Monday 6 October 2014

Fun Online Polls: Exploding pavements & Carnivorous animals

The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

How many pavement explosions have there been in London in the last three years?

None - 20%
1 to 10 - 21%
11 to 100 - 20%
147 - 38%


Very well done 38% of you, that was the correct answer!
----------------------
I don't really like analogies when discussing social or economic issues, as they only help us so far.

But I like to see the productive economy as herbivores (turning plants into animals) and rent seekers/rent collectors as carnivores or parasites (reducing the number of animals).

Carnivores need herbivores but herbivores don't need carnivores. The productive economy doesn't need landlords, bankers, regulators and quangocrats. By analogy, if all the lions disappeared from the savannah, we'd end up with more animals. If all the giraffes disappeared from the savannah, then the lions would die out and we'd end up with no animals. If the productive sector shut down, from whom would landlords collect rent, from whom would the bankers collect interest, who would the regulators regulate and from whom would the government collect the taxes to pay for quangocrats?

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: is it possible to have an eco-system where all the animals are carnivores?

Answers here or use the widget in the sidebar.

2 comments:

James Higham said...

Is the moral that we should all become vegan?

Mark Wadsworth said...

JH, no no, it was an analogy, illustrating that society doesn't need landlords and other rent collectors.