Tartare:
Sunfish's view is unnecessarily apocalyptic.
The facts show that when people in industries like car manufacturing lose their jobs, they find others.
In a perfect world Tartare you are absolutely right - the "creative destruction" of uncompetitive industries and businesses frees up resources of labour and capital and makes them cheaper - allowing "green shoots" of new businesses to replace them with an overall net positive return to the economy.
That is the theory - but it doesnt take account of geography or the overall forces of technological change either.
For example there is no direct route available between say a retrenched Holden assembly worker and a shiny new job on a shiny new gas platform on the Kimberly coast because Labour is the least mobile resource and the guy probably can't get the training anyway.
Of course the response to that is well, indirect routes exist, and the new gas plant worker gets his car serviced by the old assembly line worker, or buys his groceries in a place where the retrenched holden worker is now cleaning floors, etc. etc etc. We all know the theory.
However the theory fails if when Holden displaces 10,000 jobs and your gasplant only employs 1000 people on 457 visas who fly in fly out from Singapore. All your metaphorical Holden worker sees, sitting on the beach is the flares from the rigs as HIS gas gets sold to Japan to benefit an American owned oil company with no benefit to himself or his kids. That is the reality the likes of Rhineheart et al - **** Australia, **** paying Australian taxes, **** paying Australian mining royalties, I want it all and I will pay politicians whatever they ask to get it for me.
To anyone else reading this, please spare us any more doses of Ayne Rand, which is all bulshyte anyway. We already know about risk and return. What we also know is that the rentier class of which Rhineheart is a shining example, will, as Adam Smith observed, always try to corrupt free markets for their own benefit.
If you study the case of the Bouganville secession and its copper mine, or Nigeria and the rebels of the Okavango(?) oil province you will see the exact same issue playing out: the extraction of rich natural resources from underneath the local population with no benefit to them.
To put it another way, unless you can demonstrably
prove to our hypothetical retrenched Holden assembly worker that the North West shelf gas boom is doing some good for him that outweighs his job loss, then he is going tot try and close you down or get some of your stuff for himself - possibly at gunpoint.