Gore vs. Churchill

Apparently, Al Gore has invoked the memory of Churchill as a means to garner support for "fighting climate change" (which he no longer calls "global warming" since the climate is no longer warming - a fact I blogged about here). To label Gore's invocation morally repugnant and nauseatingly offensive is a profound understatement. Invoking the spirit of the great man who steadfastly led Great Britain and most of the free world in a horrifyingly bloody struggle against arguably the most formidable evil in world history is an act of monumental evasion and vicious absurdity. To invoke a world war, fought by free people to secure their liberty from the march of totalitarian oppression, as a means to gather support for his global fascist central planning fantasies, is the height of irony.

The Tea Party Movement Has Just Begun

I am very happy to report that I was able to give my speech (posted here) to about 1000 people. I would like to thank Wendy Caswell and her group http://www.louisvilleteaparty.org/ for holding the event which was a tremendous success. My colleague, George, and I hosted a table and were able to pass out well over 100 Ayn Rand samplers which were sent to us by the Ayn Rand Institute who connected us with the event organizers. We also formed a mailing list with the goal of forming a local Objectivist group.

The Tea Party movement is an eclectic mixture of individuals and organizations. Although there are certainly differences in philosophy and priority, what unites this movement is outrage over the rapid erosion of individual freedom amid the extraordinary growth of government and a desire to reassert the Founding Father's philosophy of a government constitutionally limited to securing the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The challenge will be to harness this outrage and channel it into a coherent and rational program.

Rather than complain about this eclecticism or divergences in philosophy, Objectivists should see this as an opportunity to reach like minded individuals who may not fully appreciate the role of fundamental philosophy or the need for a rational, secular defense of freedom and capitalism. As I have argued before, our battle is with the right not the left. We are not going to persuade Barney Frank or Noam Chomsky that we are right. Their minds are wrecked. We can convince people already sympathetic to the American ideals of individualism and limited government.

This movement needs leadership. Many sense something is drastically wrong but do not have the intellectual ammunition to win this battle. Without properly understanding the rational, moral case for capitalism this movement will fail for the same reason the American right has been failing for generations. When the right can proudly and unapologetically assert the right to our lives and property we will win.

The Tea Party movement has just begun. There are legions of Ayn Rand admirers who have had generations to digest her revolutionary philosophy. Objectivism has a presence in academia. We have prominent Objectivists appearing on national television and in the national media on almost a daily basis. Let's provide the leadership and the intellectual ammunition that the right so desperately needs.

Tea Party Speech: July 4, 2009, "My America"

I hope to give this speech tomorrow if afforded the chance. Please use any or all of it if you find it helpful. It is about 5 minutes. (update: I will be speaking at the Louisville Tea Party).

MY AMERICA

Today, we are engaged in a battle - a battle between opposing visions of America's future. The challenge of the Tea Party movement is to define that vision and to give it life.

In many ways, this battle has been raging since the founding of our nation. Recently, however, this battle has reached a profound and critical moment as we witness a spectacle - the spectacle of the first actively anti-American president in our nation's history. (editors note: HT to TIA via The New Clarion)

America was founded upon the spirit of individualism - the idea that each individual is independent, the owner of his life, free to pursue his own happiness. In stark contrast to the Founders spirit of individualism, Obama stands for collectivism, the idea that one's life belongs to the state and that morality consists of sacrifice and duty.

Throughout our history, Americans have always stood for limited, self-government, whose purpose is to secure the right to pursue your life and happiness. Obama stands for the long arm of a faceless command and control bureaucracy which attempts to manage and control every detail of your life.

Americans admire success and believe in reaping the profits derived from hard work. Obama denigrates the productive and seeks to tax and redistribute your earnings to anyone who has not earned it.

Americans are unapologetic for our success which has come at a steep price - the blood of patriots spilled here and around the world for over 200 hundred years - and the sweat and tears of the productive: the scientists, the businessmen, the tradesmen, and the laborers who followed their dreams, built this country and in improving their own lives created the highest standard of living in world history.

While Americans celebrate their achievements and the birth of our nation, Obama travels the world apologizing for America. The President of the nation which fought a bloody Revolution to overthrow the tyranny of monarchy - bows to Kings. He dignifies evil by extending olive branches to tyrants and kowtowing to our enemies. He hesitates to criticize the terrorist theocrats of Iran when they butcher their own people in the streets but vehemently decries the Honduran people's exile of an outlaw supported by the likes of Chavez and Castro.

My vision of America or My America means something very specific to me. My America is represented by George Washington, Patrick Henry, James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.

Obama's America also means something very specific. Obama's America is represented by Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.

Our Founding Fathers were influenced by men such as John Locke, Voltaire, and Montesquieu.

Obama sympathizes with Pastor Wright, William Ayers and the God of the American Left: Karl Marx.

My Americans are the creators and the producers: the Founding Fathers, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers; My Americans are Fred Astaire, and Walt Disney, Mark Twain and Henry Ford; My Americans are Sherman, Patton, and MacArthur; My Americans are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs; My Americans are John Galt and Ayn Rand.

Obama's Americans are anti-American destroyers: Michael Moore, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Reich, Saul Alinsky, Paul Krugman, FDR, the Clintons, Ted Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter (and the thousands of Marxist university professors funded by your tax dollars and their allies in the mainstream media.)

My Americans have literally given us light, mass production, aviation, bridges, the movies, music, television, the personal computer, and life saving medicines; some led great armies in heroic battles against tyranny and evil or glorified their work in literature and art.

Obama's Americans have given us the Internal Revenue Service, government run schools, section 8 housing projects, the Federal Reserve to print paper dollars out of thin air and destroy the purchasing power of money, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who underwrote loans to people who could not afford them, trillion dollar bailouts of politically connected banks and automobile companies, and trillions of dollars of pork barrel fiascos.

My Americans produced wealth, defended freedom, and invented something from nothing.

Obama's Americans gorge on the productive through the income tax, medicare tax, social security tax, state tax, city tax, county tax, sales tax, property tax, school tax, capital gains tax, corporate income tax, alternative minimum tax, gas tax, gift tax, estate tax, the generation skipping transfer tax, excise tax, VAT tax, marriage tax, luxury tax, recreational vehicle tax, road usage tax, telephone federal excise tax, vehicle tax, workers compensation tax, federal unemployment tax, state unemployment tax, to name a few.

My Americans have given us freedom, production, prosperity, and aesthetic beauty.

Obama's Americans have given us stifling regulations, confiscatory taxation, inflation induced boom-bust cycles, and a veritable mountain of debt to support a Leviathan federal government that never shrinks but only grows.

My America stands for the life affirming benevolence and productivity that follows from free minds and free markets. Obama's America stands for the stagnation, misery, and tyranny of government coercion, central planning, and socialism.

Which America do you want?

To change America, you must realize that My America is no longer the mainstream. Obama's America is the mainstream. Obama, Barney Frank, and Nancy Pelosi's vision, that freedom is the problem and government coercion is the solution, is preached in virtually every university classroom, on every television network, and in every newspaper in this country. In the wake of every government caused crisis from housing, to health care, to education, to traffic jams on public highways, always "the free market" is blamed and always, their solution is "more government intervention, more controls, and more taxes."

We must wage a moral and intellectual battle to rediscover the American spirit and the morality implied by the Declaration of Independence; we must recapture the spirit of individualism, self-reliance, and limited government. We must fight, not just against Obama's vision, but for our own vision.

In the words of Ayn Rand:

"The world crisis of today is a moral crisis--and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American revolution. . . . [You] must fight for capitalism, not as a 'practical' issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it."

We must boldly and proudly assert our rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. We must fight to make My America, our America.

Helen Thomas Questions Obama's AgitProp?!

In a previous post, I discussed the Obama administration’s deliberate attempts to control the media through what I described as an unofficial Soviet style Department of Agitation and Propaganda. Such efforts at tightly manipulating the media are the hallmark of dictators as “state run media” in Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, etc. so clearly demonstrate. In that post, I discussed an internal media network that has apparently been created within the White House to report on events inside the White House separate from the traditional White House press corps. I also discussed a recently staged “town hall” meeting in which guests were invited by the White House and questions were submitted and approved by White House controllers yet carried on as if it were an extemporaneous exchange between Obama and the public.

To my great surprise, this event was the subject of a dustup between Chip Reid of CBS News, Helen Thomas, and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs as the reporters grilled Gibbs on the “pre-selected” nature of this town hall meeting. Helen Thomas went as far to say that this was “shocking” and something she had never seen before. Gibbs’ snarky obfuscation and haughty attempts at humor were appalling. I am sure that Gibbs, accustomed to getting the kid glove treatment from the White House press corps, was taken aback that anyone in the MSM would dare question the Dear Leader. After all, the ends justifies the mean – do they not?

As an aside, this Breitbart show, “The B-Cast”, discusses this incident and runs a clip from the town hall in which Obama hugs a sobbing uninsured cancer patient – an image which made national headlines.

Looking at Obama's "Green Jobs" through a Broken Window

If I were to urge you to grasp one principle of economics, a principle that would help you throughout your life dissect and refute virtually every government scheme to take your money in the name of the "public good", it would be the Broken Window Fallacy. This parable was created by Frederic Bastiat in 1850 and popularized by Henry Hazlitt who used it to refute dozens of economic fallacies in his famous book Economics in One Lesson. Despite over 150 years of knowledge and experience, this fallacy permeates every facet of politics today and is committed routinely by politicians and Nobel Prize winning economists alike.

I gave detailed descriptions of this principle in two past posts here and here so I will not go into full detail. Briefly, the principle is that one must focus on both the direct consequences of an action AND consequences that would have occurred in the absence of the action. In certain contexts, it could be called the law of unintended consequences. Another way to put it: in order to understand the consequences of government action, do not just look at what it does directly, but also imagine what could have happened and what did not happen as a result of government action.

For example, in the parable, when a brick is thrown through a shopkeepers window, observers are led to believe that the broken window is "good" for the economy since it increases the revenue of the glass maker. Such a view might lead someone to think that destruction is good for the economy and even to conclude that wars are actually a benefit. Perhaps someone should routinely burn the entire town to the ground to "help" the economy. Sound familiar? What is not seen by these observers, is the action that would have taken place if the shopkeeper had not had to pay for the broken window. He would have had more money to spend elsewhere on the movies, new furniture, or perhaps to expand his own business. In this instance, although the glass maker benefited, the broken window is at best a zero sum game as far as the economy is concerned since the movie theater, furniture maker, or anywhere the shopkeeper would have spent the money has lost potential revenue. (In actuality, I would argue that the broken window is less than a zero sum game - it is highly destructive to the economy to the extent that it subdues capital investment which subdues innovation and productivity.)

Once one fully grasps this principle by applying it to numerous instances as Hazlitt does, it becomes clear how futile and destructive are government policies implemented on the basis of this fallacy.

One of the most obvious applications of this principle is to the idea of "make work" jobs which are jobs "created" by the government for the purpose of employing individuals. For example, say the government announces a plan to employ 10,000 individuals digging ditches. For the 10,000 people who get this job, it clearly is a benefit. After all, they are now working and making wages which they can use to support themselves. However, is such a plan "good" for the economy?

First, where did the government get the money to pay these workers? It obtained the money through taxation which means the wages paid to the 10,000 workers is money no longer available to those who paid the taxes. These taxpayers now have less money to spend on other things like food, computers, or automobiles. Again, it is at best a zero sum game and in actuality worse since the government generally spends the money on activities that no one wants or needs.

How could anyone think that robbing money from some people and giving it to others could result in a "better" economy? If that's true, why don't we legalize theft by, for example, the Mafia. Then, when the economy needs a jolt, the government can urge the Mafia to shake people down for their money in order to spend it. Won't that be good for the economy? How is the logic any different?

If such a notion seems absurd - it is, yet, this is the exact reasoning behind the "stimulus" package unveiled by Congress earlier this year. It is exactly the reasoning behind the argument being offered that the cap and trade energy bill, despite the fact that it will increase energy costs, is actually good for the economy since it will "create" so-called "green jobs".

In this case, the stimulus bill and the climate bill are supposed to actually create jobs since the government will spend money in various areas. In fact, in this Yahoo article, seven "lucrative" new jobs from the Obama stimulus plan are highlighted. What are they? Among others include "solar panel installer", "cost estimator" to estimate costs of spending the stimulus money, and "physical therapist" since so many people are unemployed and apparently will need physical therapy (I'm not making this stuff up...). This means that individuals rather than being motivated to enter productive professions like medical research or computer science will instead be encouraged to install solar panels and to monitor the expenditure of loot that is robbed from taxpayers.

Let's ask another important question: is the government literally magic? Can it simply spend other people's money and, voila, create prosperity? Apparently, the government is magic since Nobel Prize winning economists like Paul Krugman endorse the government's plan to spend other people's money and in fact call for even more spending. Obama claims that the climate bill will create "millions of new jobs" which, of course, relies on the Broken Window Fallacy.

What creates real wealth? Making more with less effort or productivity is what leads to real gains in prosperity. "Jobs" in the sense of "people doing things" is not necessarily good for the economy nor does it necessarily lead to increasing prosperity. In other words, "activity" should not be confused with "productivity". When people make more with less effort, it frees up time so that people can work and produce in other areas. Hundreds of years ago, virtually everyone spent their time simply producing food and subsisting from day to day. More efficient agriculture due to new technology allowed the same amount of food to be produced by less people and freed people up to work on things like inventing electricity, the locomotive, and medicine. Robbing some people and giving it to others to spend does not benefit the economy in terms of creating real wealth and prosperity. Such a plan only redistributes wealth to some for the unearned benefit of others.

In April 2009, Dr. George Reisman posted Green Jobs in which he facetiously discusses how Obama's stimulus plan is capable of creating an infinite number of "jobs":

Indeed, advancing the goals of environmentalism is capable of creating a virtually limitless number of jobs. Big-rig trucks and their “polluting” emissions might be done away with by replacing them with human porters who would carry freight on their backs. Ocean-going ships and their emissions might be done away with by replacing their “dirty engines” with the clean labor of banks of oarsmen. (Sails would be a substitute too, but they are no match for oarsmen when it comes to the number of workers needed.) Automobiles and their emissions might be replaced by sedan chairs and teams of litter bearers.

Later, he discusses a brilliant idea that could literally "employ" millions:

And finally, think of all of the jobs that a program of environmental “stewardship” might make available. Thus each patch of desert, each rock formation, each clump of grass, and each tree stump, might have assigned to it one or more “stewards” whose job would be to watch over it, protect it, and “preserve it for future generations.” To carry out this valuable work, there could be a whole corps of “stewards.” They could be dressed in special uniforms displaying various ranks and medals, all gained in “service to the environment” and the defense of nature and its resources against the humans.

Indeed, once we put our minds to it, nothing is easier than to think of things that would require the performance of virtually unlimited labor in order to accomplish virtually zero result. Such is the nature of all job-creation programs. Such is the nature of environmentalism. Such is thought to be the path to economic recovery by most of today’s intellectual establishment.

When you understand the Broken Window Fallacy, programs offered to "stimulate" the economy and "create" jobs seem laughable. It's too bad it's not funny anymore.

If Global Warming is Real, Freedom is the Solution

Beth at Wealth Is Not the Problem has published two posts here and here related to the issue of science versus politics. She makes the crucial point, rarely ever made, that the science of global warming does not imply anything politically. In other words, even if one could prove human-caused global warming, it does not imply that the state must pass certain types of legislation, e.g., a cap-and-trade bill that will destroy the American economy. I think it is often assumed, certainly by environmentalists, that if global warming can be proved, this fact alone implies some sort of statist takeover of the American economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, if global warming is real, it would be cause for more economic freedom - not less. The economics of this argument were dealt with brilliantly by Dr. George Reisman in this post. He writes:

Even if you are absolutely convinced that human activities are responsible for global warming and, if nothing is done, will ultimately result in an intolerable rise in temperature, there is a very simple test that you need to apply. Pretend, for just a moment, that that same global warming is coming about independently of human activities, that it is strictly the product of natural forces. Then ask yourself, what would be the best fundamental method of coping with it? Maintaining a free market or establishing a centrally planned socialist system?

More fundamentally, what is the appropriate method for Man to use in dealing with Nature in general? Is it the motivated and coordinated human intelligence of all individual market participants that is provided by a free market and its price system? Or is it the unmotivated, discoordinated chaos in which one man, the Supreme Dictator, or a handful of men, the Supreme Dictator and his fellow members of the Central Planning Board, claim a monopoly on human intelligence and on the right to make fundamental decisions?

I can't help quoting one more passage:

The answer to the question of how best to cope with intolerable global warming caused by Nature is obviously the maintenance of the free market, not its replacement by Socialist central planning. Indeed, the answer is to make the free market freer than it now is—as much freer as is humanly possible. This is because while the primary reason for advocating a free market is the greater prosperity and enjoyment it brings to everyone in the course of his normal, everyday life, a major, secondary reason is to have the greatest possible industrial base available for coping with catastrophic events, whether those events be war, plague, meteors from outer space, intolerable global warming, or a new ice age.

In effect, what the environmentalists would have us do as the means of preparing for coping with a coming global warming is analogous to the imaginary absurdity of the United States in the 1930s having reduced its economy to the level, say, of Poland’s economy. Then, when World War II came, our country would have had to fight the war with horses instead of tanks and planes. In the same way, the environmentalists would have us cope with global warming by waving little fans instead of using air conditioners, refrigerators, and freezers....

Some Clarity on the Honduran "Coup"

If you are like me and confused about the "coup" in Honduras this is a great post over at The New Clarion. The MSM led me to believe something sinister had occured and Obama and Hillary have taken the position that this was an illegal usurpation of power. In addition to learning that Obama opposed the coup, once I heard that Chavez opposed the coup, I immediately supported the coup not knowing anything else. This instinct appears to have been right.

There is a major struggle going on in Latin America between the forces of Marxism and oppression represented by Chavez' Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua among others and various groups that are struggling to oppose them. Naturally, the American government could quickly put an end to Chavez and his ilk by vigorously opposing their activities and countering their absurd rhetoric. However, given El Presidente Obama's pragmatism (lack of principles) and his default ideology of Christian Marxism (the primary ideology of leftists in Latin America) he is more likely to directly and indirectly provide them support as we are seeing in his latest proclamation regarding Honduras, his kowtowing to Chavez last month, and his reversal of policy on Cuba.

Obama's Department of Agitation and Propaganda

A few months ago, a colleague sent me this ABC blog post by Jake Tapper titled "Do You Want Your OTV" regarding an event at the White House in which the White House press corp was banned.

After the event, President Obama went to the White House basketball court to shoot hoop with the Lady Huskies. The White House press corps was not allowed to attend.

At first, the idea that the President was spending time with the Lady Huskies without the press seemed rather innocous to me, but Tapper then realized why they were banned:

...Obama White House officials decided to do their own media report on the visit, complete with cuts, interviews, and chyrons identifying who's speaking. Also, just like a network, they have their own little logo!

If you watch the video, you will see their logo appear as if it is an actual network.

This story came on the heels of the New York flyover incident in which Obama had an Air Force One 747 flyover New York to get pictures of it with the Statue of Liberty in the background - an incident which caused a panic in lower Manhattan.

Then, I read an excellent post titled "Feast of Fools: Washington Style" at The Dougout where the author, Grant Jones, links to a You Tube video of the White House Congressional picnic in which Obama invited guests to playfully dunk his senior advisers. If you notice, the video once again has the mysterious logo which means that it was created and produced by this White House media network. Jones' post is excellent and I will only add that the video is propaganda at its finest. My favorite is the heavily cut scene where Obama throws a ball like a girl from point blank range to the hearty laughs of all who attended. They cut his throwing motion quickly so you only have a split second to see it. Let me add that given the context, the background music is horribly unnerving.

Of course, we now know that ABC ignited an "ethical firestorm" by broadcasting a phony "townhall" type meeting from inside the White House to cheer lead socialized medicine in which opposing voices were not allowed.

Apparently, America now has its own Department of Agitation and Propaganda or Agitprop as it was known under the Soviets.

Cheese Caves, Offsets Integrity Advisory Board, and the Adjustment to the Adjustment Act

From the year 2013, Bill Frezza writes this startling piece related to "dozens of competing bills [that] are making their way through Congress seeking to reform the controversial 'American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.'"

Among others, he discusses "The 'Strategic Biofuels Reserve Reform Act' [which] attempts to cap the amount of excess ethanol the Agriculture Department is allowed to purchase and withhold from the market each year", "the 'Promote Green Driving While Creating or Saving Jobs Act' [which] promises a $20,000 rebate to qualified purchasers of any of the 4.7 million unsold electric vehicles piling up on GM dealers' lots, and writes that "in an effort to keep the last of the nation's oil refineries from closing, the 'Save or Create Domestic Refinery Jobs Act' seeks to normalize the carbon penalty differential between domestically refined gasoline and imported gasoline."

Probably my favorites are a "bill intended to restart the stalled Cape Wind project [which] met stiff resistance from friends and family of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, claiming that erecting windmills near the coast of Cape Cod where Kennedy's ashes were spread would represent sacrilege" and "Waxman-Markey payments to low-income households designed to offset the higher cost of everything from transportation to home heating [which] were the subject of another bill titled the 'Adjustment to the Adjustment Act.'"

His conclusion: "Finally, meteorologists are projecting one of the coolest summers in years as average global temperatures continue to decline after remaining flat for over a decade despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Computer models indicating that the world should have ended by now are being checked for errors."

Lethal Exposure

"Good News for People Who Love Bad News". The title of this Modest Mouse album was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news that the House narrowly passed the global warming bill. Practically, this bill even turned many Democrats off, and it will face severe resistance in the Senate so there is still hope that this economy crushing, rights violating, power grab by the left can be stopped. Secondly, and more importantly, I think there might be a silver lining.

In a previous post, I attempted to explain why I think Americans are so easily taken in by the apocalyptic prophecies and pseudo-science of the environmentalist movement. This movement, which relies on guilt and the veneer of science, combines together every ideological ingredient necessary to take full advantage of a culture steeped in altruism and intellectually disarmed by modern philosophy's assault on reason and objectivity. While these philosophical factors have ripened the American populace to be led into fascism, there is a large element of the population that is anti-intellectual but reachable.

By that, I mean that there are Americans who, despite warnings from writers like myself that the environmentalists are profoundly anti-human, may have dismissed Al Gore and the environmentalist left as "well-intentioned" but "impractical". There are Americans who may have thought there was some validity to the concerns expressed by this movement but who did not fully appreciate their philosophical premises, and therefore, remained unable to abstractly grasp the deathly implications of the environmental movement's ideology. While these ideas remained in the abstract it was possible for this type to dismiss them. Not anymore. The left and particularly the environmental movement has finally been exposed.

In the midst of massive scientific uncertainty and in fact a seeming scientific revolt against the global warming orthodoxy, can there be any doubt about the motives of politicians and intellectuals who rush through a bill that threatens to impose "the highest tax in American history" to decrease carbon emissions? Is there any doubt about the "intentions" of politicians and intellectuals who denigrate oil companies and threaten energy producers with punitive regulations and "windfall profit" taxes as energy prices rose last year but who then pass a bill that will directly cause energy prices and thus the cost of everything to rise? Is there any doubt about the motives of politicians who in the middle of the worst economic crisis in 80 years pass a bill that will burden industry with draconian regulations, higher costs, and cause Americans to pay exorbitant prices for the lifeblood of American prosperity: energy?

Are these people really "well intentioned"?

(Incidentally, I have heard the Democrats make the argument that this bill will actually result in an increase of "jobs" allegedly in the alternative energy industry or some such thing. This is like saying that a bill which forces doctors, engineers, and businessmen to quit their jobs to take up ditch digging and collecting rocks is a value because they will have "jobs". It is like arguing that cavemen were better off than modern man because they were all "employed" hunting squirrels and evading predators in caves. Is it better that people are employed finding cures for cancer and inventing spaceships or devoting time to monitoring ethanol regulations and assembling windmills? This argument completely drops the context and ignores the most fundamental principles of economics which I explained in this post. )

Defenders of freedom have a historic opportunity. The environmental movement and the larger aims of the left can no longer be dismissed as ivory tower idealism. The practical consequences of the their deadly ideas are coming to fruition for all to see. Our job has been made easier in that now, all we have to do is point. If Americans still can not grasp this, then maybe they will finally grasp it when they are herded into a rail car and shipped to a Green Re-Education Camp. Then again, maybe not.

Beautiful Minds

Here is an article about the late Farrah Fawcett's relationship with Ayn Rand. (HT to Rob Reynolds of OActivists).

Repost: Why don't Government make someone pay for me?

I re-read this post from July 2007, and I thought it was apropos so I am reposting it below:

Why don't Government make someone pay for me?

I'm really mad because I don't feel well, and I went to doctor who knows lots of stuff, and he wanted to know how I was going to pay and stuff. And just because he knows about medicines and how the body works and stuff that's no fair. Why won't he just tell me what to do? Why won't someone just give him the money for me? What about those insurance companies? Why don't they just send him the money because they got a lot of it? They're just mean because they won't give me the money. They should care about me more. Or what about the rich people? Why don't they just send him the money for me otherwise its no fair. The doctor will tell the rich people what to do all the time because they will give him the money but the doctor won't tell me nothing until someone pays him for me. I don't get it. Why does the doctor want the money? He already has a lot so why don't he just tell me stuff I need to know about me. Why doesn't Government just pay for me. They have a lot of money somewhere. Can't Government just pay the doctor then he will tell me stuff. Or can't Government just make doctor tell me what he knows. That'll show doctor he can't keep stuff from me. He make Government mad. Or Government tell insurance company they got to pay for me because otherwise no fair and that's mean.

And then if he tells me what pills to get then I have to go to the place to get them and they want money too. But you see, this place already has a lot of pills so can't they just give me a few? The guy there wanted money for them. Can't someone just give me the money? My neighbors won't give me the money but maybe Government can make them give me the money. What about the pill companies. They must have a lot of pills. Can't they just give me a couple when I need them? That's no fair either. They already know what pills work so why don't they just give them to me or give the recipe to someone who can make them for me? The people in Canada make them for cheaper because Government makes them make the pills cheaper so can't Government here just make the pill company make them cheaper? No fair. All these guys learn a lot about these pills but now they know which ones work so can't they just tell me how to make them or give me some?

And Government even takes care of prisoners and stuff and they don't kill them or let them die but then Government don't give the money to the doctor for the free people. No fair.

So here my answer. People should just go to the guys who know stuff about medicine and know how to make the pills and they should just tell us what to do and if they want pay then Government should make someone else pay them for me or Government put them in jail for not paying for me. That's fair.

To Know Capitalism Is to Love Capitalism

The premise behind virtually every government intervention into the economy is that "capitalism" or the free market has failed and government must step in to "fix" the alleged problem. Such a notion has wide ranging political implications. If it is true that capitalism has failed or can not "work" in principle, then isn't the government justified in intervening into every aspect of the economy? After all, what is the justification for the public education system, public roads, publicly regulated utilities, the Federal Reserves printing of public money, public transportation, public housing, public parks and waterways, public mail, public garbage dumps, and our latest government wonders: public automobile companies and soon to be public health care? For some reason we are told, in these particular areas of the economy, the free market just does not "work" and we need the helping hand of the state to "provide" these services which somehow is able to provide them.

The argument that capitalism is to blame for various crises is rampant and seems to appear in every possible context today. I have blogged about it quoting other excellent essays and video's on the topic demonstrating that it is not capitalism but socialism which is to blame for the current crisis and explaining why the modern Right is incapable of defending capitalism. Of course, that capitalism would take the blame for the consequences of governmental policies based on socialism is a monumental injustice. Yet, the argument that capitalism has somehow failed is, as C. August wrote in this post at Titanic Deck Chairs, "seemingly impossible to kill". I do not want to rehash the economic argument for capitalism vs. socialism which has been made countless times by brilliant scholars more lucidly and in more detail than I ever could. Also, my linked post already touched on the ethical argument for capitalism. Instead, I want to focus on another important reason why I think this argument seems "impossible to kill" so that we can work towards killing it.

A primary reason why this argument is difficult to "kill" is that the meaning of capitalism has become completely blurred by modern academics who do not think in principles or essentials. For example, I would say that most intellectuals implicitly define capitalism as "anything America does or has done". So, for example, if the United States had slavery, then that is an example of "capitalism". If the United States authorizes a Federal Reserve Bank to print money endlessly causing credit expansion, malinvestment predicated on the illusion of profits, and a boom-bust economic cycle then that is an example of "capitalism." If the federal government encourages employer sponsored health insurance through its manipulation of the tax code and then offers health care entitlements to a third of the of the population thus exploding health care costs it is an example of "capitalism". Another popular definition of capitalism seems to be "government favors to business". In other words, any time the government offers some preferential treatment to business owners it is regarded as an example of "capitalism".

Consider for example, the most recent Newsweek whose cover is titled "The Capitalist Manifesto" referring to an essay by Fareed Zakaria. To have a clue as to the nature of this piece you only have to know that the sub-title is "Greed is Good (To a Point)". Nowhere in this piece does the author ever define capitalism. It is obvious from context, however, that his definition of capitalism is of the "anything America does" variety. He therefore regards anything America has done in the last 20 years to be examples of capitalism and ends up blaming the "ethics" of businessmen rather than the statist economic polices of the government for the current crisis.

In all of these instances, the concept of capitalism is implicitly being defined in terms of non-essentials. Such definitions blur the essential distinguishing characteristics of capitalism and have the effect of packaging the concept of capitalism together with concepts that represent its antithesis. In these cases, because capitalism is defined improperly, it is literally regarded as its opposite and held accountable for the deleterious effects of its opposite. Therefore, before arguing over capitalism versus socialism one should understand and clarify what exactly capitalism is.

I personally have had the experience of arguing with someone over capitalism when the term is not properly defined. These kinds of opponents of "capitalism" are usually all over the place blaming it for slavery, pollution, Indian genocide, price increases due to monopolies which hurts consumers, price decreases due to competition which hurts labor, etc. Again, it is because they associate capitalism with "anything America has done" or some other non-essential definition that they can not even make a coherent argument and it is virtually impossible to answer them.

The first step is to define capitalism by means of essentials. Ayn Rand defined capitalism as "a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned." This is a definition by essentials and rests on a prior definition of individual rights. A proper argument for Individual rights rests on rational principles of morality all of which rest on rational epistemological and metaphysical principles. When capitalism is defined properly and put into the larger context of individual rights, freedom, and an egoistic ethics, it is apparent that to know capitalism, i.e., to define capitalism by essentials, is to love capitalism. It is also apparent that defenders of capitalism are fighting for something that has never existed.

As we can see from the Newsweek piece which is evidently supposed to be an argument for capitalism, it is obvious that we are not fighting the Left - we are fighting the Right. We know what the Left stands for. The problem has been that the alleged defenders of capitalism have not provided a solid intellectual foundation for a proper defense of capitalism. That is why we are losing. We must fight for a proper conception of capitalism and make it clear that we are fighting for something that has never truly existed - a complete separation of economics and state. I think an efficient approach is to constantly argue for more general fundamental principles like individual rights, property rights, and to cast political issues into arguments over these principles. This approach necessitates translating the political issue into a more general context. Arguing over the minutia of various policies can be useful in certain contexts but translating the political into a more philosophical, ethical framework has the power of appealing to people morally at the same time more clearly defining the real issues.

Properly defining capitalism and refuting the "capitalism is to blame" argument should be a high priority for those who value freedom. We can never overestimate the value of refuting this argument (or in the positive sense, making the argument for freedom) no matter how obvious it seems.

Meta Post: "Clumsy but Swift"

One of the consequences of not posting for over two weeks (due to a move...) is that I have dozens of posts in the works fueled by my horror and outrage over what is occurring in this country. It appears that Obama’s overt strategy is to overwhelm his opposition by rapidly attempting to take total control over virtually every aspect of our lives. I will give him credit for explicitly or implicitly following one of Sun Tzu’s great principles elucidated in his famed Art of War:

When doing battle, seek a quick victory.

A protracted battle will blunt weapons and dampen ardor.

If troops lay siege to a walled city, their strength will be exhausted.

If the army is exposed to a prolonged campaign, the nation's resources will not suffice.

When weapons are blunted, and ardor dampened, strength exhausted, and resources depleted, the neighboring rulers will take advantage of these complications.

Then even the wisest of counsels would not be able to avert the consequences that must ensue.

Therefore, I have heard of military campaigns that were clumsy but swift, but I have never seen military campaigns that were skilled but protracted.

No nation has ever benefited from protracted warfare.

His team clearly understands the value of a "clumsy but swift" campaign.

The sheer volume of potential commentary related to Obama's madness and the state of world affairs is so large that I am somewhat overwhelmed and do not know quite where to start. When overwhelmed you must prioritize, so I have formulated a few principles for dealing with this.

One is to try and stay general and tend to act more as an “intellectual wholesaler” rather than retailer. Two is to only dissect concrete issues that have pedagogic value in clarifying these general principles or that involve life threatening political issues that must be defeated (like socialized medicine). Three, where possible, seek the entertainment value of facetiously attacking this insanity because it is fun.

Here are a few of the posts I am working on:

* The importance of refuting the argument that "capitalism" is to blame for the current crisis

* How to stop socialized medicine without doing anything

* Context part II: Towards a theory of induction

* The pragmatist virtue of complexity

* Obama changing U.S. from paper tiger to just paper

* How prices can go down under inflation - update on Fed

* Obama's pragmatism: pattern of stating outright contradictions and meaning it

* Examples of Anthem like economic regression - are we in a depression?

* Follow up: why houses are not investments

* Comment on The Reith Lectures

* Update on the religious left

* Follow up: "the fatigue of central planning"

Anyway, I am back on the job and if anyone yearns for a post on one of these topics let me know and be sure that if no one yearns I will write about it anyway. Hopefully you will continue to find that although this blog is free, it is worth every penny.

More to come...

"Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition"

"We have received from Divine Providence the supreme favour of being relieved from all error."

-Constantine, Letter to the Church of Alexandria, c.330AD

Concerning the end of the world, as a youth I heard a sermon in a church in Paris that as soon as the number of a thousand years should come, the Antichrist would come, and not long thereafter, the Last Judgment would follow; which preaching I resisted with all my strength from the Evangels and the Apocalypse and the book of Daniel.

-Abbo of Fleury 996 AD

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

-1798 Thomas Malthus

“I believe that the second coming of Jesus Christ is near, even at the door, even within twenty-one years,—on or before 1843

-William Miller, 1822

[Christ will return on] “the tenth day of the seventh month of the present year, 1844"

-Samuel Snow

"Sometimes I really regret that I did not live in those times when there was still so much that was new; to be sure enough much is yet unknown, but I do not think that it will be possible to discover anything easily nowadays that would lead us to revise our entire outlook as radically as was possible in the days when telescopes and microscopes were still new."

- Heinrich Hertz as a physics student, 1875

"We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy."

- Simon Newcomb, early American astronomer, 1888

"The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals."

- Albert. A. Michelson, speech at the dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab, U. of Chicago 1894

"There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement"

- Lord Kelvin, 1900

"During the last 20-30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade...The cause of the cooling trend is not known with certainty. But there is increasing concern that man himself may be implicated, not only in the recent cooling trend but also in the warming temperatures over the last century".

National Science Board report, 1972

"we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate...The climates of the earth have always been changing, and they will doubtless continue to do so in the future. How large these future changes will be, and where and how rapidly they will occur, we do not know.."

National Academy of Science report, 1975

"ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change" [due to a] "a drop of half a degree [Fahrenheit] in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968."..."The evidence in support of these predictions [of global cooling] has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it."..."what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery"... "not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions."...."melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting Arctic rivers" ..."But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies...The longer the planners (politicians) delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality." The "resulting famines could be catastrophic", "drought and desolation," "the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded", "droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons," "impossible for starving peoples to migrate," "the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age."

"The Cooling World", Newsweek, 1975

"I think the main question is, How does the sun [in general] act on climate? What are the processes that are going on in the Earth's atmosphere?"

Simi Solanki, Max Planck Institute, National Geographic, September 2006

Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says

Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.

IBD, February 2008

Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a 50-year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity.

According to Prof Louise Hara of University College London, it is unclear why this is happening or when the Sun is likely to become more active again.

BBC, April 2009

No-one knows how the centuries-long waxing and waning of the Sun works. However, astronomers now have space telescopes studying the Sun in detail.

"This is very exciting because as astronomers we've never seen anything like this before in our lifetimes," he said.

"We have spacecraft up there to study the Sun in phenomenal detail. With these telescopes we can study this minimum of activity in a way that we could not have done so in the past."

BBC, April 2009

The rapid temperature increase of 1°C over mainland Europe since 1980 is considerably larger than the temperature rise expected from anthropogenic greenhouse gas increases. ...The measurements show a decline in aerosol concentration of up to 60%, which have led to a statistically significant increase of solar irradiance under cloud-free skies since the 1980s. The measurements confirm solar brightening and show that the direct aerosol effect had an approximately five times larger impact on climate forcing than the indirect aerosol and other cloud effects. The overall aerosol and cloud induced surface climate forcing is +1 W m−2 dec−1 and has most probably strongly contributed to the recent rapid warming in Europe.

Geophysical Research Letters, June 2008

"Global warming is pushing northwards diseases more commonly found in developing countries, posing a risk to the financial and physical health of rich nations, the head of a livestock herders' charity said. Steve Sloan, chief executive of GALVmed, said on Friday insect-borne diseases were increasingly moving north, such as the viral infection bluetongue that has hit cattle and sheep in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany."

Yahoo News, 2007

"On Disko Bay in western Greenland, where a number of prominent world leaders have visited in recent years to get a first-hand impression of climate change, temperatures have dropped so drastically that the water has frozen over for the first time in a decade."

Copenhagen Post, 2008

"The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate. "

Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, RIA Novosti, March 2008

The effect that our meat addiction is having on the climate is truly staggering. In fact, in its recent report “Livestock’s Long Shadow—Environmental Issues and Options,” the United Nations determined that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined.

Drudge Report, 2007

A detailed analysis of black carbon -- the residue of burned organic matter -- in computer climate models suggests that those models may be overestimating global warming predictions.

The findings are significant because soils are by far the world's largest source of carbon dioxide, producing 10 times more carbon dioxide each year than all the carbon dioxide emissions from human activities combined. Small changes in how carbon emissions from soils are estimated, therefore, can have a large impact."We know from measurements that climate change today is worse than people have predicted," said Lehmann. "But this particular aspect, black carbon's stability in soil, if incorporated in climate models, would actually decrease climate predictions."

Cornell University Chronicle, November 2008

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Michael Asher, Daily Tech, 2008

Patterson said much of the up-to-date research indicates that "changes in the brightness of the sun" are almost certainly the primary cause of the warming trend since the end of the "Little Ice Age" in the late 19th century. Human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas of concern in most plans to curb climate change, appear to have little effect on global climate, he said.

Standard Freeholder, 2007

During the last 10,000 years climate has been seesawing between the North and South Atlantic Oceans. As revealed by findings presented by Quaternary scientists at Lund University, Sweden, cold periods in the north have corresponded to warmth in the south and vice verse. These results imply that Europe may face a slightly cooler future than predicted by IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Science Daily, 2007

"Brothel owners in Bulgaria are blaming global warming for staff shortages."

Metro UK, 2007

"Violence within and between communities and between nation states, we must accept, could possibly increase, because the precedents are all around." He [Sir Crispin Tickell] cited Rwanda and Sudan's Darfur region as two examples where drought and overpopulation, relative to scarce resources, had helped to fuel deadly conflicts. "Experts at the conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute said it was likely that global warming would create huge flows of refugees as people tried to escape areas swamped by rising sea levels or rendered uninhabitable by desertification. Tickell said terrorists were likely to seek to exploit the tensions created."

Yahoo News, 2007

"any attempt by countries to build fortress walls to keep out climate change refugees -- what he called the 'barbarians at the gate' mentality -- was doomed to fail."

Paul Rogers, Professor of "Peace Studies", 2007, Yahoo News, 2007

Global warming possibly linked to an enhanced risk of suicide: Data from Italy, 1974–2003, Journal of Affective Disorders, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 17 January 2007, A. Preti, G. Lentini and M. Maugeri

"The debate on the science is over, but the science is now telling us that action is urgent".

Peter Cosier, Group of Concerned Scientists, October 2007

“Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.”

Dr. Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, 2007

Experts say over the next hundred years the "perfect storm" of population growth, resource depletion and climate change could converge with catastrophic results.

ABC News, Earth 2100

(For a list of apocalyptic predictions from 2800 B.C. to present see this.)

These quotes not only show the uncertain state of modern climate science, they demonstrate that the hysterical doomsday predictions of the modern environmental movement increasingly resemble the apocalyptic rantings of ancient mystics. Even their method of chastising and proselytizing the "non-believers" has taken on a religious tone. But what is the connection between biblical prophecy and modern scientific warnings about the end of civilization due to "global cooling", "global warming", or "climate change"? When observing the spectacularly absurd predictions of Malthus in 1798, lamentations about the end of discovery in the 1800's, or Newsweek's dire warnings of global cooling in the 1970's, and in light of overwhelming evidence that modern climate scientists do not fully grasp, uh, well, climate - how can someone like Peter Cosier claim that the "science is over" and that "urgent action" is required?

Furthermore, do these notoriously wrong predictions show that man can never be certain of anything and that knowledge is impossible, and would that imply that man's only choice is between the arbitrary prophecies of mystics or the skepticism of modern philosophers? (On a related note, why is it that Ayn Rand's work is continually prophetic on a scale that would make Nostradamus followers blush yet modern economists can't tell us for sure if fascism is "bad" for the economy?)

The answers to these questions are essential to understand why America is collapsing. The reason they are essential is that these questions relate to how we determine what individuals regard as "true" and therefore relate to what people consider to be "true". If people largely accept the prophecies or theories of the Pope or the Bible it would have enormous implications as the Dark Ages showed. If people largely regard truth as impossible and turn to subjectivism it would have enormous implications as modern culture demonstrates. In general, to the extent that intellectuals can not properly validate concepts or theories, people's ideas will tend toward a bastardized mixture of religion or pseudo-science and subjectivism - a state which will lead to the collapse of civilization itself as we are already witnessing today.

Modern culture is infected by two sides of a false alternative: the religious mystics who claim that knowledge is revealed by God and the subjectivist intellectuals who claim that knowledge is impossible. Where do the global warming scientists fit in? Afterall, religious prophecy overtly rejects evidence in favor of faith and scientists supposedly rely on observation of actual data and logic.

What unites overt mystics and these particular scientists is that both camps reject rational epistemological methods, i.e., both do not understand or overtly reject a rational approach to validating knowledge - although they default in different ways. With respect to both camps it can be said: junk in - junk out, i.e., if one does not properly validate a theory or concept then any prediction based on that theory will be flawed. It is therefore not surprising that the claims of the modern climate scientists resemble the prophecies of ancient mystics.

What is different is that religion is not as powerful as it once was and physical scientists still retain the mantle of "experts" in our society. However, the public at large has largely been disarmed by the modern philosophers assault on reason. If modern climate scientists are considered to be "experts" by a public that does not have the ability to discern truth, scientists take on the same authoritarian role as the priest once did. In other words, rather than evaluate scientific claims independently and objectively, the public accepts the claims of scientists as epistemologically equivalent to the word of God. If scientists say so, it must be true because they are scientists just as whatever the Pope said was once regarded as the word of God. To the extent that a scientist relies on an argument from authority rather than objectivity, he should be regarded on the same level as a religious mystic.

Why do scientists "reject" or fail to understand rational methods of validating ideas and what is the proper method? The root cause of the false alternative between dogma and subjectivism is the modern philsophical assault on reason and the utter default by intellectuals to provide rational methods of validating concepts. The solution is not to throw away the possibility of knowledge nor is it to turn to mysticism. The solution is an objective theory of concepts. Such a theory exists and without it, we are doomed.

In Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, protagonist John Galt states:

No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge.

In its most basic form, I submit that this one simple sentence is the solution to the world's problems. This essential principle is the principle of context. What does the contextual nature of knowledge mean? It means taking into account everything you know and don't know when stating a conclusion.

For example, say it is observed that temperature is increasing somewhere over a certain period of time. Understanding the causes that give rise to this fact could be incredibly difficult. Varying temperatures across the globe made under different conditions at different times with different instruments makes just the act of observation difficult and subject to error. To then go forward and understand the relationship of solar variation with the earth’s atmosphere taking into account solar cycles, the earth's precession, levels of certain gases in the atmosphere affected by such diverse factors as aerosol concentrations, animal emissions, black carbon in the soil, fossil fuel emissions, volcanic activity, oceanic variation, and further grasping that there are factors of which one is not aware makes this process difficult.

Every day, scientists make new observations which enhance their current understanding. The contextual nature of knowledge is not grounds to invalidate reason and knowledge, it is crucial to understanding the human method of cognition. In other words, the fact that scientists make new observations which add to their knowledge is simply a recognition that man is not omniscient, i.e., we don’t and can’t know everything. It is vital that the scientist understand this fact as well. Pronouncements by scientists that “the science is over” or “physics is over” or we are close to “the theory of everything” is spectacularly misguided. Scientists should just state what they know. That means stating a conclusion within a context.

The best current sources on rational epistemology are Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. One of the best writers on this topic today is David Harriman. In an excellent piece titled Errors in Inductive Reasoning in the Winter 2008 issue of The Objective Standard, David Harriman analyzes notorious errors committed by scientists and explains how each case represents an instance of a failure to properly use the method of induction. In the introduction, he states:

In contrast to perception, thinking is a fallible process. This fact gives rise to our need for the method of logic.

Logic, when properly applied, enables us to arrive at true conclusions. But it comes with no guarantee that we will apply the method correctly. The laws of deduction were identified by Aristotle more than two millennia ago, and yet people still commit deductive fallacies. If one remains attentive to the evidence, however, further use of logic leads to the correction of these errors. The same is true of false generalizations reached by induction. Although even the best thinkers can commit inductive errors, such errors wither and die in the light shed by continued application of observation and logic.

During the past century, however, many philosophers have rejected the validity of induction and argued that every generalization is an error. For example, Karl Popper claimed that all the laws of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton have been “falsified”; in his view, no laws or generalizations have ever been or can ever be proven true. By demanding that a true generalization must apply with unlimited precision to an unlimited domain, Popper upheld a mystical view of “truth” that is forever outside the reach of man and accessible only to an omniscient god. In the end, he was left with two types of generalizations: those that have been proven false and those that will be proven false. He was then accused by later philosophers of being too optimistic; they insisted that nothing can be proven, not even a generalization’s falsehood.

Such skeptics commit—on a grand scale—the fallacy of dropping context. The meaning of our generalizations is determined by the context that gives rise to them; to claim that a generalization is true is to claim that it applies within a specific context. The data subsumed by that context are necessarily limited in both range and precision.

Harriman further discusses the role of context in forming a generalization:

A true generalization states a causal relationship that has been induced from observational data and integrated within the whole of one’s knowledge (which, in terms of essentials, spans the range of facts subsumed by the generalization). A scientist makes an error when he asserts a generalization without achieving such an integration. In such cases, the supporting evidence is insufficient, and often the scientist has overlooked counterevidence.

Good science includes understanding the nature of knowledge, i.e., that knowledge is contextual and forming generalizations accordingly. In this sense, the statement that "the science is over" as it relates to climate science is an egregious fallacy. When one understands the contextual nature of knowledge it can be seen at a fundamental level that unless human knowledge is over, the science is never over and as it relates to climate science, in particular, as one can see from the above quotes - it is not even close.

Scientists should understand the limits of their knowledge and be ruthlessly objective with respect to stating or accepting conclusions. Applying induction properly to validate theories is extremely difficult. The modern philosophic assault on reason and induction has resulted in this sorry state of science where many dismiss the pursuit of knowledge as impossible and those left pursuing have no concrete epistemological tools with which to work. If the intellectuals and the scientists have no clue how to validate theories properly, then is it any wonder that the public at large is routinely taken in by apocalyptic forecasts made by "the experts"? Is it surprising that intellectuals within academia and the media are so easily able to exploit the ignorance of the public to advance their own political agenda?

Modern civilization is founded upon the recognition and celebration of the power of the free and independent human mind to discover, create, and build. The Dark Ages and any dictatorship is a consequence of the rejection of the efficacy of the individual mind in favor of revelation and faith in mystic, supernatural forces conveyed to the ragged masses by self-anointed "experts" able to divine real Truth or the will of God. You choose which world you wish to live in.

I came across this poem which inspired this post and I think it eloquently captures the essence and suffocating sense of life of the mystic or in modern times - the crusading environmental pseudo-scientist.

Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition

The church bells toll a melancholy round,
Calling the people to some other prayers,
Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,
More harkening to the sermon's horrid sound.
Surely the mind of man is closely bound
In some black spell; seeing that each one tears
Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,
And converse high of those with glory crown'd
Still, still they too, and I should feel a damp, -
A chill as from a tomb, did I not know
That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;
That 'tis their sighing, wailing ere they go
Into oblivion; - that fresh flowers will grow,
And many glories of immortal stamp.

John Keats, posthumous

Reality Check II: The Cost of Gas vs. The Cost of Government

Below is an updated version of a post from May 2008.

Amidst all the hysteria related to rising gas prices including Congressional "investigations" of the oil companies and threats of additional taxes on their profits consider the following.

If you drive 15,000 miles per year and get 18 miles to the gallon you will consume 833 gallons of gas per year. This means that if gas prices rise $1 per gallon it will cost an extra $833 per year and if they were to rise another $2 per gallon it would cost an extra $1666 per year. Of course, no one wants to pay more, but consider the value you obtain from driving an automobile. It is an almost indispensable part of most of our lives and adds tremendous value in terms of our ability to travel and work. Consider that oil companies are delivering fuel to the consumer at about $2.50 per gallon despite regulations preventing domestic drilling which forces them to rely on hostile foreign governments, regulations that have prevented any new domestic refineries in the last 30 years, and TAXES on the production and sale of gasoline.

Now, if you make $40,000 per year in income, which is about the average yearly income in the United States, consider this back of the envelope calculation of the taxes you must pay the government:

Sales Tax on a 2010 Toyota Prius Hybrid: 6%*$24,000 = $1,440
Income Tax, say 15% = $6,000
Social Security Tax, 7.5% = $3,000
Employer Match (which could be yours) , 7.5% = $3,000
Medicare, 1.45% = $580
State Income Tax, average 5% = $2,000
Sales Taxes (say you spend $10,000 per year at 5%) = $500
Gas Tax (0.40c per gallon at 833 gallons per year) = $333
Property Tax (say you own a $150,000 house at 1.5%) = $2,250

TOTAL = $19,103 or 48% of yearly income, and were not done!

Consider the hidden taxes one pays, which I will not even attempt to quantify. For example, consider that taxes on businesses get passed on to consumers and make the price of goods and services higher than otherwise. Consider that government caused inflation and regulations drive up the cost of everything on the order of 3% to 6% per year as well as having the effect of destroying capital and reducing the productivity of labor which further reduces real wages. Consider the lost return on money you could be saving that instead went to Social Security. Consider the cost of simply filing a tax return which often requires the assistance of a trained accountant if you itemize deductions or own a business. Consider the lost productivity due to the fact that legions of highly intelligent people, viz. accountants and tax attorneys, which could be doing something valuable, are instead employed in the preparation and understanding of the 70,000 page tax code. Consider the cost of health care which is generally deducted from an employees salary as part of an employer sponsored program which reflects the high costs caused by government intervention into medicine and the insurance market. I could go on, but I think I have made my point.

Perhaps most importantly, consider that if you don't like the price of gas then you do not have to buy it! You could simply choose not to purchase it or drive less. The oil companies don't put a gun to your head and demand you buy their product. They offer a product that is of the utmost value and people are voluntarily willing to pay the price. On the other hand, if you don't pay the government you will end up in jail, i.e., the government takes your money under the threat of physical force. This represents the difference between "economic power" and "political power", i.e., the voluntary exchange of value for value versus the point of a gun.

To top it off, consider this recent article which states that

Taxpayers are on the hook for an extra $55,000 a household to cover rising federal commitments made just in the past year for retirement benefits, the national debt and other government promises, a USA TODAY analysis shows.

The 12% rise in red ink in 2008 stems from an explosion of federal borrowing during the recession, plus an aging population driving up the costs of Medicare and Social Security.

That's the biggest leap in the long-term burden on taxpayers since a Medicare prescription drug benefit was added in 2003.

The latest increase raises federal obligations to a record $546,668 per household in 2008, according to the USA TODAY analysis. That's quadruple what the average U.S. household owes for all mortgages, car loans, credit cards and other debt combined.

In summary, consider that the government takes roughly 50% of what you earn in a given year through income and various taxes, impedes productivity and capital formation, and then saddles each household with an additional $546,668 in debt to be paid for out of future taxes including interest. If the government takes 50% of what you make, is it a surprise that both parents must now work to support a household despite massive increases in productivity over the past 100 years? Consider this crushing tax burden in relation to the fact that when gas went from $2 to $3 per gallon it cost the average person an extra $833 per year.

Why are we investigating the oil companies and not our own government?

Now Your State Can Print Money Too!

One reason why spending at the state level can rarely get out of control is because states lack the power to print money. In other words, they must rely on taxation or municipal bond offerings to raise money to fund their budgets. Since taxation is unpopular, there is an obvious political limit to increased tax rates. Since private municipal bond investors can only buy so much debt before asking for higher interest rates, there is also a limit to the amount states can raise through borrowing. The federal government figured out how to get around this limit by creating the Federal Reserve System which is a pseudo private bank with the power to create money. The Fed can buy federal government debt from the public with fake money. Therefore, the federal government always has a buyer for its paper.

Now, the states want to get in on the action.

Of course, the states will not ask for the direct power to print money. They have a more clever way.

In a move with only one modern-day precedent, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic lawmakers are pressing the Obama administration and members of Congress for federal loan guarantees to help the state out of a desperate, multibillion-dollar jam.

California is not asking for cash, like the tens of billions given to AIG, General Motors or Morgan Stanley. (MS) Instead, the state with the worst credit rating in the nation is asking that Washington act as a sort of co-signer on the state's borrowing, to be backed up with money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

California leaders say that would make it easier and cheaper for the state to borrow money on the bond market, reducing the interest rate by as much as half and saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

So, here we go. The states are "not asking for cash" - only federal government "guarantees" to get them out of a "jam". Sound familiar? This is exactly the premise of government sponsored agencies (GSAs) like Freddie and Fannie that were to "guarantee" pools of mortgage backed securities. Such guarantees resulted in the massive issuance of mortgages since they could be pooled and sold to GSAs all in an effort to "help" first time home buyers by keeping mortgage rates down (and underwriting standards lower than otherwise). That worked pretty well, right...?

If the federal government offers similar guarantees to state municipal bond offerings, it will effectively remove any constraint to state level spending. States will no longer have to face the politically unpopular choice of raising taxes to generate revenue or, gasp, cut spending. They will be able to borrow ad infinitum since the federal government will stand behind the state debt with its printing presses in tow. Such a mechanism would effectively transfer the power of printing money to the state level with all of its attendant consequences: reckless spending and runaway indebtedness all backed by the United States taxpayer who will shoulder the burden directly through increased federal taxes or by paying more for everything in the form of inflation as the dollars created to pay for this mess work there way into circulation.

Because this idea is unjust - it effectively spreads state level obligations to other states - and because it is economically disastrous - it will encourage states to spend and borrow more thus crowding out private investment and spurring inflation - and because it mitigates the short run need for politicians to face the consequences of their actions - look for it to pass unopposed.

The Equality of the Dead

A colleague recently pointed out a seeming contradiction.

He observed the fact that the leftist environmentalists, represented by the producer of Story of Stuff, decry "consumerism" and admonish us to conserve, recycle, and sacrifice our material happiness for the sake of their deity, the earth. On the other hand, the other left, represented by the Obama administration, are doing everything in their power to actually increase "consumerism" by inflating the money supply to keep interest rates low to encourage borrowing (a policy which also increases consumption at the expense of saving), defending and propping up Fannie and Freddie to encourage more leverage and borrowing (as this shocking video makes obvious), threatening banks into lending more to consumers, tax credits to encourage first time home buyers to go into debt, new credit card rules that will make it easier for people who can't pay their bills to continue to use them, pursuing "price gouging" witch hunts against gas station owners and oil companies with the alleged goal of keeping gas prices lower, etc.

(Furthermore, their policies which tend to destroy capital formation have the further effect of reducing productivity, which not only reduces the real wages of workers but has the effect of encouraging resources to not be used as efficiently. For example, consider how much a given unit of farmland can produce today compared to a hundred years ago and then consider that any policies which reduce technological progress by reducing productivity impede this process throughout the economy and leads to a much less efficient use of labor, and natural resources.)

In the same way, observe that the greens attack corporations, technology, and capitalism for despoiling the wilderness and encouraging consumption and profits through advertising while at the same time Marxist union workers in Europe are rioting, vandalising, and "bossnapping" in response to layoffs and cutbacks by the same corporations.

Is this a contradiction? How can businesses continue to exist and employ workers while at the same time not making profits, not advertising, and not reshaping the earth? Does one wing of the left desire economic prosperity while one wing opposes it.

This is not a contradiction. What both desire is egalitarianism - just at different levels of absolute misery.

Egalitarianism means belief in the "equality of all men". Properly, "equality" means equality before the law under a system of individual rights. However, egalitarianism means something entirely different. It means that individual should receive equal outcomes regardless of their effort or ability. Quoting Ayn Rand:

They turn the word into an anti-concept: they use it to mean, not political, but metaphysical equality—the equality of personal attributes and virtues, regardless of natural endowment or individual choice, performance and character. It is not man-made institutions, but nature, i.e., reality, that they propose to fight—by means of man-made institutions.

Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts. Since the Law of Identity is impervious to human manipulation, it is the Law of Causality that they struggle to abrogate. Since personal attributes or virtues cannot be “redistributed,” they seek to deprive men of their consequences—of the rewards, the benefits, the achievements created by personal attributes and virtues. It is not equality before the law that they seek, but inequality: the establishment of an inverted social pyramid, with a new aristocracy on top—the aristocracy of non-value.

Note that both the environmentalists and the Obama's seek just this type of egalitarianism. The environmentalists do not value human achievement, progress, and technology. They wish each person to live at the level of a caveman eking out bare subsistence while minimizing his "carbon footprint". Similarly, the Obama's do not value human achievement, progress, or technology either. Their every policy is not designed to protect individual rights, encourage profit seeking, or increase productivity which is required for economic growth. Their motive is to effect an injustice - the injustice of throttling the productive and redistributing their earnings to anyone else who has not earned it.

What fundamentally unites them is the evasion of the law of identity as discussed by Rand in the above quote. Environmentalists wish that man could exist as a non-man who does not need to remake the earth in order to survive. The Obama's wish that the consequences of a non-productive man's non-action would be equal to the consequences of a productive man's actions.

A minor distinction between the environmentalists and Obama is that, as a pragmatist politician, Obama must seem like he is concerned about the economy to get elected. Therefore, his egalitarianism is cloaked in the pseudo-economic theories of Keynes and Marx which have mainstream credibility with the masses as policies that might "work". Practically speaking, all that distinguishes these two factions is the absolute level of misery to which they desire to reduce mankind. The Obama's wish to reduce every man, regardless of his ability, to the level of a K-Mart shopper who can afford shampoo, toothpaste, and anti-depressant medication, while the environmentalists wish to reduce every man to the level of a caveman who subsists on berries and bark. In fact, since the environmentalists wish to depopulate the earth, their version can be regarded as an even higher level of egalitarianism: The equality of the dead.

Devastating "Story of Stuff" Video Critique at HowTheWorldWorks

In my post analyzing the "The Story of Stuff", an environmentalist-Marxist propaganda film aimed at grade schoolers, I linked to a youtube video that performs a line by line critique of the entire film (HT: Harold). He now has a second part posted as well. I highly recommend this devastating critique.

Incidentally, I noticed that the producer of the critique has his own site at HowTheWorldWorks. He engages in several video debates which he has posted and I highly recommend them. Here is one that I enjoyed. In this post, note the long list of anti-human environmentalist quotes he offers to refute his opponents sarcastic claim that environmentalist are really not the "misanthropic caricature" that anti-environmentalists charge them to be.

As an aside - another interesting aspect to this video is the calm, thorough logic of the producer in presenting his arguments as opposed to the hysterically illogical diatribe of his leftist opponent (which includes the offering of a middle finger at one point!). This phenomena is not a coincidence, a fact which I analyzed in some philosophical detail in this post, also here, and here.

Lockitch: "No Environmental Footprint = No Life"

As a follow up to my post from yesterday in which I argued that environmentalists must regard man as innately evil since our nature requires usage of the earth to survive, here is a brief but excellent video op-ed by Dr. Keith Lockitch of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

Lockitch observes the fact that no matter how much anyone actually adopts so-called "green" solutions, no amount of sacrifice is enough to satisfy environmentalists. For example, even when their favored solutions are implemented like solar power or wind farms they complain that the farms despoil the land, or if you switch from disposal to cloth diapers, they complain that it takes water and detergent to clean the cloth, and so on. In other words, Lockitch states:

So long as you are still alive, no amount of green penance can fully erase your guilt...The only way to really leave no footprint would be to die - and that conclusion is not lost on many green ideologues.

He then asks us to "consider this chilling anti-human statement" made by an environmentalist who decries the birth of human life:

From the earth’s point of view, it’s not all that important which kind of diapers you use - the important decision was having the baby.

Think about that for a second! It perfectly captures the the logic of environmentalism, i.e., that human beings are a problem and that less would be more as far as their deity "earth" is concerned. Appropriately, he adds:

Remember that the next time you trustingly adopt a green solution like fluorescent light bulbs, cloth diapers, or wind farms and then find yourself puzzled because you’re still made to feel guilty and asked to sacrifice even more – remember what counts as a final solution for these ideologues

Businesses and individuals must stop kowtowing to the hysterically sanctimonious propaganda of the environmental movement and oppose them philosophically and morally. I agree with his conclusion:

The only rational response to green philosophy is to challenge it at its core. We need to recognize that it’s the essence of human survival to reshape nature for own benefit – that’s not a sin – that’s our highest virtue. It’s time we recognize that environmentalism is a philosophy of guilt and sacrifice – we should reject it in favor of a philosophy that actually values human life.

Human life depends not on adopting "green solutions" - but on opposing them.

The "Story of Stuff" is the Stuff of Evil

3 Ring Binder (HT: Gus Van Horn) has an excellent post regarding an environmentalist propaganda film, "Story of Stuff", that is now being shown to grade schoolers. Quoting the post:

The New York Times reports "Story of Stuff" is the next big thing in environmentalist propaganda in the classroom. Of course, they don't report it that way; the Times actually calls it "cheerful" as its simple drawings and friendly presenter are accessible to even the very young. I don't think that the shaking, desolate line-drawn individuals standing on their little piece of destroyed earth – who have no alternative but to work in nasty factories and poison their own babies through their toxic breast milk because you had to have an iPod – is "cheerful" even if the presenter refers to it in scare quotes as the "beauty” of the system.

This film is purely evil in every sense of the word. It is predicated on a willful evasion of the most basic facts of reality and perhaps, more disturbingly, appears designed to appeal to young children who do not have the power to conceptually grasp the material presented, i.e., it is purposefully designed to scare children into adopting the environmentalist religion's anti-human, anti-freedom, anti-technology credo.

A proper discussion of the ideas presented in this film would include advanced concepts and theories in the physical sciences, basic philosophy, ethics, politics, economics, finance, law, and history. To assume such a discussion is appropriate for young children presumes that the material can be inculcated at a pre-conceptual level, i.e., by emotion, which is exactly the purpose of the propaganda. In other words, the belief that discussion of these topics is appropriate implies that these ideas have the same epistemological status as admonitions to not get in cars with strangers or drink poison, i.e., it implies that the ideas presented in the film are unquestionably true.

The fact that the film is factually inaccurate, philosophically false, and contains ideas beyond the conceptual level of children are grounds enough to prohibit this film in public schools. But, there is an even deeper reason why it should be prohibited. This film should be banned from public schools on the same grounds that any religious material is prohibited in government run schools. Just as intelligent design and creationism have properly been prohibited in schools on the grounds that teaching unscientific ideas would constitute a state sanctioned promotion of religion in violation of the First Amendment, this film and all environmentalist propaganda should also be prohibited.

As this film demonstrates and as I have argued in dozens of past posts, environmentalism is indeed a religion, i.e., it has all the essential characteristics of any modern day religious movement [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. The essential distinguishing attribute of religion is belief in the absence of evidence which perfectly characterizes the environmental movement. The hysterical, apocalyptic propaganda of the environmentalists is groundless [1, 2] and not only ignores but actively flouts the basic facts of reality such as the fact that there are more human beings living longer than ever before, that there can be no shortage of "natural resources" as long as there are no price controls on commodities, and their policies to restrict growth, technology, and freedom lead to a negation of human life - not its furtherance.

To further see the religious nature of environmentalism, consider that environmentalists worship a deity, "Mother Earth", or "Gaia" and regard it as an intrinsic value. That is, this movement holds that the earth is valuable apart from human life and must be preserved for its own sake. In other words, the essence of this movement, their rhetoric notwithstanding, is not to save the earth for man but from man as all of their actual actions prove unequivocally. This doctrine has profound consequences.

Man, by his nature, must use the earth to survive, i.e., he must reshape the earth to build fires, build homes, computers, automobiles, antibiotics, etc. However, if the earth is deified and held to be intrinsically valuable, any impingement upon nature must be regarded as inherently destructive of the true "value", i.e., earth and therefore evil. Therefore, logically, the environmentalist must view man, "the builder", as an innately evil creature. This fact could be likened to an environmentalist version of the concept of Original Sin, the view upheld by Christians that man by his nature is sinful. In this context, it is man's "carbon footprint" which serves as his Original Sin. It is therefore not surprising that famous environmentalists have called for the widespread death of human beings and that they routinely restrict human progress in favor of snails, mosquitoes, and swamps. Consider the following quote by biologist David Graber:

Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet....[The ecosystem has] intrinsic value, more value to me than another human body or a billion of them....Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. (Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1989, p. 9)

In a speech which I have quoted before, noted author Michael Chrichton eloquently states:

"Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe."

..."With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts."

Environmentalism relies on pseudo-science [1, 2,] and upholds the the flawed concept of "intrinsic" value, but there is one more salient feature of the environmentalist ideology which is its real lifeblood - the morality of altruism. Just as modern religion calls for self-sacrifice and self-abnegation in service to God, the environmentalist calls for self-sacrifice to its God - the earth. In other words, the environmentalist appropriates the essential ingredient of modern religious ethics but applies it in an allegedly secular framework - the pseudo-scientific framework of the ecologists.

We are admonished to give up a life of mere "consumerism" in service to a higher ideal. Just as priests embody the Catholic Church's virtue of monastic asceticism and the saintly ideals of sacrifice, abstinence, and service to others, the environmentalist calls on each of us "to do his part", to conserve, recycle, restrict, downsize, and simplify (including not eating meat, not sending Valentine's Day bouquets, not using sex toys with chemical plasticizers and not charging I-pods lest you kill polar bears). Just as modern religions warn their adherents of the consequences of their sins on Judgment Day or hold out the ideal of a heavenly afterlife replete with angels and virgins - the environmentalist warns of the consequences of our actions if we do not heed the call to sacrifice; consequences that include boiling to death from a global warming induced hell on earth, increasing natural disasters, and even increased terrorism [1,2] and suicide - all while holding out the supernatural possibility of a Disney-like harmony with nature where man somehow exists and prospers without eating animals or moving a speck of dirt. Quoting Dr. George Reisman:

It is customary for old-fashioned religion to threaten those whose way of life is not to its satisfaction, with the prospect of hell in the afterlife. Substitute for the afterlife, life on earth in centuries to come, and it is possible to see that environmentalism and the rest of the left are now doing essentially the same thing. They hate the American way of life because of its comfort and luxury, which they contemptuously dismiss as “conspicuous consumption.” And to frighten people into abandoning it, they are threatening them with a global-warming version of hell.

Hell is the environmentalists’ ultimate threat... literally to roast and boil the earth.

The effect of this philosophy on the young will be devastating. As I argued previously [1,2]:

Students are being thoroughly immersed in environmentalist propaganda from a young age...

...Just as those indoctrinated into a cult, a religion, or any philosophy which holds that man is evil and that the standard of morality is sacrifice, the budding environmentalist will be racked with guilt, uncertainty, and fear.

Just as Catholics are famous for the adult psychological consequences of guilt instilled at an early age, now environmentalist children will suffer the same fate - for the same essential reason. In other words, the Catholic concept of Original Sin holds that man is a sinner by nature which requires life to be spent in perpetual self-punishment (penance) to atone for this wrong doing. Similarly, as cited above, the environmentalist views man's nature as essentially evil which must lead to the same type of psychological effect

Perhaps, rather than asking why this film is essentially religious, a better question is in what sense is this film scientific and in what sense does it have any value whatsoever? It is, in fact, riddled with fallacies and outright contradictions and betrays a complete and utter ignorance of the physical sciences and virtually all of the humanities. [UPDATE: per Harold, see this thorough critique posted at YouTube]

For example, at one point the narrator of the film asserts:

One third of the planet's natural resource space have been consumed - gone - we are cutting and mining and hauling and trashing the place so fast that we're undermining the planets very ability for people to live here

Even her on-screen graphic literally shows a giant pie slice taken out of the earth as if it has vanished. But, how is that physically possible? As I pointed out in a past post (which should have been regarded as comical), matter can not be created or destroyed. This implies, contrary to the filmmakers claims, that the earth can not just vanish. When we dig up aluminum and use it to make a can, the aluminum does not disappear from existence. It's location changes but it does not get destroyed. For example, instead of being in the ground, the can is now in my refrigerator. In fact, to concretize this point, in the post I proposed that we use the aluminum ore mines as garbage dumps which should assuage the environmentalists as they can pretend that nothing happened to the precious ore.

And how exactly is our usage of resources undermining "the planets very ability for people to live here"? Man has been producing and using resources for some time now and the population has grown enormously yet the prices of basic commodities have not risen in real terms and in fact have decreased in many cases. This is an obvious contradiction of her claim. In other words, man's ingenuity and the profit motive see to it that there is never a shortage of anything. If prices rise then the potential for profit increases and it stimulates people to create new methods to extract resources or to find alternatives. If she were right, wouldn't we be running out of "stuff"? Apparently, not because at the end of the film she warns us about the evil corporations plot to brainwash us into buying more goods. But I thought everything was disappearing....

Again, keep in mind, a child would regard this claim as positively frightening. Unable to grasp the above argument, they might actually think that the earth is vanishing beneath them which I imagine could be enough to cause mental distress if not mental illness. (If you think I'm exaggerating see my post Climate Change Delusion which discussed a 17 year old psychiatric patient in Melbourne who was refusing to drink water because he was convinced that if he drank water, millions would die from drought caused by climate change - a case doctors deemed to be the first known instance of "climate change delusion". I discussed this case and the relationship of psychosis, religion, and environmentalism again here.)

Elsewhere, she claims that "in her area, less than 4% of the forests are left"and that "40% of the waterway have become undrinkable". What exactly does this mean and in what context? "4% of the forests are left" as compared to when and even if that were true, so what? Does she live in an area that contains farms or maybe in Malibu that has been burned to the ground? She states this as if it is prima facie terrifying. First, someone really should tell the lumber market that wood is vanishing since the real price of wood hasn't changed much lately. But, seriously, is anyone really worried there is not enough forest in the United States? If there were a real shortage of trees, the price of wood would skyrocket and PEOPLE WOULD PLANT MORE OF THEM. In fact, I'm pretty sure wood is a "renewable resource".

And what about the "water" argument? Is there a shortage of water? Last time I was at the grocery store, the shelves were stocked with water, soft drinks, teas, and juices, and in fact, I just turned on my faucet and it came out. I'm shocked. Last I heard, we have the technology to clean and purify it (or desalinate it if we use salt water). Again, does water vanish when it goes down the drain? No, I think it goes back into the ground or to a water treatment facility. Also, water has been known to evaporate but then something called rain drops it back on us. Is there any doubt, that as a result of capitalism and the so-called evil "corporations" that more clean water is available to a larger mass of people that at any time in mankind's history? (Ironically, in this post, I cited environmentalist concerns over water bottles to which they surprisingly seem opposed - but doesn't that imply that we have a lot of water...can anyone seriously argue these people care about people?!)

Consider another typical argument often made by environmentalists - she says that

it's not just that we are using too much stuff but we are using more than our share. We have 5% of the world's population but using 30% of the world's resources and producing 30% of the waste if everybody consumed at U.S. rates we would need 3 to 5 planets. [emphasis mine]

This argument is based on a total evasion of the concept of consumption. In a free market, one can not "consume" without first "producing". In other words, if you go into a restaurant and say "OK, I'm here to consume" do you think they will just give you food for free? Of course, your "demand" is equal to your "supply" meaning that one must first produce something of value and then offer to exchange that value for something else of equal value - a principle known in economics as Say's Law. To say that Americans "consume 30% of the world's resources" is to say that Americans produce 30% of the worlds wealth. Yet, she equates the ratio of the population of America to the population of the world (5%) with "consumption" as if there is some necessary identity between the two.

To see this more clearly, let's say you lived on a desert island with a bunch of people. Let's say that a couple of guys work really hard cutting down trees, planting crops, domesticating livestock, making tools, etc. while the other people just plant a few bananas and make some beads. Now, the guys that produce a lot have a lot to offer and so they would likely trade with one another meaning that one guy might trade his stock of wood for some cattle while the other less productive people would trade one of their beads or bananas for a smaller portion of the wood. Is this not completely fair? Yet, the environmentalist would say "but the 2 guys are only a small percent of the overall population and yet they are 'consuming' a large portion of the 'resources' and creating all the waste." When put in this light, one can see that this is a ridiculous argument that evades the essential nature of production and its relationship to consumption. One must produce value in order to consume. The more one produces then the more one can consume.

This particular environmentalist argument combines a flawed understanding of basic economics with an egalitarian theory of "social justice" once again derived from their religious ethical view of morality. First, they imply that "resources" are finite which simply exist rather than understanding that goods must be produced. In essence, they regard wealth as a big pie to be sliced up amongst the population in such a way that each person gets his "fair" share of the pie which evidently is equal to his ratio of the population. Who determines this and why? They don't say. In fact, this whole theory that greater population will require "3 to 5 more planets" harkens back to Malthus, who notoriously predicted that we were running out of food - in 1798!

Of course, it should be obvious that the only real threat to the actual supply of timber, water, and any other essential product are the environmentalists themselves who use government coercion to usurp the right to trade and own property, stop progress, and restrict technological advancement. Consider that technology in a capitalist society has resulted in less land usage to produce a greater amount of food. Consider that technology allows us to air condition or heat our homes which can protect us from "climate change". Technology allows us to MOVE if conditions change and to relatively cheaply and easily construct new homes anywhere including within deserts and on mountains and someday on other planets. Consider that technology results in life saving medicines that lead to longer, happier lives.

If environmentalists were truly concerned with mankind's happiness, wouldn't they study the system that has brought about the greatest prosperity, longevity, and human happiness in mankind's history? Wouldn't they regard capitalism and the principle of individual rights upon which it is based as a bastion of civilization and human happiness? If they were truly concerned about human life, wouldn't they uphold this system and seek to advance it everywhere on earth so that more could enjoy its benefits? If they were truly concerned with alternative energy or "green" technologies wouldn't they become engineers or scientists and seek capital from investors to pursue research and development of products which they could trade on a free market if anyone wanted them?

Don't be fooled - the environmentalists are concerned about human beings - but it is not our happiness that concerns them.

[UPDATE: per Harold, see this thorough critique posted at YouTube]

Shock: Fed Oversight?

This is truly shocking. A must see.

My colleague who sent this to me adds:

Per the Fed’s website: "The Office of Inspector General (OIG) conducts independent and objective audits, inspections, evaluations, investigations, and other reviews related to programs and operations of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Board). OIG efforts promote integrity, economy, efficiency, and effectiveness; help prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse; and strengthen accountability to the Congress and the public. The OIG’s work assists the Board in managing risk and in achieving its overall mission to foster the stability, integrity, and efficiency of the nation’s monetary, financial, and payment systems so as to promote optimal macroeconomic performance."

Chrysler's Debt Holders Meet Karl Marx

In several past posts [1,2,3], I discussed the Obama Administration's fascist tactics related to their recent handling of Chrysler's secured debt holders. These debt holders, relying on the rule of law and hundreds of years of jurisprudence, expected to be repaid first in any sort of bankruptcy proceeding. When they realized that Obama is trying to thwart the rule of law, several dissident bond holders mounted a lawsuit aimed at stopping this process, however, they have now thrown in the towel. Thomas Bowden from ARC discusses the case here. [update: Alex Epstein discusses what should have happened here if we did not live in "Bailout Nation"]. In an article titled “U.S. Played Rough With Chrysler’s Creditors”, the WSJ recounts the recent events surrounding this travesty.

The results of these hardball tactics were on display Friday, as the last resisters of a deal to slash the value of Chrysler debt abandoned their effort to fight it in bankruptcy court. That raised the chances for a relatives swift transit through Chapter 11, producing a new Chrysler that is 55%-owned by a trust for union retirees, 35% by Fiat SpA-a company that hasn’t even been a Chrysler creditor-and not at all by the senior secured lenders.

The more fundamental concern related to this series of events is that such government tactics represent a major broadside on the rule of law and a further dramatic step on the road to outright fascism. What is fascism and what distinguishes it from socialism?:

The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal . . .

Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it—at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens . . .

Needless to say, under either system, the inequalities of income and standard of living are greater than anything possible under a free economy—and a man’s position is determined, not by his productive ability and achievement, but by political pull and force.

If continued, this disturbing trend will end in chaos, economic stagnation, and oppression as capital flees the country or never enters it in the first place. What incentive would any investor have to invest in "secured debt" when the government can and will change the rules at any time? Even if Obama mitigates this type of intervention going forward, the cost of capital will likely rise as investors demand a larger premium (interest rate) to compensate them for the risk that the government will not protect the rule of law. America, rather than a bastion of safety under a stable system of laws, will begin to resemble a third world emerging market - a state of affairs for which we will all pay the price. Unfortunately, this trend is far from ending. In fact, it is just beginning as the PPIP (Public-Private Investment Program) makes clear.

To flesh out the more fundamental premises behind these programs, consider a statement in the WSJ article:

The White House ‘s role in restructuring Chrysler has sent a shudder through the community of lawyers and lenders in the field of bankruptcy and corporate workouts. Critics complain that the administration has violated a bedrock principle of American capitalism and unfairly demonized financial firms that are vital to the functioning of the economy and its eventual recovery.

Administration officials reply that the Chrysler crisis required bold action. While Chryslers suppliers, dealers and unionized workers are critical to its survival-and so is Fiat, which will contribute high-efficieny engines and foreign distribution-the creditors were expendable.

“You don’t need banks and bondholders to make cars,” said one administration official. [emphasis mine]

What!? So, according to the Obama administration, capital is not required to build factories, car engines, or dealerships?! Of course, this is a statement that contradicts the most obvious facts of reality. What is the root of such a claim made not by an uneducated ignoramus but presumably by a highly educated member of Obama's administration? The root of this claim can be found in virtually every college classroom, the same college classrooms funded and supported by the very businessmen who decry the real life consequences of the lessons taught in those classrooms.

The root of this claim is Karl Marx’s Labor Theory of Value.

In essence, Marx’s theory holds that the price of a good consists solely of the physical work required to make the good. Under this doctrine, if a good sells for more than the sum total of the wages paid to workers who allegedly are entirely responsible for its production, this excess (or profit) is held to be exploitative to the workers. This theory is the bedrock foundation of Marxian exploitation theory and of the entire philosophy of Marxism. Under this theory, capitalists serve only to exploit the workers by siphoning off revenue which rightly belongs to the worker. Thus, “you don’t need banks and bondholders to make cars.”

Of course, it is a fact that labor is one of the determinants of a good’s value, a fact recognized by classical economics. However, the idea that a good’s value consists entirely of the physical labor required to produce it is absolutely false. For a full refutation of this argument, I recommend Dr. George Reisman’s, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics which can be found in its entirety here. Quoting Reisman:

The Marxian exploitation theory has been and continues to be among the most influential economic doctrines in the word. Despite the global collapse of socialism, it continues to be the prevailing theory of wages. Its truth in the explanation of the determination of wage rates is taken for granted both by the overwhelming majority of intellectuals and by the great mass of ordinary citizens in all countries of the world...

According to the exploitation theory, capitalism is a system of virtual slavery, serving the narrow interests of a comparative handful of "exploiters" - the businessmen and capitalists - who, driven by insatiable greed and power-lust, exist as parasites upon the labor of the masses. This view of capitalism has not been the least big shaken by the steady rise in the standard of living of the average person that has taken place in the capitalist countries since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. the rise in the standard of living is not attributed to capitalism, but precisely to the infringements that have been made upon capitalism. Thus, people attribute economic progress to labor unions and social legislation, and to what they consider to be improved personal ethics on the part of employers...

As I have indicated, the exploitation theory has been and continues to be a guiding force in the thoughts and actions not only of the various Communist and socialist parties around the word, but also in those of the great majority of people who regard themselves as anticommunists and antisocialists. It is believed to be correct by almost everyone, not as a description of present-day conditions, to be sure, but as a description of the workings of laissez-faire capitalism-of capitalism free of all government intervention into the economic system...

Dr. Reisman offers a full refutation of Marx's theory along with an exposition of the classical labor theory of value. See particularly:

Chapter 11, Part C 4: The Labor Theory of Value of Classical Economics

Chapter 11, Part C 5: The “Iron Law of Wages” of Classical Economics

Chapter 11, Part C 5: Marxian Distortions of Classical Economics; The Final Demolition of the Exploitation Theory

Chapter 14, Part A: The Productivity Theory of Wages, The Marxian Exploitation Theory

Why is it that Marx's ideas continue to dominate academia despite economic theory and the facts of reality which overwhelmingly refute it? Is there an even deeper cause that explains Marxism's appeal? Marxism has gained currency because its fundamental premises resonate with the prevailing ethos of our culture: the morality of altruism.

The morality of altruism regards anyone who pursues their self-interest as evil. This is why Marxism, which regards capitalism to be "driven by insatiable greed and power-lust", is palatable to modern intellectuals. Marxist economic theory much like the science of global warming provides a pseudo-scientific veneer to the socialist agenda - an agenda which seeks to subjugate the individual in the name of egalitarian social justice. Only a philosophy which boldy and proudly upholds the right of the individual to exist for his own sake, i.e., a philosophy which upholds rational self-interest, can defeat Marxism.

For those who do believe that banks and bondholders are "necessary" to make just about anything and to those who grasp that the foundation of civilization: individual rights and the rule of law are necessary if man is to survive and prosper, it would serve them well to understand what modern universities are and are not teaching, and demand “value” for their money.

Plato's Beauty Pageant

This article reports on a recent "beauty pageant" that took place in Saudi Arabia:

Sukaina al-Zayer is an unlikely beauty queen hopeful. She covers her face and body in black robes and an Islamic veil, so no one can tell what she looks like. She also admits she's a little on the plump side.

But at Saudi Arabia's only beauty pageant, the judges don't care about a perfect figure or face. What they're looking for in the quest for "Miss Beautiful Morals" is the contestant who shows the most devotion and respect for her parents.

"The idea of the pageant is to measure the contestants' commitment to Islamic morals... It's an alternative to the calls for decadence in the other beauty contests that only take into account a woman's body and looks," said pageant founder Khadra al-Mubarak.

"The winner won't necessarily be pretty," she added. "We care about the beauty of the soul and the morals."

To me, what is interesting about this pageant is that it represents a concretization not just of religion but the more fundamental philosophy upon which modern religion is based: Platonism.

In my post, Meet Cass Sunstein - Your Choice Architect, I discussed the influence of Platonism on his evil ideology. Here, in a completely different context, we see the influence of Plato again. It is not coincidental that his philosophy appears in evil contexts. Why is this so?

According to Plato, actual things are just imperfect reflections of ideal forms that can only be accessed by the enlightened.

According to Socrates [Plato's representative], physical objects and physical events are "shadows" of their ideal or perfect forms, and exist only to the extent that they instantiate the perfect versions of themselves. Just as shadows are temporary, inconsequential epiphenomena produced by physical objects, physical objects are themselves fleeting phenomena caused by more substantial causes, the ideals of which they are mere instances. For example, Socrates thinks that perfect justice exists (although it is not clear where) and his own trial would be a cheap copy of it.

The allegory of the cave (often said by scholars to represent Plato's own epistemology and metaphysics) is intimately connected to his political ideology (often said to also be Plato's own), that only people who have climbed out of the cave and cast their eyes on a vision of goodness are fit to rule. Socrates claims that the enlightened men of society must be forced from their divine contemplations and compelled to run the city according to their lofty insights. Thus is born the idea of the "philosopher-king", the wise person who accepts the power thrust upon him by the people who are wise enough to choose a good master. This is the main thesis of Socrates in the Republic, that the most wisdom the masses can muster is the wise choice of a ruler.

Plato's philosophy leads to a rejection of this world, i.e., reality, in favor of an idealized or perfect world as conveyed to the masses by enlightened Philosopher Kings (like the Pope, the Ayatollah, or Cass Sunstein). It is obvious that such a philosophy is the essence of religion. In fact, Platonism was hugely influential on early Christian theologians. For a detailed accounting of the early Christian church and the influence of Greek philosophy I highly recommend, The Closing of the Western Mind, by Charles Freeman. For example, Freeman discusses Clement of Alexandria [c.150-c.215]:

Clement was in effect drawing on Middle Platonism, which stressed the power of "the Good" or "the One" to act in the world through the Platonic Forms. Platonism was ideally suited to providing the intellectual backbone of Christianity in that Platonists, particularly Middle Platonists, were dealing with the concept of an unseen, immaterial world in which "the Good," or God, could be described as absolute while at the same time being able to have a creative and loving role. Middle Platonists had developed the idea of the human soul from earlier Greek philosophy. They saw the soul as distinct from the human body and able to exist independently of it and to make its own relationship with a providential God, who, in his turn, might reach out to it living and creatively through the Forms, or "thoughts of God," as they were now described by Christian theologians.

To Plato, everything in the world is an imperfect reflection of the ideal, so logically, this doctrine leads to a disdainful, contemptuous view of reality and of man's nature. Consider the Christian doctrine of Original Sin which regards man as inherently sinful by virtue of having obtained knowledge and the capacity to be human in the Garden of Eden. Note that the essence of religion is faith or belief in the absence of evidence, which is considered a virtue. Note that religion urges the rejection of this world in favor of a heavenly after life; it promotes the worship of an unknowable God; it demands the rejection of sexual pleasure, and in the case of the beauty pageant (and in Islam generally) the literal cover up of physical feminine beauty.

Another important feature of Platonism mentioned in the Freeman quote is the separation of the body from the soul. Note the explicit recognition of this dichotomy by the pageant founder: "The winner won't necessarily be pretty," she added. "We care about the beauty of the soul and the morals." Again quoting Freeman (p. 146):

In contrast to Aristotle, who had talked of the soul as the essence of a human body, using the analogy that a body without a soul would be like an axe that cannot cut, Plato had stressed the independence of the soul from the body and its continuing existence from one body to another.

This doctrine was hugely influential on early Christian theologians such as Origen who argued:

that the soul was preexistent to the body in which it came to live and could move on to others after the death of a body (transmigration), but gradually the belief was consolidated that each body had its individual soul given to it at conception and that soul continued to exist eternally after the death of the body, something Aristotle could never have imagined. It could enjoy the happiness of heaven or the suffering of punishment in hell for eternity.

Origen stressed that the process of learning "true reality" requires devotion and commitment, an attribute of paramount importance to the pageant contestants:

Origen drew on the Platonic idea of a long, disciplined period of training before it was possible to achieve knowledge of the true reality - in their case God. The first step, the desire to commit oneself to the long path ahead, was the most important. This created the possibility of being "transformed, " a key concept for Origen. Those who selected themselves for "transformation" were the equivalents of Plato's Guardians, and like the Guardians their selection distinguished them from the those less committed to recovery.

Note how this philosophy naturally leads to the false alternative between "morals" and "physical beauty". Under this doctrine, in contrast to the Forms or God, physical beauty is regarded as fleeting and imperfect. Accordingly, to the Platonist, it is much more important to devote or commit one's life to the soul which is eternal. Therefore, the choice offered by this false alternative is "morals", i.e., sacrifice and the dictates of dogmatic authority or "beauty", i.e., the physical realm detached from morality.

Today, we see this all around us. It is implied in the false alternative between "religion", represented by the Religious Right in America or the fundamentalist Muslim fanatics in the Middle East, and subjectivism, represented by modern cultures' glorification of physical power and brute materialism detached from the concept of morality. It is implied by Cass Sunstein's distinction between the "consumer" who imbibes "infotainment" and the "citizen" who aspires to higher ideals. It is implied by the pageant founder when she declares:

The idea of the pageant is to measure the contestants' commitment to Islamic morals... It's an alternative to the calls for decadence in the other beauty contests that only take into account a woman's body and looks."

In reality, if morality is derived objectively, i.e., through reason using man's life as the standard of good and evil, then it becomes obvious that one can and ought to be moral and beautiful. In other words, there is no necessary dichotomy between the achievement of rational egoistic values and physical beauty. Under this philosophy, the philosophy of Objectivism, the idea of morals without beauty or beauty without morals or a beauty pageant where the contestants cover their bodies, can be seen as the ridiculous and disastrous false alternative that it is.

Good News II: Cliff Asness is "Unafraid in Greenwich"

It's heartening to see more financial professionals speaking out against the Obama administration's fascist tactics related to their treatment of Chrysler's debt holders. Another prominent hedge fund manager, Cliff Asness, who runs AQR Capital, "has distributed an opinion letter discussing the most relevant topic over the past few days that has gotten no MSM attention". In his letter titled "Unafraid in Greenwich Connecticut" which can be found here, he writes:

Let’s be clear, it is the job and obligation of all investment managers, including hedge fund managers, to get their clients the most return they can. They are allowed to be charitable with their own money, and many are spectacularly so, but if they give away their clients’ money to share in the “sacrifice”, they are stealing.

...This is America. We have a free enterprise system that has worked spectacularly for us for two hundred plus years. When it fails it fixes itself. Most importantly, it is not an owned lackey of the oval office to be scolded for disobedience by the President.

After citing fears in the investment industry of retaliation by the government against those who speak out, Asness fittingly ends his letter with the following sorry statement on freedom in America:

I am ready for my “personalized” tax rate now.