[0] https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/the_gist_of_jul.htm...
Henry George, if he were still alive today, would probably say that valuable raw mineral deposits like this would be more likely to be discovered and brought into productive use earlier if they were taxed. The argument being that people would have no reason to speculate on a large untapped reserve of it. There would still be an incentive to bring it into production because the earned profit would be made through extraction, processing, and distribution of the material even if the higher holding cost of the land is factored in as a cost.
I think the analogy doesn’t quite work. Humans produce chickens because we can do that. We find more lithium because we need it. Jayhawks can also evolve to get better at finding more chickens. And by their very nature, have been doing exactly that.
What I’m mainly pointing to is that we can’t currently just mass produce lithium. We just go around looking for it more.
> when a particular resource becomes scarcer, its price increases, and that change incentivizes people to discover more of the resource, ration it, recycle it, or develop a substitute for it. As such, population growth and resource use do not automatically lead to higher commodity prices in the long run.
So no, we can't mass produce lithium, but a high enough price might drive someone to discover a substitute.