At 11:16 AM 10/4/01 -0400, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>You don't make the rest of the world richer by taking away everything
>that we have. That is a zero sum worldview typical of lefties who don't
>understand economics.
It depends. There's this island where a guy with a gun and a title rounded
up all the shovels. A hundred other guys who'd like to work their plots of
land can't do so, because the guy won't let them use the shovels. One day
they get together and take his gun and shovels from him and start digging
their gardens. A year later, there's all this extra produce from
Non-Zero-sum Island.
There's another island where a lone genius with a gun and a machine he
built himself out of old clams that makes shovels, which he keeps locked
up. Same story, by the end.
Now Mike will object that the guy with the shovels would never be so stupid
as to act this way. He's always rented those shovels out and earned a fair
slice of the work of the digging guys. Not only that, but on the day the
digging guys come and take away his shovels they just use them to build
sand castles and everyone starves.
Lots of islands, lots of stories.
Damien Broderick
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