Here's the original question:
"...can you show me an example of a critical resource that was completely depleted before substitution, conservation, and innovation made the problems presented by the scarcity of the said resource manageable - if not null and void?"
Thus far j_b has offered up a source of food (North Atlantic Cod), and Tvash offered up a source of ...cough...energy (North American Timber).
These are especially odd examples to put forward, since both have substitutes in times of scarcity, and both fish-stocks can be replenished. I would have expected someone to put forward a mineral resource, but here the case is the same. When a mineral becomes scarce relative to demand, its price increases, and people use less of it, find substitutes for it, and develop ways to use what they can't substitute more efficiently. Only in instances where populations haven't been capable of responding in this fashion has a resource scarcity left a population helpless to respond. In modern history this set of conditions has been confined to primitive, isolated populations - or in nation states where central planning has prevailed.
As your examples demonstrate, it *is* extremely difficult to make accurate forecasts about the future. This is true even in cases where the only bit of the future that you are concerned about is which crops to grow, and how much of it, or what mix of cars to manufacture, and how many of them. As a farmer, doing so involves deciding which type of crop will grow best on a particular piece of land, when to plant, how much to plant, whether it makes more sense to upgrade machinery or use the money to buy more water rights or improve the efficiency of the irrigation system that you have in place, etc, etc, etc. Each piece of land is different, the weather each year is different, and thousands of variables beyond the farm that you can neither control nor foresee ultimately determine if you get more money out of that season's crops than you put into them. The same can be said for virtually any enterprise making any good or service like, say, legal services. What's the probability that a class-action lawsuit taken on a contingent basis will result in a favorable payout, how many first-year associates will we hire for document review for the said class action lawsuit, at what salary, etc, etc, etc...
Anyone who stresses how difficult it is to make accurate predictions about the number and type of cars that society will need in the next six months, for example, would have to concede that it is infinitely more difficult to make accurate predictions accurate predictions about how much of *everything* will be required in the next six months, let alone several years into the future. So - to answer your question - yes, we should leave it up to farmers to determine what kind of crops to grow on each acre of land, in what quantity, how often to water them, when to harvest them, what kind of machinery to harvest them with, etc. Ditto for leaving it to car manufacturers to decide what kind of cars they'll produce, and for legal firms to decide what kind of cases they'll accept, what they'll charge per-hour, etc.
Yes - it's true that some farmers, car manufacturers, and law-firms will make horrible choices based on wildly inaccurate predictions in some years. Do all farmers, firms, and factories all make equally bad decisions in all years? Would the outcome be better if the government made all of their business decisions for them?
In order to answer "yes" to that question, you'd have to answer "yes" in response to a number of questions. If it's hard to make accurate decisions for a single farm, factory, or firm - is it easier to make accurate decisions for thousands, or tens of thousands of them all at once? If it's tough for a single farm, factory, or firm to respond to changes that affect their business in a way that will allow them to remain viable, would it be easier for government officials assigned responsibility for making these choices to do so on their behalf?
There are quite a few secondary questions that you'd have to figure out the answer to if answering "yes" to the first question. How would the same officials respond if the consumers didn't want or need most of the stuff that the businesses that they were making? What if critical suppliers in businesses that they didn't supervise decided to raise their prices? What if competitors overseas were offering their products at prices below the price that the government administrators set for the products made by the businesses they ran?
And finally - are the people who run farms and factories inherently less capable than the people running law firms? If we can't leave it to individual farmers to evaluate all of the variables that affect their businesses - how can we leave it to attorneys to run their own practices? Are the people who run farms and factories inferior to attorneys in some fundamental why? If not - why would collective administration be bad for attorneys but good for farms and factories?
When it comes to resource depletion - in this case water in California - how are the state and federal government's collective decision to allocate the majority of the finite water available to everyone in the state to farmers at a price that's many times lower than what everyone else has to pay promoting conservation, exactly? How about the many billions of dollars in ethanol and other subsidies to farmers that result in god knows how many additional acres of soil being unnecessarily tilled under, fertilized, watered, and treated with pesticides? Paying farmers to grow excess crops, and insulating them from the incentives that would prompt them to grow their crops using as few resources as possible equals conservation? Subsidizing the consumption of scarce resources by suppressing their price is a better way to promote conservation than allowing real scarcities to be reflected in the price of those resources?
Naturally - I don't expect you to respond to all of the points that I made in this post, or any of them - really - but there's my answer to your questions.
One could ask the same thing of the Evil Homonym about government subsidies to fishermen in various locations all over the world.
So really, what was it like for you, going into the booth, closing the curtain behind you, and actually voting for the McCain/Palin ticket?
