Mileposts on Environmentalism’s Road to Hell

Environment, Nanny Statism
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Plane dropping fire retardantWill there come a time when firefighters have to consider saving an endangered species over someone’s home?  One wonders:

Lost in the images of aircraft dropping giant red plumes of retardant on a Colorado wildfire this week is the fact that the practice may not be legal under federal environmental laws.

A federal judge in July declared that the government’s current plan for dropping retardant on fires is illegal, and he gave the U.S. Forest Service until the end of next year to find a more environmentally friendly alternative.

The issue appears to hinge more on how the retardant is used than on the retardant itself, but when human lives and property are on the line, should it matter at all if some fish and plants are put at risk?  Plants grow back and waterways recover, even from the worst disasters.  People’s lives and homes aren’t so easy to reassemble.

Then we have the Federal government’s futile attempts to spark the “green economy”, which has succeeded primarily in shipping jobs overseas (h/t Jeffrey Tucker):

The last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the United States is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison’s innovations in the 1870s….

What made the plant here vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014. The law will force millions of American households to switch to more efficient bulbs.

The resulting savings in energy and greenhouse-gas emissions are expected to be immense. But the move also had unintended consequences.

Rather than setting off a boom in the U.S. manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas, mostly in China.

Bastiat weeps!  Of course the unintended consequences are never considered by policy makers when The Future of Civilization is at stake (or at least when cheap political points can be scored).  A few hundred people’s livelihoods, consumers’ freedom of choice: small sacrifices on the environmentalists’ altar.  Maybe Mother Earth will thank us in a few million years.

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Article: Blowback, Provocation, and Perpetual War

Featured Articles, Imperialism, Police Statism, War
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It isn’t radical Muslims’ hatred for “our freedoms” that drives terrorist acts on U. S. soil, William Grigg argues.  It is the regime’s continued policy of aggression on foreign soil, and its leveraging of Muslim outrage to justify its perpetual wars.

Read the Full Article by William N. Grigg

Afterwards, discuss it below.

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9/11/01: Shocking, Unsurprising

Imperialism, War
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Nine years ago today, early in the morning, I woke up to my radio alarm. Usually, classical music woke me. This time, the radio announcer urgently related the horror that an airliner had hit one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. There was no consensus on what it meant, at that early hour, and the announcer offered none. But I immediately knew it was an act of what we call “terrorism.” I hit the snooze button and rolled over. “Finally,” I muttered.

I was not surprised. I was not shocked. Appalled at the massive taking of life? Yes. Later, I was impressed at the planning and daring of the attacks. But, unlike most Americans I talked to that day, I was definitely not startled by the event. Though the largest act of terrorism ever, it was not unprecedented. I had been expecting blowback from U.S. foreign policy for over a decade. I was not unaware that, in matters of aggression, the Laws of Thermodynamics echoed in sociology, if crudely: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. American forces bomb, obliterate, and gun down folks elsewhere? At some point those folks elsewhere are going to strike back.

To not expect this, I figured, was to be incredibly naive.

But I live in America, the land of Never-Ending Naivety. When the president called the terrorists “faceless cowards,” the essential silliness of the epithet did not strike most people as the very opposite of the truth — which it was. And when the president then began talking about a “war on terrorism,” I knew things were going to get bad. Self-righteous talk of “wars” against this and that always get out of hand, and rarely reach their ostensible objectives. Instead, we’d just have wars. And reductions in civil liberties. And such.

The wonder, now, is that things didn’t get  worse than they did. But grant the declension its own rate. In 2008, as the financial markets began to collapse, and as the American government threw trillions of dollars at rich people, in fear of chaos, in utter beffuddlement at what to do, I imagined Osama bin Laden, chortling in a cave, rubbing his hands and saying “Excellent, excellent.” The American federal government did pretty much everything that Osama wanted. In its wars on terrorism, it spent itself to the brink of oblivion; it addicted itself to spending. Now, its leaders cannot see the way out of any problem other than spending increasing heaps of borrowed money.

If and when this all collapses — America’s ability to support military bases around the world, America’s ability to pay interest on its own debt — I’ll think, again, on that morning of 9/11/01. On what horrors came so close to home. And on what ended. Lives, yes. But also America’s game of pretending to be for peace while spreading death; the politicians’ game of playing US vs. THEM and never expecting negative feedback “in the homeland”; the citizens’ belligerent insistence on their own innocence even while showing not one jot of interest in what actually happens in the rest of the world — it all began to unravel on 9/11/01.

And that’s good. Vicious fantasies deserve to die. But the everyday folk in the towers, on that day, didn’t deserve their horrible deaths. But then, neither did the innocents in Iraq, or at the aspirin factory in Africa, or in Panama, or too near a thousand other targets of America’s careless “peacekeeping.”

I would rather have had it that we lost our innocence through inquiry, reason, and reflection. But a shocking-to-the-fools comeuppance works, too.

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Wolf in Sheep’s Garb

Libertarian Theory
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Martin Wolf, a British writer, has offered us a grand example of a certain rhetorical style. He has written a seemingly reasonable pitch for the modern state, a defense that had a chance of ascending to the insightful had he not also possessed another, more subtle purpose in mind.

He asks “What is the role of the state” in order to declare, with the utmost confidence, that the role is to provide “protection.” Protection of what or whom, it is not really very clear, though civic-minded readers will just assume it is “everybody.”

Also not clear, at least at the outset, is whether he is describing what states do or telling us what states should do. There is a difference.

But what becomes clear, as one reads, is that Wolf’s main purpose is to cast aspersions on libertarian ideas.

The careless reader might not notice his anti-libertarian stance until he brings up anarchism only to dismiss it by saying that “most people accept that protection . . . is a natural monopoly: the presence of more than one such organisation within a given territory is a recipe for unbridled lawlessness, civil war, or both.” There’s nothing like the authority of popular opinion to decide an important issue.

Libertarianism/classical liberalism comes under attack, directly, in the eighth paragraph. But by this time the careful reader will have understood that the whole piece has been written in just such a way as to undermine respect for libertarian ideas. Not argue against libertarianism, mind you, just undermine respect. For what Wolf offers by way of argument is not very compelling.

What is compelling is the careful rhetoric of the way he frames his piece. He raises up “protection” as the standard, and dismisses the Molinarian idea of competition in protective services without once mentioning any scholarly work done on the subject, or (and this is where he is breathtakingly clever) using the word “contract.” As I wrote on my blog yesterday, he carries over his understanding of warfare and conflict from his experience with monopoly state governments, and imputes them to competitive protective services.

The cleverness comes in with his immediate admission of a more skeptical point of view than the one he obviously prefers. He cites Mancur Olson’s contention that the state is a “stationary bandit.” And then he offers up the three mechanisms by which the stationary bandit has been controlled in modern time: exit, voice, and restraint. This is all very fascinating, and could have been the beginning of a great article on the nature of politics and law. Instead, he turns on libertarians, and misinterprets their ideas as relying almost exclusively on “restraint,” that is, the constitutional constraints of competing powers and the like.

The truth is that “exit” is the main check that libertarians prefer. And “voice” (speaking out, protest, lobbying, voting) is not exactly foreign to the libertarian mindset, either.

His contention that libertarians have little practical hope has more than a little plausibility. But I pilloried his assertion that libertarianism is “hopeless intellectually,” elsewhere. It is a silly argument. Utterly silly. Risible.

And by “silly” I don’t mean “blessed” or “pious.”

Those may have been the original meaning of the word, but I’m going with current meaning.

Why bring this up?

Because Wolf concludes his short essay with a discussion of an Athenian epithet, against those who don’t participate in politics. The word? “Idiotes.” And Wolf cannot help himself: “This is, of course, the origin of our word “idiot”. Individual liberty does indeed matter. But it is not the only thing that matters.”

You see what he’s done here. He’s called libertarians “idiots.” It’s his final, subtle insult. (This is the clear implication, even though libertarians, in insisting on rolling back the state, are also, just as clearly, being the good citizens he himself says we all have a duty to be.)

The whole piece ends up amounting to nothing other than an exercise in passive-aggressive rhetoric. Actual arguments are sparse. But by juxtaposing ideas in a certain way, it is designed to lead people not inclined to libertarianism to take libertarian ideas less seriously.

It is perhaps a pity that Ilya Somin (on The Volokh Conspiracy) and I (on Wirkman Netizen) took his piece seriously. Really, it is not a serious piece of argument. It is a clever piece of derision . . . all the more so because it doesn’t look like one.

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A Thought On Immigration And Time Preference

Immigration, The Right
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When talking about immigration, some conservatives complain that immigrants often times do not assimilate. They do not, among others, learn the language, settle down, establish themselves in the community and so on. What is puzzling about this view is that, though not necessarily incorrect, political conservatives appear to support policies that lead exactly to the result they want to avoid.

Take a look at farm workers visas, as well as other temporary work permits. Not only do they cause chronic employment shortages and similar problems (upstate NY is plagued by this issue), but because transient workers are not allowed to have permanent residency, their place in the workforce is tenuous. Indeed, lacking stable, reliable employment, their time preference is increased. No longer can they plan for long-term living arrangements, savings, settling down, establishing their families–things permanent residents/citizens can do. Temporary work visas bolster the existence of the “bad immigrant hood.” They end up with poor, crowded living conditions.

When I brought up this point to a friend, he said, “I used to deliver pizzas to a motel near the Monfort rendering plant on the north side of town. In each room there would be up to 8 people, all Mexican migrant workers, sharing like two mattresses on the floor. Their living conditions sucked but they all were trying to save money to take back home… Obviously if these guys could stay year-round they would likely not want to remain in such squalid conditions.”

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