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Yes, but it's the framing and it's connection to reality that needs to be clarified.

If you frame the environment as half the source of all prosperity - which ultimately it is, being the source of all raw materials and energy inputs - you can cost the value of resources of every type more realistically than if you count products of raw resources in terms of their nominal economic utility.

This is why biofuels are such a fiasco. In terms of natural prosperity economics they're not just barely cheaper, if at all, than oil, they're shuffling deck chairs around by taking energy from one place - food production - and moving it to another.

Natural prosperity accounting would make shifts like these explicit and central, not peripheral and easy to disguise.

Of course you still have to account for more conventional utility. But the equation becomes:

value = resource taxes (including energy inputs) x innovation multiplier x human conscription ('work') x desirability x profit

In a natural prosperity economy, the only true source of profit is the innovation multiplier, so traditional corporate profit - which is 'rent' paid on 'capital' - will have to be eliminated.

Infinitely renewable resources, or intellectual and creative products which use no physical resources at all, will pay no resource taxes. Extremely scarce items will pay very high taxes. If - and only if - ways are found to make them less scarce, the taxes can be lowered.

Desirability engineering can be used to create demand, but it should be valued less than original innovation.

And I don't agree with the use of land as a key resource. It's certainly one key resource, but it's also a return to a feudalism of sorts.

If I happen to find a gold-mine under my house the value of my land increases dramatically, and accounted for - and probably taxed - accordingly.

Value of land is a very contingent concept, which is why it can't be counted as a primary resource.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Fri Mar 14th, 2008 at 07:31:09 AM EST
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