Doug Casey & Tom Woods: Is limited government an oxymoron?

Curious. Are you stating that by opposing the civil war (back in the day) you were hindering those that wanted to stop the spread of slavery?

I am not sure you can factually argue that. From what I have read and understand about the era slavery wasn't going to expand to other states with or with out the war. It seems to me that it was politically hemmed in.

The emancipation proclamation didn't free any slaves in the union. Only the slaves in confederate controlled areas, even parishes in Louisiana were not emancipated.

I am not tom Delorenzo claiming tariffs started the war, but I vaguely remember the mainstream Lincoln worshipers claiming the south got jumpy because Kansas (I think it was) went to some northern free soil people and didn't become a slave state. That in fact secession started because the south felt they need to just to protect their "right" to own slaves.

Here's my crazy thought, what would have happened if crazy, I mean prudent, Lincoln didn't provoke the attack ft Sumter (in which no was killed)? Wasn't there only 7 states that had seceded at that point? I think there is much to be said for diplomacy that wasn't said at the time. Slavery's goose was cooked and I don't think it was worth 600,000 lives to get it cleared up 10 years earlier. Don't get me wrong slavery is aweful, but its not the same as the death and destruction that comes from war.

I never claim to be an expert on this just because there is so much propaganda an emotion around this war. But I would like it to make sense, which is hard to do unless you understand the context of it all at the time.

Saddam Hussein enslaved an entire nation. Because our leaders did not approve of the form of government that existed under his rule, they believed themselves justified in causing the deaths of a million innocent people and the displacement of a couple of million more.

The Confederate States of America was a sovereign nation born out of secession (as was the Union, for that matter -- or would you prefer we were all still speaking English :-) ). We did not approve of some aspects of their government or laws so we thought it justified to kill thousands of innocent people to force them to conform to our model. Two wrongs do not make a right. Slavery is wrong. So is murder. A moral person does not choose murder as a tool to end slavery.

Actions have consequences which ripple through the space-time continuum forever. You reap what you sow. There is a tremendous amount of bad Karma out there. In prosecuting the Civil War, Lincoln set some very bad precedents which hurt all Americans, black and white, today: Suspension of Habeas Corpus, inflating the currency, raising taxes, conscription, jailing and in some cases even killing dissidents. We are all of us, black, white, yellow, red, brown, spiritually and materially poorer, today because the Civil War was fought. If the principles of liberty and morality that the abolitionists had kept in their hearts were adhered to by everyone since the beginning of the human race, slavery would have never existed, and, for that matter, neither would have any form of tyranny ever existed.

Before you go condemning abolitionists for being "impractical idealists," remember that without their moral guidance, ending slavery never would have occurred, no matter how many brutal wars were fought to "preserve the Union" or whatever lame excuse is used to justify murder.

All evils must be purged from our thoughts and actions. Until that happens to a much larger degree than at present, slavery and tyranny will not end.

First of all technology is knowledge applied to resources. For most of human history, the resources that we are used up over the last 200 years or so just sat in the ground. We had resources, but we did not have the knowledge that allowed us to extract them and reshape them into value to humans, so we did not have technology. If we run out of or can't extract resources fast enough, then we have knowledge but not resources, so we don't have technology. There may be some improvement in efficiency of resource use as a result of better knowledge, but this is limited by the laws of nature, so as resources deplete we lose technology.

There are two major problems with extraction of finite energy sources. The first is the "low hanging fruit" principle or the cost curve. We always use the easiest to exploit energy resources first. With oil for example, the biggest, shallowest, purest, most proximate deposits were used first because the smallest, deepest, dirtiest, most remote made less profits and were avoided. The amount of energy that it takes to find new oil has been doubling about every 20 to 25 years. When it doubled the first time it went from 1% to 2%, so who noticed. But if you follow the progression (1%, 2%, 4%, 8%, 16%, 32%, 64% and then 100%) eventually it takes so much energy to find new oil that the pursuit ends. Each form of energy has its own curve, so each becomes impractical to pursue.

The second is the production curve. It has been demonstrated by studying the pattern of oil production that it follows a bell curve. Oil is produced by drilling multiple wells into fields. This produces a pattern of increasing production until a peak is reached at which time production from the field begins to decline until eventually production falls to uneconomical levels. This is not only true of individual oil fields, but also of oil producing nations and will be true for the world as a whole. There are more oil producing nations now in decline than nations that can still increase production. It is a simple mathematical application to determine that worldwide oil production is at peak, give or take a few years. New discoveries are constantly being made, and oil production lags discoveries by a few decades. So if you look at what has been discovered over the last few decades you can determine what future production will be, and discoveries peaked a few decades ago. You hear plenty of good news about new discoveries, but none have been sufficient to replace oil fields that are being depleted.

I used oil for an example, but the same is true of natural gas, and of uranium.

The significance of these two problems in extraction of finite energy resources is that they predict decreasing energy production in the future. There is a point in time when energy available to us declines no matter what we do, and that means continuous economic contraction. Once we are in decline, there is not enough energy to even keep us all alive, much less invest in alternatives which are renewable. And of course, nobody has yet found a source or renewable energy that can even come close to replacing the nonrenewable sources. Most of the things that are touted as saving us actually uses as much energy as they produce if not more. Ethanol and biodiesel have been demonstrated to use more energy to produce that they contain with the exception of sugar cane ethanol in Brazil which is a very limited source. Solar electricity is marginal. Wind generated electricity seems to produce more energy than it consumes, but because it is intermittent there must be backup facilities, when taken into account make wind generated electricity marginal. Hydrogen takes more energy to produce than is in the hydrogen. Nuclear has limitations, and it seems that we do not now have sufficient conventional energy to even produce the hundreds of nuclear plants that would be necessary to replace declining hydrocarbon sources.

My own conclusion is that we face a bleak economic future, and the wolf is already at the door. If we returned to a free market economy (fat change) it would alter who the economic survivors are to be, and might change production somewhat, but if you don't have adequate energy, then production will fall. I think of it like the Titanic. Seats on the lifeboats were passed out to first class passengers first. If the system of allocating the seats had changed, say to first come, first serve, then the people who survived would have been changed somewhat, but because seats were limited, the overall death toll would have been almost the same.