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Climate Hysteria Is A Backdoor For Imposing Personal Interests On The Public.

January 10, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

The “fight” against global warming is not a selfless movement wholly focused on saving our world but a means for activists to impose their personal desires on the rest of us. They want to shut down farms, stop homebuilding, dictate what we can eat, and are eager to financially reward politically favored groups.

Our first stop on this tour of private crusades is in the United Kingdom, where Ian Boyd, a former chief scientific adviser for the government, is claiming, according to a recent British Guardian report, that “half of the nation’s farmland needs to be transformed into woodlands and natural habitat to fight the climate crisis and restore wildlife.”

“We need a large, radical transformation and we need to do it quickly, in the next decade” said the good professor.

Continued Boyd: “If anybody asked me: ‘If there is one thing I can do to help save the planet, what would it be?’ I would say just eat a lot less meat. It’s the easiest thing to do. I’ve done it.”

And we are therefore supposed to be impressed by his commitment and inspired to follow the great man.

Of course he’s not making the sacrifice alone. Others have chosen to cut back or eliminate their meat intake in the name of saving us from global warming. None were easily found at the last United Nations climate conference in Madrid, where “U.N. bureaucrats chow(ed) down on burgers – while attacking meat.”

While some alarmists have gone to war against meat consumption, a UCLA urban planning professor apparently wishes housing was a communal rather than an individual or family affair.

“If we want to keep cities safe in the face of climate change, we need to seriously question the ideal of private homeownership,” says the subhead of piece published in The Nation two days before Christmas.

Professor Kian Goh, who is teaching young minds vulnerable to radical thinking, is also critical of property rights in general. He prefers “government-planned and -built public housing,” as well as “new or reconstituted forms of cooperative housing.”

“The idea of cooperative living,” (which clearly means “communal” living and therefore is socialism-based) “in both financial and social terms,” writes Goh, “needs room to breathe and grow.”

Obviously there’s no room for the freedom to choose in Goh’s world.

Finally, we move on the reparations crowd, which skipped the steps of Eric Hoffer’s progression of causes and jumped directly to the racket level.

“Shout out if you want to destroy fossil fuel capitalists,” a woman described as an “environmental strategist” told the crowd gathered last week at Fire Drill Friday, a Capitol Hill climate protest held each week.

“We will demand reparations for the harm that they caused,” she tweeted. “Together we will redistribute trillions of dollars to fund a #GreenNewDeal.”

According to Townhall, the woman – who was given a microphone and stage clearly to stir up emotions, and has common ground with Joe “Put Fossil Fuel Executives In Jail” Biden – also said “let me hear your vigor for ending racism while you do it” and “we need to make them pay today.” So again we find evidence that the goal isn’t to stop Earth from overheating, but to fulfill a left-wing wish list.

Even Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teen who is supposedly a prophetess warning that we’re burning through our blue rock, has tapped into the wider agenda. Last month, she told her thrilled-to-be-scolded followers that “the climate crisis is not just about the environment. It is a crisis of human rights, of justice and of political will. Colonial, racist and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled it. We need to dismantle them all.”

Sounds much like the warming alarmists who dream of taking down capitalism without firing a shot.

We should be appalled at the dishonesty that’s at the rotten core of climate fanaticism. But we’re not, because its disciples learned from some of the most deceitful and vicious characters throughout history.

This article first appeared at Issues & Insights (issuesinsights.com)

Image by Alejandro Alvarez

The Politicians Who Rig Our System Learn How To Make “The System Is Rigged” Trend On Social Media.

December 17, 2019/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

It’s crazy season, that special time on the American calendar when aspiring candidates for the nation’s highest office try to outdo each other in an effort to attract more voters to their platforms. This time around, background support is provided by a virtual anvil chorus of anti-capitalism clatter. Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example, frequently unleashes criticism of American capitalism by asserting that the “system is rigged,” a complaint that seems to resonate with meaningful populist appeal. It’s an old refrain that has echoed across the years from Karl Marx onward.

Nobel Laureate Robert J. Shiller explains why this may be the case in his new book, “Narrative Economics.” As Shiller points out, when a story is repeated enough, the viral message may be accepted as conventional wisdom, more like an article of belief than a matter of reason.

I’ll also emphasize that for a message to prevail, it helps if its content rests on a preexisting and inherently moral foundation that reflects our tribal instincts as an evolved human species. And what works for a small tribe doesn’t necessarily work so well for a huge industrialized nation.

Consider this: Some may inquire, “Do you believe in capitalism?” almost as if the position one takes is a matter of religion. When answering, we reflect on our tribal preferences, and cooperating and sharing with our family and neighbors is often a key to success. Thus, many people will almost instinctively answer “no,” or at least “yes, but …” followed by some serious caveats and exceptions.

Yes, the beneficial-but-invisible hand of commerce driven by self-interest has never been an instinctually lovable idea. Gains from trade, while well-documented since the days of Adam Smith, can be more elusive than we may first realize. Given the widespread negative views on the subject, politicians’ calls for greater accountability and government intervention may not be welcomed by all, but they’re understandable.

Shiller adds another dimension to his narrative economics story by using data from Google’s Ngram Viewer. The viewer produces charts based on the frequency of particular words and phrases in Google Books, which include some 8 million downloaded volumes in various languages.

Consider an Ngram we might apply to Senator Warren’s comments. The nearby figure contains one for “system is rigged” that shows the frequency of the phrase’s occurrence from 1940 through 2008, the final year in the database. I have smoothed the data by using a three-year running average:

Capitalism Promises Hope And Requires Responsibility. Politicians, Intellectuals And Critics Promote Only Envy.

May 27, 2019/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

Presidential aspirant Kamala Harris promises to compel private companies with more than 100 employees to disclose what they pay employees to the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission. Companies that don’t pay women “enough” will pay fines until they demonstrate an acceptable level of gender parity. South Bend, Indiana’s “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg thinks America needs a federal “Equality Act” to make up for past racism, sexism, and homophobia. Senator Elizabeth Warren champions direct cash payments to black Americans as reparations for slavery. And all of the 2020 hopefuls take great pains to characterize income and wealth disparity as the defining issue of our time.

The ostensible thread connecting all of these public policy ideas is equality. Millions of Americans firmly believe the proper role of government is to make us more equal and thereby make society more just. Old-fashioned liberal ideas about private property and natural rights barely register in this worldview. And it won’t be changed by an election or politician; egalitarianism as an animating political, economic, and social principle is firmly entrenched across the West today.

Are these proposals rooted in justice, or hatred and envy? Are they presented as an appeal for restitutionary justice, however far-fetched and far-removed? Or do they represent a gross display of cynical politics, an appeal meant to divide? We hate to play amateur psychologist. But after more than a century of progressive claims of good intentions, the results speak for themselves: capitalism and markets increase freedom and prosperity, while political engineering is zero-sum and antagonistic.

Ludwig von Mises explained so much of what still plagues us today in his underrated classic The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. Written in the early 1950s, toward the end of Mises’s long career, this short book exhibits easier language and faster pace than his earlier works. Having been in the US for more than a decade at this point, one senses a change in Mises’s written English. He’s more comfortable in his diction and syntax, and utterly unconcerned with staying in his lane as an economist.

For Mises, capitalism is private property and markets. It is the engine of civilization, and the hallmark of any society with a natural and healthy “urge for economic betterment.” It is the only way to organize society that comports with human nature, promotes peace and social cohesion, and advances material well-being.

So what accounts its constant vilification? Capitalism’s critics, no less self-interested than anyone else, must be explainable by their unease and dissatisfaction with life. And envy, no less than a biblical sin, is the source of that unease and dissatisfaction. So while Mises much earlier advanced the concept of “felt uneasiness” in his explanations of praxeology, he goes much further here into an outright examination of the psychological source of that uneasiness.

Why do intellectuals, particularly university professors, resent capitalism? Simple, Mises explains: they resent the higher incomes and prestige of the risk-taking, entrepreneurial widget makers they look down upon.

Why do working-class voters resent capitalism? Capitalism provides freedom, Mises tells us, but also imposes responsibility for one’s lot in life (a suggestion for which Jordan Peterson is deeply resented on the Left). A more successful sibling or neighbor serves as a reminder of one’s failings, and every day presents an opportunity to advance or fall back. This is hardly comforting.

Why do literary and artistic elites, including Hollywood and Broadway, resent capitalism? The consuming public’s taste is fickle and fleeting. The sensitive artist’s work may go completely unappreciated by middlebrow mass audiences, and even the successful actor may become forgotten after a poorly received film or two.

Capitalism produces bad art? Who is to say, Mises asks, how the tired working class spend their leisure time and money? And with the plenitude capitalism provides, every taste is satisfied. Over time, particular genius like Shakespeare tends to emerge and prevail—albeit not always in time for wealth and fame in the artist’s lifetime.

But doesn’t capitalism result in other kinds of impoverishment, by making us less happy, more unequal, and crassly materialistic? Again, Mises unapologetically stands his ground: materialism is worthy of celebration; as today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s affordable middle-class necessities. Inequality is meaningless until we grapple with scarcity, the starting point for any economic analysis. Capital accumulation is the only way to alleviate the scarcity that defines our natural world. Happiness is perhaps undefinable and un-measurable, but who among us should have the right to deny an automobile or refrigerator to satisfy a consumer’s wish? Why do the anti-capitalists want to forbid the common man his “daily plebiscite”?

Of course, Mises’s account of the anti-capitalist mindset did not go unchallenged by critics. The infamous former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers took to the pages of National Review for a denunciation of the book’s “know-nothing conservatism.” The Economist magazine (was it ever good?) lambasted Mises’s “sad little book” and its caricature of liberalism by a debater of “Hyde Park standard.”

But in the intervening 65 years, has Mises’s identification of “envy, conceit, ignorance, and dishonesty” among western anti-capitalists proved correct? Did events in the second half of the 20th century, particularly the collapse of Soviet communism, tend to vindicate him?

Certain sentences like “Under capitalism…everybody’s station in life depends on his own doing,” and “Under capitalism, material success depends on the appreciation of a man’s achievements on the part of the sovereign consumers” will strike some readers as depicting an overly rosy view of American meritocracy. But again, Mises’s conception of capitalism is unfettered, not the mixed system of political patronage in the US then and now. His larger point stands: markets and property present the individual with opportunities never before known in human history, while state planning makes us all cogs in a wheel.

Ultimately, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality is a defense of dynamic capitalism against the doctrines of both progressives and conservatives. The former would deny average people that most unique and cherished American opportunity, the chance for upward class mobility. The latter seek to protect their own status against the nouveau riche the market disruptors. Both seek to keep people in their place, whereas unbridled capitalism—warts and all—gives them hope with responsibility.

Mises understood this. Politicians should read him.

Jeff Deist is president of the Mises Institute.

Climate Change Activist Admits: Being Green “Requires the End Of Capitalism”.

March 30, 2019/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

Well, at least they’re now being honest about it. A headline this week in The Guardian reads: “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?”

The article, by Phil McDuff, goes on the discuss the “Green New Deal” currently being peddled in the US Congress, and declares a radical turn toward socialism is really at the heart of saving the planet from climate change:

The radical economics isn’t a hidden clause, but a headline feature. Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below “absolutely catastrophic” is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo.

The “status quo,” we have now is a form of capitalism that is highly regulated by states, manipulated by immensely powerful central banks, and distorted by global NGOs like the World Bank. Nevertheless, this system contains enough of a semblance of market-based freedom that many leftwing ideologues regard it as a type of radical laissez-faire capitalism marked by unrestrained and fossil-fuel powered consumption.

Not surprisingly, they think this system must be abolished.

Unfortunately for the billions of human beings who have benefited from what market freedom exists, the new green-socialist global state imagined by McDuff will undo decades of gains against grinding poverty — gains enjoyed by the world’s most at-risk and poorest populations.

The Decline of Poverty — and Its Effects — In the Developing World

Quality of life indicators have been consistently moving upward in recent decades.

Global life expectancy is increasing, especially in the poorest parts of the world. Child mortality is going down. Malnourishment is down. Access to clean water and sanitation is increasing. Literacy is increasing. Extreme poverty is rapidly declining. Access to electricity has grown.

The biggest gains tend to be in Africa and South Asia where the world’s worst poverty has been historically found.

Moreover, we have yet to observe evidence that these trends will be reversed due to climate change.

This doesn’t stop advocates for climate-change socialism like McDuff from predicting disaster. Indeed, in a July 2018 article, McDuff predicts the effects of climate change will be so disastrous that not even oil companies will benefit from their rapacious fossil fuel mongering.

Hazy Disaster Metrics

But what exactly will this global disaster look like? McDuff can point to no details or examples. He can only predict the coming disasters will be measured in “the lives lost, the homes flooded, the farms wasted away to drought.”

Yet, the observed trends suggest this simply isn’t happening. Moreover, McDuff can’t even point to rising deaths from natural disasters, which we are so often told are the chief currency of the coming climate apocalypse.

In reality, deaths from climate-caused natural disasters have gone into steep decline. This is why efforts to predict coming natural-disaster-fueled doom rely on dollar amounts and property damage, which naturally grow over time as homes and machines become more complex and more expensive.

But any growth in human casualties simply can’t be found, and this is largely a byproduct of the wealth surpluses fueled by what moderate amounts of market freedom we have. Thanks to centuries of capital accumulation in market societies, even ordinary people increasingly have access to better medical care, infrastructure, and disaster aid undreamed of in previous generations.

Do What We Say: Or Face Total and Utter Extinction

“So what?” proponents of carbon taxes and climate regulation will say. “Sure, the standard of living may decline, but what’s that compared to total global destruction?”

This sort of hyperbolic language, isn’t an exaggeration on my part. Advocates for climate-change regulations routinely rely on this sort of language precisely because they know the cost of implementing their policies comes at a very high cost. Thus, the choice between their policy and alternatives must be framed as a choice between climate socialism or total extinction.

Indeed, when we examine the proposals in more detail, such as October’s report released by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we find that the costs of implementation are immense.

After all, the fundamental premise behind most climate-change-prevention schemes is to regulate energy production, reduce access to cheaper forms of energy, and then replace part of that lost capacity with subsidized new forms of green energy. These subsidies require pulling wealth out of the productive economy and funneling it into special government-favored “green” industries which will receive subsidies — after the state bureaucracy takes its cut, of course. The more expensive products offered by these industries would not have been purchased without the subsidies, and without the coercive regulations designed to reduce choice in energy consumption.

We’re told this sort of extensive state control of one of the economy’s most fundamental resources — i.e., energy — must happen because the only alternative is the total destruction of planet earth.

One does not need to be some sort of hard-core laissez-faire libertarian to see the problem. Even economist William Nordhaus, who has been hailed as a champion of climate-change policies, found that recent carbon-tax and regulatory schemes were so costly, that it would be better to do nothing.

It’s also important to remember these costs are not mere aggregate numbers on a spreadsheet somewhere.

Declaring War on Rising Standards of Living

The effects of these climate-control schemes would come down hardest on people in the poorer parts of the world. Energy consumption is high in the rich world, but the demand for growing access to electricity, personal transportation, and heating-and-cooling technologies are highest in the developing world.

Access to these technologies will be increasingly important as climate change occurs. People the world over will need heating and air conditioning. They’ll need water filtration technology. They’ll need better insulated homes. They’ll need appliances that improve sanitation and free human beings to engage in higher-productivity labor.

But the new green socialism is an immense obstacle to all of this.

Moreover, people in the developing world are still in the process of gaining access to labor-saving and life-changing machines like washing machines. Electric devices such as these improve daily life — an improvement felt especially by women — in ways modern westerners forgot about long ago. Yet, manufacturing and powering machines such as these is costly, and the more affordable energy is available, the more people will gain access.

First-World Chauvinism

This is why statistician Hans Rosling saw a fundamental conflict between well-meaning first-world activists and ordinary people in the developing world.

When speaking to environmentally-conscious audiences, Rosling noted many in the audience insisted that “No, everybody in the world cannot have cars and washing machines.” For these activists, the imperative of lowering energy usage simply demands it.

But, pointing to a photo of a low-income women slaving over a wash basin, Rosling asks: “How can we tell this woman that she isn’t going to have a washing machine?”

It’s a good question, and it’s also a reminder that much of the talk over carbon taxes and climate regulations smack of first-world chauvinism. The rich world already has its cars and its washing machines. Sure, a global climate scheme would reduce the wealth of people in the rich world, but the impact in China, India, Africa, and South America — where most live closer to subsistence levels —would be far more devastating.

For many environmentally-minded suburban upper-middle class people in North America and Europe, this is just tough luck and bad timing for everyone else.

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute.