conservationism vs. profiteers

[lemur]

Typically I think of resource conservation and profiteers as being opposed to one another. After all, more commerce logically results in more material consumption, which entails more resource utilization. However, it just occurred to me that both positions are oddly related to one another in a fundamental way. I.e. both rely on scarcity as a basis for valuation of their respective values. So while conservationists are concerned with using less resources to avoid running out of them, profiteers seek to drive up the prices of the same resources and the products that are dependent on them to make more money, which is achieved by creating artificial (speculative) scarcity. So are these two seeming opponents in fact on the same team? And if so, who is their opponent? People who want to consume more for less? What about people who want to consume less for less and allow population to grow as a result?

Edited February 10, 2011 by lemur

[Mr Skeptic]

No. Profiteers want to maximize profits now, whereas conservationalists want to save resources for later. If you could find yourself a profiteer who was willing to postpone income for a long time (say 200 years), then they would be largely equivalent to the conservationalists. As for raising of prices, at some point that will reduce profits and the profiteers will not go past that point, because it is not profit margins but profit that they are looking for, and eventually people stop buying things when they are too expensive.

[Marat]

They are both related on a deeper political level, however, since the environmental movement channels progressive political forces into concerns about waste water management, global warming, and wetland preservation, and thus (given limited attention spans) away from economically progressive programs that would threaten the interests of capitalists. Ultimately the profits of capitalists will increase because of the environmental/conservationist movement, since the social forces which would have reduced capitalism's profits by progressive labor legislation, stricter economic regulation, and more steeply progressive taxation rates are diverted into fretting about the destruction of the snail-darter's spawning areas.

[lemur]

No. Profiteers want to maximize profits now, whereas conservationalists want to save resources for later. If you could find yourself a profiteer who was willing to postpone income for a long time (say 200 years), then they would be largely equivalent to the conservationalists. As for raising of prices, at some point that will reduce profits and the profiteers will not go past that point, because it is not profit margins but profit that they are looking for, and eventually people stop buying things when they are too expensive.

Yes, that is basically the demand curve. Increasing prices diminish quantity consumed. True that profiteers will lower prices to the point of maximizing profit by balancing profit margins with sales volume. However, the general tendency for capitalism to increase the gap between rich and poor results in decreasing purchasing power for the growing lower classes, which can lower consumption and thus conserve more resources. The force that counteracts this is that the rich have an interest in bankrolling as many people as possible to keep them friendly, which results in a large semi-aristocratic middle-class who get basically spoiled by the rich/investors, which keeps them working and generating the profits that maintain the wealth and prosperity/income levels of the rich (and themselves - and the poor as well, actually). Still, however, I think the underlying logic of profiteering is to keep consumers as "hungry" as possible to stimulate consumption. This can have the effect of reducing consumption and resource-depletion to the extent that it doesn't drive consumers into a consumption frenzy, which it periodically seems to do. Economics is complex, though, so I don't think there are any perfectly simple relationships between resource-usage and economic activity that don't depend on the specific details of each economic activity in itself.