- It is possible and probable that negligent owners can still misallocate resources to less than maximum profit and still make a slight profit.
Yes, but their returns would be so low compared to everyone else (by necessity, since they misallocate resources) that they couldn’t raise funds and couldn’t innovate. As everybody else has who access to capital gets more efficient due to technological progress, they would have to use larger and larger shares of their ‘gold mine’ rents to maintain their infrastructure, while commodity prices go down because of progress. Eventually they’ll go broke and have to sell the resource. This is one of the basic processes of capitalism, that leads to resources being in the hands of those who use them efficiently. Lefties have a problem with that process, because they only see how poor farmers lose their homes to greedy bankers, see Capitalism: A Love Story. But all his this talk about underutilized resources is kind of besides the point, see next paragraph.
- Moreover, outright owners of valued resources can allow these resources to sit idle without threat of going broke.
- For example, environmentalists acquire Saudi oil to prevent drilling.
Now you’re talking about owners of resources who just plain don’t feel like exploiting them. There would be plenty of examples of that, in fact most people wouldn’t use their land to the fullest economic benefit. So there would be underutilized resources. So what? I see no reason this translates into low defenses. If someone is rich enough to forgo profits, he probably has the spare money for defenses.
But all this talk about underutilized resources and defenses is kind of besides the point anyways. Because there wouldn’t need to be defenses at all. So let’s just assume that no resource would be defended at all. You can ignore this post until here. Now you still have the task of showing that in a stateless society there would be a war for resources, i.e. that it’s profitable to steal resources. But nobody would go through the expense of maintaining a large military force to steal resources. It’s just not a profitable business model. I think I made a pretty solid argument that there wouldn’t be any sort of PDA with a significant military force, here and here. You directed me to this thread as a response, but I can’t really find anything that addresses that. (But the thread is long, so I guess I wouldn’t find it if it were here.)
As I mentioned in the other thread, having resources isn’t really that profitable any more. And it will become less profitable in the future. Pretty much all commodity prices in the free market go down, the real money is in manufacturing, knowledge, service, ideas, not natural resources. In the future owning resources will not be the kind of ‘gold mine’ you expect it to be.
I’m actually inclined to agree with your other argument, that constitutional republicanism is supposed to be cage where the power-hungry can consume themselves in constant competition for limited power while under our gaze. And that we might have a problem in anarchy because those people would be doing some destructive busywork. But the theory that there would be wars about resources; not so much. I would rather try to make the argument that anarchism possesses enough checks and balances to keep the power-hungry under control, that would be a much more realistic argument than the one about wars for oil fields.