquafer), or an object of plunder for rent-seeking politicians, depending on how hands on the rulers are.

DOUG
I have seen NO evidence that your assertions are correct. People have a great incentive to protect the value of their property right now. We see it every day. We have property owners on this list. I own two houses, one in Arkansas and one in Texas. I don't have any problem finding the incentive to protect my investments, yet I don't live in Ozarkia.

Perhaps you are saying that households or individuals who own property have a right to (or are able to) govern their property. This, of course, uses "govern" in a totally non-political sense. I suppose one could refer to a family as a "small government," but of course this has nothing to do with government in its usual political sense, i.e. a State. As I recall, you've had trouble distinguishing "government" qua State from "government" qua voluntary coordination before. Anarchists like me oppose the former and favor the latter.

DOUG
I think it is a false dichotomy to say that the "State" is opposed to voluntary coordination. There is a lot of that within the state too, but the state saves us a LOT of trouble. I don't want to have to organize my own fire department, my own police force, my own road crews, etc. I would not want to live in a society in which I had to bother with all of that. I would rather pay taxes and let professionals handle the tasks as well as the organization of those tasks.

In addition, I think just about everyone would agree with me on this.

[Hogeye]

Hogeye> My view is that private property provides an incentive to the owner to protect its value, whereas government "property" eliminates such incentives.

Doug> I have seen NO evidence that your assertions are correct. People have a great incentive to protect the value of their property right now. We see it every day. We have property owners on this list. I own two houses, one in Arkansas and one in Texas. I don't have any problem finding the incentive to protect my investments, yet I don't live in Ozarkia.

I don't get it. Your first sentence implies that you disagree with my assertions, but the rest of the paragraph agrees with my assertions. You, as a private owner, take better care of your property than government absentee owner bureaucrats and politicians in Washington DC would. You agree with me that you, the private property owner, have a great incentive to maintain the value of your property. (I don't understand what living in Ozarkia has to do with it, so I'll let that slide.) By government "property" I mean things like national forests, rivers and aquifers, federal buildings, and so on.

I think it is a false dichotomy to say that the "State" is opposed to voluntary coordination.

I didn't say that "the State" opposes voluntary coordination. No doubt the State would love for people to voluntarily submit to its predations! A State by definition (the standard socio-political definition attributed to Max Weber) is an organization with an effective monopoly on the legal use of force in a fixed geographic area, which gains its values predominantly by plunder rather than production. This is what anarchists fundamentally oppose. We don't (necessarily) oppose legal systems, or voluntarily following leaders, or fire departments, or police services, or roads. We do oppose criminal organisations (of which the State is a special case) which enforce coercive monopolies in these services.

I would rather pay taxes and let professionals handle the tasks as well as the organization of those tasks.

That old government solipotence again - you write as if it takes a State, and only a State, to do these things. Change one word in your comment, and I'd agree: I would rather pay fees and let professionals handle the tasks as well as the organization of those tasks. IOW I'd rather voluntarily pay (or not pay) voluntary organizations to do these things, rather than have a monopoly criminal organization in charge of them all, and take "fees" by brute force. That makes me an anarchist.

Doug, may I recommend this essay: In Defense of Anarchism by Robert Paul Wolff? You need a clue.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

The problem with the "voluntarily pay fees" to get services that are currently covered by taxes (an involuntary fee, to be sure, but one that was originally voted for and so approved, which takes a certain amount of the validity from the involuntary charge) is that there are too many out there who will not pay the fee while still enjoying the service. In fact, that's why many things that used to be handled privately are now handled publicly - as people see that you can enjoy the service without paying, fewer people voluntarily pay, until it reaches the point that the money is not enough to continue the service, even though some people are still paying for it. It only take a small percentage of non-compliers to screw up the whole "voluntary" plan - that 's why rationing in WWII had to become mandatory. They tried voluntary, but it didn't work.

[Dardedar]

The problem... there are too many out there who will not pay the fee while still enjoying the service.

DAR
Gee, but that sounds rather greedy Barbara. Imagine a whole country where such greed was considered a "virtue." If only we had a country to point to as a test case.

Somalia.

D.

[Hogeye]

That's called "the free-rider problem," Barbara. Some services are hard to limit to only paying customers. You apparently think aggression is a good solution. I disagree - if you can't get enough people to voluntarily pay for it, then don't do it. And/or try to find a non-violent way to reduce the number of free-riders. Your knee-jerk statist solution - use brute force - is immoral and uncivilized.

Another problem is that government itself has a free-rider problem - the biggest one of all. People use the State to grab goodies for themselves at other people's expense. People like benefits but dislike taxes. Government is the biggest, most brutal rob thy neighbor free-rider game there is.

[Dardedar]

People like benefits but dislike taxes.

DAR
Not me. I don't mind taxes at all. I think they should be higher. Warren Buffet agrees. And I love the benefits and think they are a bargain. Just another day in paradise. Just heard today that half of Mexico lives on $2 a day. Bet their taxes are low.

For those who don't like taxes and the benefits they provide, there is always Somalia experiment/option.

D.

[Hogeye]

LOL! You had me going for a second. You and I consider it absurd and funny, but believe or not some people really believe that plunder by government increases the standard of living.

[Dardedar]

LOL! You had me going for a second. You and I consider it absurd and funny,...

DAR
I guess I still have you going then, because I wasn't joking.

but believe or not some people really believe that plunder by government increases the standard of living.

DAR
Curious how countries with typically high taxes, Canada, Sweden, Japan etc. also have high standards of living and countries with low taxes and/or incompetent collection practices (Russia) also have high levels of disfunction and poverty. No doubt you have some bizarre answer for this just as you do for whenever your idealistic theories get tried in the real world and the results are the opposite of what you expect.

Taxes in the upper brackets are too low. I hope the Demo's get in and jack them up bigtime. Time to start some pay as we go.

D.

[Hogeye]

Curious how countries with typically high taxes, Canada, Sweden, Japan etc. also have high standards of living and countries with low taxes and/or incompetent collection practices (Russia) also have high levels of disfunction and poverty.

Some may draw an erroneous conclusion, that plunder is beneficial to the plundered. But we know better than to fall for the hasty generalization fallacy. We would look for better explanations, and no doubt include such factors as geography, culture, climate, natural resources, germs, and the historical context. E.g. In comparing the US and Somalia, we would certainly consider the fact that Somalia is a desert land with virtually no natural resources or sea ports. In looking at US wealth, we would note that the US had extremely low taxation for much of its history - in particular the period where it went from wilderness to a wealth surpassing it's original European colonizers.

Here's an article by Hans-Hermann Hoppe explaining why govt plunder harms people:

The Economics of Taxation

[Doug]

Here's an article by Hans-Hermann Hoppe explaining why govt plunder harms people...

DOUG
How is it "plunder" if it is legal and supported by the people?

Hogeye, do you think that ANY form of government taxation is NOT "plunder"?

[Hogeye]

How is it "plunder" if it is legal and supported by the people?

Merriam-Webster sez:
plunder - 1 a : to take goods by force
theft - 1 a : the act of stealing
stealing - 1 : to take the property of another wrongfully

It is plunder because it is the taking of someone else's propery without consent (by force or threat of such.) It is a moral thing, not (necessarily) a legal thing. Theft is theft, regardless of whether any particular legal system punishes it or how many people support it. Note: Many prefer the word "extortion" to describe taxation, since generally just the threat of dispossession/imprisonment induces people to pay the protection money.

Pardon me, but if I might make an observation - You seem to filter concepts through statist decree much like theists filter concepts through the Bible or the Pope. Can you not understand the concept of "theft" without reference to your holy rulers and their decrees? Can you not conceive of a natural law meaning of "theft" based on property and consent?

Do you think that ANY form of government taxation is NOT "plunder"?

No. All taxation is plunder. Taxation by definition is the involuntary taking of goods by government. To paraphrase Proudhon, taxation is robbery.

[Dardedar]

Hogeye>
No. All taxation is plunder. Taxation by definition is the involuntary taking of goods by government.

DAR
Then even by your definition my taxation is not plunder. I voluntarily pay my taxes and gladly. They can double them for all I care.

D.

[Hogeye]

So for you it's not a tax, but a gift. For many/most people it is non-consentual. If you want to find out how many, then make tax-paying voluntary and see how many pay.

Of course, we notice that you're playing fast and loose with quantifiers. What a fun game! Slavery is involuntary servitude. Uncle Tom liked his servitude. Therefore, slavery didn't exist. LOL!

[Dardedar]

DAR
Actually it is you who is playing fast and loose with the words, as per usual. First it's:

"All taxation is plunder. Taxation by definition is the involuntary taking of goods by government."

But when I refute this by saying that my taxes (like millions of people) are payed voluntarily, and gladly, you back track. Suddenly, according to your Ozarkian Humpty Dumpty dictionary, my taxes can no longer taxes, by definition:

"So for you it's not a tax, but a gift."

No, my taxes, are still taxes. Your definitions of words are bogus, strained and invented by rightwing hacks that swim in a sea of tortured language and you have picked this up and parrot it. This is childish and boring. I am on to better things.

D.