In a controlled burn, fire removes the weeds and undesirable undergrowth that choke out the more desirable grasses and plants. Removing those undesirable plants with a controlled burn provides space, conditions and nutrients for the surviving preferred plants to thrive. If weeds and undergrowth are allowed to accumulate unchecked, the whole ecosystem will be destroyed when a wildfire does break out.
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Originally Posted by I B Hankering
Having read
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed: ... by
Jared Diamond I'm aware of fire suppression
lt turns out that frequent small fires burn off the fuel load, and if you suppress those frequent small fires, then when eventually a fire is lit it may burn out of control far beyond one's ability to suppress it, resulting in the big disastrous fires in the U.S. Intermontane West. It turns out that the best way to deal with forest fires in the West is to let them burn, and burn out, and then there won't be a buildup of a fuel load resulting in a disaster.
But these huge forest fires were something with which eastern Americans and Europeans had no prior experience. The idea that you should let a fire burn, and destroy valuable forest, was so counter-intuitive that it took the U.S. Forest Service a hundred years to realize the problem and to change the strategy and let the fire burn. So here's an example of how a society with no prior experience of a problem may not even recognize the problem — the problem of fuel loads in the understory of a dry forest.
https://www.edge.org/conversation/ja...rous-decisions
Similarly, Adam Smith advocated that government does have a role in free enterprise and that that role is to insure that all competitors are competing on a level playing field. Illegals disadvantage wage earning American citizens in much the same way that weeds choke out preferred grasses.
Originally Posted by I B Hankering
https://www.theglobalist.com/adam-sm...ists-of-labor/
Yet no sensible economist would disagree that the free movement of a factor of production is efficiency-enhancing. For the same reason that the movement of labor from Virginia to California is good for the global economy, the movement of labor from Mexico to the United States must also be good.
The differential treatment of cross-border movement of labor and capital among free-market economists exposes the flaw of an incomplete, or not fully consistent, argument. If free movement of one factor of production (labor) can be limited when it is in the interests of a certain political community, there is no reason why a different political community may not limit the free movement of another factor (capital) if it judges that to be in its interest.
All of economics is then seen as a subject of negotiation and bargaining between different groups of people:
Imposing price controls is not fundamentally different from limiting the free flow of capital or labor. But if we care about global welfare and take economic theory seriously, they should all be free.