----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
It also suggests a notion of efficiency that reflects very short-term changes. Of course, investors can't see into the future, but their expectations are formed on the basis of extremely volatile and temporary bits of news. What has really changed in the long-term prospects for oil to justify price swings of 300-400%? Not much, really. We've got a pretty good idea of reserves, consumption, and the atmosphere's absorptive powers, and all those crazy price swings really hamper the social capacity to plan rationally. Doug ======================== Makes a mockery of the fetish of price stability, no? http://www.blackmask.com/books34c/enprice.htm#1_0_3 The Engineers and The Price System Thorstein Veblen In point of material welfare, all the civilized peoples have been drawn together by the state of the industrial arts into a single going concern. And for the due working of this inclusive going concern it is essential that that corps of technological specialists who by training, insight, and interest make up the general staff of industry must have a free hand in the disposal of its available resources, in materials, equipment, and man power, regardless of any national pretensions or any vested interests. Any degree of obstruction, diversion, or withholding of any of the available industrial forces, with a view to the special gain of any nation or any investor, unavoidably brings on a dislocation of the system; which involves a disproportionate lowering of its working efficiency and therefore a disproportionate loss to the whole, and therefore a net loss to all its parts. And all the while the statesmen are at work to divert and obstruct the working forces of this industrial system, here and there, for the special advantage of one nation and another at the cost of the rest; and the captains of finance are working, at cross purposes and in collusion, to divert whatever they can to the special gain of one vested interest and another, at any cost to the rest. So it happens that the industrial system is deliberately handicapped with dissension, misdirection, and unemployment of material resources, equipment, and man power, at every turn where the statesmen or the captains of finance can touch its mechanism; and all the civilized peoples are suffering privation together because their general staff of industrial experts are in this way required to take orders a'nd submit to sabotage at the hands of the statesmen and the vested interests. Politics and investment are still allowed to decide matters of industrial policy which should plainly be left to the discretion of the general staff of production engineers driven by no commercial bias. [snip]
