Are we really running out of helium?

As a result, the true cost of these new resources is greater than it appears, and furthermore the external costs in our poorer health, the destruction of our environment, and the corruption of our political system, make up a greater portion of the total cost of the resource, than previous methods of extraction. There is no reason to believe this trend will reverse.

[1] Complain all you want that this isn't "true" capitalism. I don't care. The fact is we've decided that pricing these externalities directly into the market is too hard or has too much overhead, and so we patched over it with laws. If you want to change that, go ahead and try, but don't advocate weakening legislation to force someone to deal with these externalities until after you're successful.

What is more often the case: a regulation coming into form to protect the consumer from the evils of corporations, or that regulation actually forming to protect an entrenched corporation against competitors?

We, as a society, all make up the market. When you put a monopoly power in control over it--i.e. a government--you open the door to abuse of that power, as there is no alternative. You create a single point of failure for society.

Even as early as Henry Ford (in positing that greater leisure time for workers was good for the business as well, as it increased per-hour productivity and created a larger consumer class), we see capitalists bucking such simplistic and reductive thinking. Also, the only modern movements towards reducing working hours lately has been from private industry as well.

I don't think there is any principle to any study of government or economics that says what you have said. Government has the capacity to enforce laws. Beyond that, what those laws are, for whose benefit they are written, that's not guaranteed. To hope that a government will adopt a certain policy for humanitarian reasons is wishful thinking.

But, if you can make an economic case for a certain policy, then it becomes much, much harder for people--either businesses or governments--to ignore.

It also has the capacity to be a great deal stupider, because it lacks the immediate feedback of the market spanking it.

It is not sufficient to just wave the word government at a problem. You need to do a full analysis of the incentives and demonstrate they are better. Just as raw capitalism has the obvious problems of a short-term focus, being driving by money above all else, and the issues of externalities being imposed on others, governments have the obvious problems of regulatory capture by interest groups, internal bureaucratic inefficiencies, creating high-level administrators who don't particularly care about the problem and just use the regulations as tokens in a war of turf-building, and being driven by politics above all else. And that's just the high-level table-of-contents of the problems both can have.

Governments are perfectly capable of deciding that up is down, blue is red, and don't you DARE question them or you're unpatriotic and we're going to lock you up, and they're amazingly capable of retaining these beliefs for far beyond their best-by dates because they have the power to just bull through whatever problems may arise (until they suddenly run out).

In the particular case of a supply problem it is not at all clear to me that letting the normal mechanisms of supply and demand handle it is that catastrophic... these issues happen all the time and you don't even notice. Again, let me emphasize, this happens daily. It's what the markets deal with. It's not like this is some bizarre scientific theory, it's to the level of engineering. We do it all the time.

Only if you're applying favorable "principles" to government but not doing the same for the market. If you're treating government as a black box that acts as a perfect aggregate of the population's preferences, then yes, it can maximize economic efficiency (or probably accomplish whichever other goal you have, like egalitarianism, utilitarianism, etc.). But if you do that, it's only fair to treat the market as a black box that does exactly the same thing.

Of course, neither the government nor the market can act as a perfect aggregate of the population's preferences.

> The government can, in principle, just arbitrarily decide that maybe, just maybe, we need to care about surviving for longer than next fiscal quarter or at least try and not create ourselves a hell on Earth.

To use your example, the market can also in principle just arbitrarily decide that maybe, just maybe, we need to care about surviving for longer than next fiscal quarter or at least try and not create ourselves a hell on Earth. There's no rule in the market that says a rich capitalist, or even a group of private companies, can't just spend a bunch of resources on whatever you're talking about.

That may be true, but the US had a "strategic helium reserve" that we decided to sell off for no reason I can discern. I have more trust in people who are trying to maximize the amount of money they make than Congressman who can be bought and sold more easily than helium.

Please do not speak for others.

"businesses in bed with politicians"

Isn't that a failure of the law system or, more general, "our democracy" itself? Some corrupt company in XY has no ties with you but government has (at least that's the theory). So how come government (i.e., the people there) is still getting paid by your taxes while they are clearly not acting on your behalf?

Blaming capitalism is like blaming the guy who slept with your wife instead of blaming your wife (and most probably you should also blame yourself to some extent).

"For businesses, it's a tool like any other, to use in competing on the market."

Well, for the businesses receiving a subsidy it's clearly a tool while the businesses and people paying for it much less so.

To sum up, the subsidies you talk about are neither "capitalistic" nor "democratic" so we shouldn't derive conclusions about capitalism or democracy here.

We can very well derive conclusions about the current economic system called "free market" and the current political system called "democracy" but we should agree on the definition first.

"Blow out the candles! Blow them out, quick!"

In the past we fished at sustainable levels because we were incapable of fishing to extinction. WWF (http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/blue_planet/problems/pr...) say we're taking 2-3 times the volume of fish from the oceans as is sustainable.

I presume the leakage loss in storage also raises the price of Helium. People buy propane just-in-case knowing they can store it forever while helium is a "buy it before you use it" kind of thing.

The point was it was amusing to see someone suggest that private transport was the essential point of oil, so that if prices increased, it would just mean worse private transport. When of course, at those levels, it would mean the end of wide-spread private transportation as such (and the end of american urbanization as its currently known).

For comparison, Norway is larger than Arizona, with a smaller population (or a bit larger than New Mexico and a bit smaller than Montana, with a much higher population than those two - so clearly you do have some areas that truly are rural enough for public transport to be hard to do right; then again, California is not that much larger, and most of California still has an atrocious public transit system...).

Yes, there certainly are areas where you can't really get by without a car, in Norway, so it's not like I'm expecting public transport to be viable everywhere in Arizona either. But in Norway that's because very few people live there. Just like the US low overall population density is largely down to vast practically empty areas. "Nobody" cares if there's no public transport in the middle of Alaska, or in the rural parts of states like New Mexico and Montana that have low population density to start with, and are pretty much "empty" outside a few cities.

And oil is not the explanation - most of Norways public transport system predates the oil exploration, and was built at a time when Norway was far less wealthy than the US.

The ten lowest density US states have lower average population density than Norway, but they "only" house about 12 million people. And even for the rest of the country, most of the low density states still have higher density clusters. The top ten states house about 170 million people, with an aggregate population density of around 200 per square mile - far above places like Norway.

It other words: Distance is an excuse. It's down to politics and a culture centered around the car.

Sure, public transport will never cover 100% of journeys, but that's not the point.

There was an incident in my area several years ago where a rebreather diver missed a step in his pre-dive checks and jumped off the boat with his oxygen valve off. By the time he swam to the anchor line he had consumed most of the oxygen in the loop (while probably not noticing the alarms), passed out, and drowned. That was user error but the fact remains that if he had been using open circuit gear, a simple error like jumping off the boat with a closed tank valve almost certainly wouldn't have killed him.