HOUSE AFFIRMS NEED FOR SOUND SCIENCE AT EPA

I do not know why you praise this work so much. It appears to be a quasi-intellectual compillation (one l, not two) of thoughts, with widespread misunderstanding of ecomomics. Here is an example:

So, you are the judge of who is o(or isn’t) an intellectual. How characteristic.

This book will refer to factor inputs that are collected without payment as zero-priced goods.

One could also say that one has unlimited wealth, or endowment, of this good. Price is an artifact of an exchange: no exchange, no price. The author continues to confuse "price" and "worth."

First of all, nothing is unlimited, except for perhaps the universe. Strike one. So, you could “say” that, but it would be pointless. I have had half a dozen economists read this book. None have had a problem with these semantics but you, and I have to say it is typical. But then, this is not an economics book, it is an environmental book and this thread is about environmental policy. Interestingly, I have never seen you participate in a single environmental thread. Perhaps this indicates some other interest in this matter?

Zero-priced goods include:

1. Goods sufficiently plentiful that a discrete pricing mechanism is too costly to consider. What on earth is discrete pricing mechanism? But, surely, this sounds intellectual.

Businesses don’t quantify air into units until it is captured (an expenditure), then it earns units cubic feet or whatever. The units are then discrete and the cost assigned by unit. That is a discrete pricing mechanism.

2. Goods sufficiently difficult to contain that a pricing mechanism is mechanically impossible.

This suggestes that for other goods there is such a thing as mechanics of pricing?

Indeed there are, maybe not in the theory you studied but in real production. People price goods by their physical attributes or mechanical behavior. Some goods are difficult to price by virtue of that behavior, because they are difficult to control or have other confounding physical attributes. The is especially true of the “services” provided by ecological assets, for example the way birds spread and fertilize seed (it’s an environmental book).

Consider air. I buy a compressor, turn it on, and fill the tank. I now have an asset that is “sold” as a utility inside production plants. We measure the quantity of air used and assign the cost by cubic foot to specific operations within the plant as a utility. We don’t pay for the use of air or its condition, we sue the guy who fills it with dust or run to government for dust regulations and the people next to the plant don’t want oil vapor or odors in the exhaust.

Now look at the environmental problem with continuous goods, such as water. We pay the guy who buys a pump, drills a well, connects a pipe, and delivers the water for “water.” We charge fees to users of dams and aqueducts for the cost of construction and operation. We don’t pay the guy who buys a water collector and underground storage unit only when the water collector and storage unit is land even though HOW he uses those assets controls the condition, availability, and the amount of deliverable water.

Historically, groundwater or rain has been considered a public good, as an asset with a public claim on its use. Unfortunately, by doing that, we have created a socialized commons that is increasingly being used to control the use of private property and often for corrupt purposes. 3. Goods without identified economic worth or use.

Again, confusion of price and worth.

As if goods without worth have a price? Don’t be silly. Strike two.

4. Goods with positive and negative worth

I do not think there is such a think as signed worth.

Strike three. Ask your banker if he has ever heard of “net worth”? A good with negative worth is something people don’t want and pay to get rid of. Not a few goods are “sold” for less than the price of delivery. Use your imagination.

so closely balanced that their net market value does not justify a pricing mechanism.

Again, worth and price.

Saying it again doesn’t prove anything.

Ownership of zero-priced goods is typically not defined or enforced by contract. As opposed to other goods? No ownership is enforced by a a contract.

Good point, thank you, your first. Perhaps a better word would have been “through” or “via.” I am certain that the difference is a major distinction and that anyone reading it would be confused, not.

Their economic value value as defined by whom? whose value?

Now you are just playing to be argumentative, still in character.

is considered equivalent to the cost of collection, Again, confusion of cost (expenditure) and worth.

The goal of the book is to develop a business structure that (among other things) objectively calculates the financial risk associated with losing an asset with currently intangible “worth.” Once one has a cost one is in a better position to discuss a price for a service that manages that asset. One also has opportunity to market the manner in which that asset offsets risks elsewhere.

“Worth” as independent from price is a subjective and situational concept. Discussions of “worth” were more characteristic of my communist econ prof who used such things to justify all sorts of socialist policies by “worth” as evidence of market failure. Perhaps that is consistent with your uncharacteristic interest in this topic.

containment, and preparation for use. That they are intrinsically valuable is not in dispute; a person certainly needs air to breathe, and a commercial fisherman needs an ocean but, in practice, we pay little to nothing for them.

This is because we are already endowed with that "good."

Endowed, really? We aren’t expressing an opinion or preference as fact are we? No, they are commons. Once a commons exists as if it is endowed it is abused because there is no price for use. People complain, to government. Government regulates. I think you prefer things that way. Politically dominant interests, those who profit by civic control of resources, usually do.

Unfortunately, regulation of the use of commons is sufficient power to control the entire economy. This is why regulation of commons is of particular interest to the UN. I have no interest in seeing the most corrupt governance on earth acquire control of global commons. So I designed a business method that is capable of pricing the use of commons, objectively and without the need to claim direct ownership. In essence I add the time domain to the legal description of bounded regions using transfer functions. The manner in which the state of commons is transformed by either productive use or natural assets is then calculable. This is particularly handy because there is a lot of available software and mathematics to help us learn how to improve the accuracy and capability of the system at ever lower cost.

So, although you say we are endowed with commons, the associated misunderstanding of what property really is (a bounded process reactor in the time domain), is being used to slowly enslave us. Now, I wonder why you should advocate such?

Few individuals attempt to own them because the cost of control exceeds the benefits of restricting use by private ownership.

I fail to see why this would impress you. Could to tell us?

I’ll be generous and think well enough of your intelligence to assume that this is your typically sarcastic BS. I don’t think you fail to see it at all. My conclusion is partly based upon the fact that you have showed up on an environmental thread and partly the result of having observed your posts elsewhere for some time. I have never seen you express an interest in environmental policy, not once, as you instead prefer to bash people on threads dealing with issues of interest to Israel. So, let’s analyze why bashing free market environmental regulation be of interest to one with such parochial interests and perhaps you will see why this book is important.

Israel needs US support. It therefore needs the US to have a strategic interest in the Middle East. Dependency upon imported oil certainly accomplishes that. The only thing that maintains that dependency is environmental regulation. Interestingly, the Saudis have a common interest with Israel in that regard.

Now, I am not saying that you as an individual are taking this position for that purpose, nor am I bashing the interests of either Israel or Saudi Arabia. I am showing you that assigning monopoly control of access to resources to government confounds all technical decisions with political interests. It breeds distrust. The issues are too complex to decipher every hidden agenda much less deal with the simply enormous number of variables and unique circumstances inherent to environmental decisions. The issues are technical, the decision-makers are not, and everybody then buys the expert opinions to serve their ends, especially government, which has made a simply enormous investment monopolizing that power base using the public schools and universities. That process biases all science into a set of subjective beliefs that government and universities are the seat of all knowledge and the only disinterested parties capable of instituting effective and sustainable policies. Central planning by bureaucracies and universities dependent on government and tax-exempt foundations for handouts is certainly no way to run ecology and will not work for any better than it did in running the Soviet economy and for much the same reasons.

So in the interest of saving what is left of private property and free markets, we need a workable alternative to civic regulation. Without it we are doomed to a fate worse than the old Soviet Union. Not many people have tried and most of those had an agenda or dependent affiliation. I don’t. I have an unusually broad range of experience but I don’t claim to be an expert at any specialty. Not a few resource professionals, academic biologists, politicians, and business people, interests usually at diametric odds on environmental issues, say that the existing system is broken, the data I provide is honest, and the system I have created has merit. That’s why it’s important, if nothing else because there is precious little out there in the way of choices.

BTW, a getting a new product and a new process inrtoduced in a backward industry is harder than grad school.

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