Pattern-chaser wrote: ↑December 12th, 2021, 10:21 am
A childish example: everyone's 'fair share' of a finite pie is $10. A man finds $1000, and takes it. Now, 99 of his neighbours cannot feed or clothe their families, because the pie is finite.
You appear to have entirely ignored my last couple of posts.
No, wealth is not finite. It is unlimited, or limited only by human imagination. Natural resources are not wealth, until they are discovered, recovered, and transformed into useful products (aviation fuel from crude oil, dimension lumber from trees, steel beams from iron ore, etc.). The Earth, and thus the natural resources it offers, is finite, but we are nowhere near approaching that limit for any of them (also, keep in mind that what we count as a "resource" depends upon the technologies available to us, as well as the demand for the products it can yield). That the Earth is finite is a non-issue.
Nor is everyone's "fair share" of the Earth's resources an equal share. That would only be the case if everyone had an equal claim to those resources, such as the kids previously mentioned to portions of Mom's apple pie, who baked it for all of them. The Earth, however, is not a gift from anyone to anyone. It just
is, it is
res nullius, not owned "as is" by anyone, and no one has any
a priori claim to any of it, any more than anyone has an
a priori claim to, say, an iron-bearing asteroid in the asteroid belt. No one will have any valid claim to the latter until someone lands on it, explores it, and sets up a mining operation. Likewise, no one has any valid "share" of the Earth, until they have discovered it and occupied it or begun to derive some benefits from it. These
a priori entitlements you assume are baseless and vacuous.
And, of course, if the Behemoth Co. discovers, say, a manganese nodule on the ocean floor, develops an economic method of recovering and refining the metals in it, and puts those products on the market, no one is thereby prevented from feeding their families, or deprived of anything else. Not only did they not derive any benefit from the nodule before its discovery, and hence lost nothing, but 99% of them would never have discovered it, or even looked for it.
The equal shares you imagine are based on one (or maybe both) of two assumptions: 1), that Earth is "Gift from God to mankind in common" (Locke's words), or 2), that all mankind are signatories to some sort of "social contract" which allots equal shares of the Earth to everyone. Both of those assumptions are false.