“Nothing is more fatal to a realistic and usable understanding of resources than the failure to differentiate between the constants of natural science and the relatives of social science, between the totality of the universe or of the planet earth … and … the ever-changing resources of a given group of people at a given time and place…. One has but to recall some of the most precious resources of our age—electricity, oil, nuclear energy—to see who is right, the exponent of the static school who insists that ‘resources are,’ or the defender of the dynamic, functional, operational school who insists that ‘resources become.’”
– Erich Zimmermann, World Resources and Industries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), p. 11.
Resource optimists are continually rewarded by oil and gas drillers. One can only imagine what world production would be like if private property rights and profit/loss entrepreneurship were the norm as it is in much of the United States.…