Why hasn't there been more concern, given how equilibrium imbalance affects both original wealth sources and their dependent markets? Alas, we can't directly observe, when common pools of public revenue potential are subjected to too many takers and competing activities. Further, no one knows when hard limits to public subsidies for applied knowledge, may actually go into effect.
In the meantime, who has incentive to reduce the price making which has come to dominate so much economic activity in general? Those earlier concerns which both Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. once held regarding budgetary deficits, have largely vanished. Yet nothing productive has transpired in fiscal policy which justifies that lack of concern. In all of this, price making has become the preferred option for individuals and institutions alike, to get things done. Even so, at the level of general equilibrium, public revenue is like oceans becoming overfished, once price making becomes the standard for economic engagement.
Whereas in tradable sector activity, resource limits are generally more obvious. Perhaps this explains why physical extraction catches a lot more heat, than revenue subsidy extraction. For tradable sector activity, sustainability is often expressed as what the earth appears capable of. Yet we completely lack any moral equivalent, in terms of what societies expect long term of their pooled revenue sources. Just the same, postponed debt obligations could well prove as problematic for future generations, as extractive behaviours which negatively impact physical environments.
Granted, extractive processes are vital as important sources of wealth origination. After all, they create a myriad of economic possibilities which otherwise would not be feasible, due to the extensive scale which is sometimes required. What matters, however, is the pace at which extraction occurs and is managed. When does extraction preserve wealth, and when does wealth end up destroyed in the process?
By way of example, Nameless Towns provides a history of the no holds barred extraction approach, which was earlier taken by sawmill companies in East Texas. Even though local pine forests were finally replenished afterward, those beautiful and ancient old growth forests were completely logged out, first. The entire area suffered greatly afterward, while many temporary communities simply disappeared. Thad Sitton and James Conrad explain:
Most companies saw no alternative to a policy of cut out and get out. Since the Southern lumber boom had begun during the 1870s, companies had bought stumpage rights to blocks of timberland along the new railroads, built mills and tramway systems, and cut their virgin pine groves as fast and efficiently as they could. Buying land made no sense to most companies, since regeneration of pines on cut-over land seemed a dubious possibility, and in any case the next marketable crop of marketable saw timber remained at least a third of a century away. And that would be three and a half decades of paying for land, paying for taxes on land, paying for more careful logging to protect the seedlings, paying for thinning the hardwoods so the pines would not lose the competition for sunlight - money spent with no return and no assurance that the person setting the policy would ever live to see the trees turned into profit...
Far better to keep operations clean and simple, most lumbermen believed - to buy stumpage, build temporary towns, cut out, and move on. Besides, the cheap lumber prices of competitors following these policies discouraged other companies' experiments with land ownership, "selective harvesting" and "silviculture", as did the Southern traditions of the "open range" which allowed landowners only limited control of their own lands. Northern lumberman had discovered to their consternation soon after locating to East Texas that Southern customs gave anyone the right to trespass, hunt, fish, and run stock on the lands of anyone else...When pressed, local courts often supported these informal usufruct rights.So why compare government fiscal realities to an extractive story such as this? Present day national fiscal capacity has made possible the use of a vast store of high quality knowledge. But what could happen to this wealth and immeasurable value, should it face too many demands and too few sources of willing replenishment? Replenishment depends on time value for resource maintenance - maintenance which by its nature lacks full monetary compensation, as illustrated above. Replenishment requires forms of immediate reciprocity which society as a whole, may lack the patience to provide. Who is willing to work for small wages unless they have absolutely no choice? Would such patience only emerge, if and when it were completely necessary, once a high volume extraction system for knowledge can no longer be maintained? Only consider the propensity of current political parties to spend as much as possible, so long as they are the ones in control of the public purse.
It can be difficult to contemplate solutions for long term fiscal sustainability, once everyone gets caught in the struggle over access to the public revenue commons. How would governments and private interests alike proceed, should their public commons disappear? Hopefully, greater patience for reciprocity and long term sustainability can be found, before these reserves dwindle even further.
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