No Resources Occur "Naturally"
Posted: 27 Aug 2010 01:35 PM PDT
Commenting on this blog post http://cafehayek.com/2010/08/investing-other-peoples-money.html
"Arrowsmith writes that It's the peoples' natural resources. It's god-given by god. I disagree. Non-human nature supplies a wide variety of atomically and molecularly different things – things that we English speakers now call "petroleum" and "land" and "magnesium" and "helium" and "trees" and "gold" and on and on and on. But none of these things is naturally a "resource" – that is, none of these things is something made exclusively by nature to be useful to human beings. The creative intervention of human beings is necessary to transform any substance found in nature into a resource."
Certainly true. Rand said much the same thing when she said that value is given to objects by the minds of people, that without the power of the mind natural objects have no value to mankind. One example she sited was land. Without the knowledge to farm it or mine it or subsist off of it or do whatever with it, what value does the land itself have? None.
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