Libertarians for Junk Science
Posted by Kevin Carson on Dec 22, 2009 in Commentary • 101 commentsRecently the climate science community suffered something of an embarrassment with “Climategate”: the servers of the Climatic Research Unit were hacked, opening thousands of emails over a thirteen year period to scrutiny. Some of these emails, if not undermining the validity of all global warming research, at least shows some climate scientists in the unflattering light of spinning data to promote a politically predetermined outcome.
But global warming advocates don’t have a monopoly on the political abuse of science.
It’s funny how the same libertarians who gleefully pounce on “junk science” when it serves an agenda they regard as inimical, are so fond of it themselves when it confirms their own prejudices.
A good example is Rachel Carson’s alleged responsibility for millions of deaths from malaria, as a result of her role in banning DDT. The neocon FrontPage magazine accused her of “ecological genocide,” and a character in a Michael Crichton novel went so far as to say she killed more people than Hitler. The JunkScience.Com (!) website even has a malaria death clock featuring Rachel Carson’s face.
Unfortunately, it’s one of those things everybody knows that just ain’t so. Here are some of the holes in the received version of the story:
1) The various national bans on DDT all left a loophole for mosquito eradication when other available means were inferior to DDT. Controlled use of DDT for mosquito eradication is entirely legal.
2) DDT was already losing its effectiveness for mosquito eradication in the 1960s because mosquitoes were becoming resistant to it.
3) DDT had numerous side-effects that outweighed its limited effectiveness as a pesticide. Most importantly, and like most synthetic pesticides, it also poisoned the rest of the food chain above the mosquitoes. This meant, among other things, that it killed off mosquitoes’ natural enemies, so that it took larger and larger amounts of DDT to achieve the same results as before. In the process, it also caused significant collateral damage. For example, by killing the parasitic wasps that previously kept down the population of thatch-eating caterpillars, DDT indirectly caused an epidemic of collapsing roofs. Another example: it poisoned geckoes who ate the mosquitoes, and who in turn poisoned the cats who ate the geckoes, thus resulting in an epidemic of rats.
The canard can be traced back at least to a campaign by Roger Bate, a right-wing economist who worked for a variety of industry think tanks. He personally conducted funding pitches around the corporate world, selling his propaganda campaign as a stiletto between the ribs of the envirnomentalist movement. “The environmental movement, he said, “has been successful in most of its campaigns as it has been ‘politically correct.’” DDT offered the potential of using the environmental movement’s erstwhile advantages against it, he crowed: “the correct blend of political correctness ( . . . oppressed blacks) and arguments (eco-imperialism [is] undermining their future).”
Reason magazine science reporter Ron Bailey was an early and enthusiastic adopter, regurgitating the urban legend in most of its particulars in 2002 (he linked to an article based almost entirely on Roger Bate’s work).
Picking and choosing evidence to believe based on what its truth would entail, rather than whether it’s valid or not, is a bad thing—regardless of which “side” it comes from.
In the case of anthropogenic global warming, the reflexive opposition of many libertarians is just as cavalier with the truth as the folks crowing over Climategate accuse global warming advocates of being.
That such libertarians feel compelled to take the strategic position they do in regard to global warming speaks volumes about their basic view of the world. It’s a view of the world that shares a lot in common, ironically, with that of the average liberal Democrat.
The reasoning process goes something like this:
If global warming is real, all is lost for libertarians, because the need for statism follows as a direct implication. If global warming is real, it will prove the liberal Democrats are right: the free market has led to disastrous results at least in one particular, and the state is necessary in at least this one case to correct market failure. In other words, given the premise of global warming, libertarians of this stripe see the big government argument as something that follows legitimately from it, as a matter of course. So global warming cannot be happening. QED.
Funny. I’m fairly friendly toward the anthropogenic global warming thesis, and I don’t see global warming as a market failure at all. I see it as a government failure. If we removed all the government-created externalities that promote consumption of energy and transportation inputs, and protected the fossil fuels industry from full liability for torts committed in the course of its operations, global warming would never have arisen as an issue in the first place. The free market is not the problem, it’s the solution.
But maybe some libertarians see the free market as something that needs protection from the truth.
AGW might very well be true, I don’t deny that when I exclaim that it’s based on “junk science”. The climategate seems to indicate, at the very least, that the conclusions drawn from the research have been (intentionally) misrepresented. So from an objective & scientific POV, the “evidence” out there is not, nor can it be, conclusive.
But I do agree that if it *is* true, it’s a government failure, not a market failure.
Kevin,
Whatever the sins of libertarians re junk science the statists are 100x worse. And in my view the libertarians (and fellow travelers) have been very good on junk science–Bruce Ames ( http://www.fortfreedom.org/n16.htm ), Peter Huber (Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists A Conservative Manifesto, Galileo’s Revenge: Junk Science In The Courtroom and others http://www.amazon.com/Peter-W.-Huber/e/B000APUYFG/ref=sr_tc_2_0 ), Elizabeth Whelan (Toxic Terror, http://www.amazon.com/Toxic-Terror-Behind-Cancer-Scares/dp/0879757884 ), Petr Beckmann ( http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/11/18/beckmanns-economics-as-if-some-people-mattered/ ).
And various libertarians have been good on critiquing the pseudo-scientific enviros, e.g. Lew Rockwell and Bob Bidinotto ( http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/09/07/environmentalists-are-a-cancer-on-the-earth/ ) (as much as we might disagree w/ Bidinotto on other issues like war, Ron Paul, statism v. minarchy, IP, etc.)
As for AGW — it’s a mystery to me why anyone would believe this has been established. First, there is little doubt we are between ice ages–we are in an interglacial period. The earth will start cooling again–even if for some reason it does warm up a bit more before it finally starts to cool.
Second, it’s a mystery why people think change per se is bad, or why change in the warmer direction is bad.
Third, as to the idea humans are causing it — well I refer you to various material, et.. by Jerry Pournelle http://jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view478.html and physicist Freeman Dyson http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge219.html , and see also this by physicist Howard Hayden http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/10/29/physicist-howard-haydens-one-letter-disproof-of-global-warming-claims/ and MIT Professor Richard Lindzen http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/11/30/lindzen-presentation-on-global-warming/
Fourth, even if we are causing it, it’s not clear that we can stop it, or that we should stop it–better to live in a world of energy and AGW problems, than to live in a world without energy (to put it starkly).
As I wrote here, http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/11/02/statism-and-the-global-warming-bandwagon/ :
I’m against the state. I’m against junk science. I’m against science used by liberal arts and women’s studies majors from Brown who now infest the state to advance their anti-capitalist interests.
I believe we are in an interglacial period. I believe the evidence trotted out so far by global warming advocates is spotty and selective, and almost always insincere and agenda-driven, or driven by pure ignorance. I believe that global warming would probably be good, but is not going to happen. I suspect that even if it were happening and even if it were bad, the cost of stopping it would far exceed its damages–that is, that it’s not worth it to stop it; that human survival is more important, ultimately, than environmentalist concerns; moreover, I would never trust the state to make this assessment or to impose the “right” regulations to ameliorate the “problem.”
I think that the global warming advocates are not interested in real science or real debate–they want to just take their temporary popularity in the polls and among the arts & croissant crowd, among the DC jetset bored housewives and ditzy Hollywood stars and parlay that as quickly as possible into legislation sponsored by corrupt pols like Nancy Pelosi. I.e.., they just want to win, right away, as quickly as possible before the public starts to catch on or yet another pseudo-science fad catches its eye.
The primary enemy is the state. Any scheme that involves them as a part of the “solution” to a posited problem is obviously flawed. I have no wish to cooperate with or endorse that criminal gang’s legitimacy. Period.
Kinsella wrote:
“human survival is more important, ultimately, than environmentalist concerns”
I’m not a global warming expert (I don’t really have an opinion on it), but, with all due respect, human survival IS one of the major concerns, if not THE major concern, of most environmentalists. I’ve never heard anyone claim that we ought to prevent global warming because the earth’s current range of temperatures has some sort of intrinsic value, but I hear constantly about how global warming will lead to problems like water shortages which have a direct impact on human lives.
FWIW, my solid views on AGW can be summed up as follows:
CO2 and other greenhouse gases tend, ceteris paribus, to increase temperature. But as with the Laffer Curve, tipping one’s hat to such a correlation is worthless without figuring out the actual curve the correlation follows.
CO2 levels are at a record high for the past several million years, and approaching the record high associated with the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum.
The potential effects of a tipping point like freeing embedded methane in the permafrost, etc., are pretty scary.
And even if moderate global warming is a net benefit, the potential local disasters (like drought and a dustbowl in the Great Plains and Midwest, or the Gulf Stream stalling out and causing glaciation in NW Europe) could be pretty catastrophic for a lot of people (including me).
I think the “world without energy” part, at least in the sense of a lot higher cost per unit of energy consumption and economic incentives to make intensive use of fewer energy inputs, will occur regardless of how AGW shakes out. And I don’t think it would be that catastrophic, because cheap energy has distorted the market to the point that (as Amory Lovins points out in Natural Capitalism) Factor Four or more reductions in energy inputs per unit of output could be achieved at very low cost. But Peak Oil is another issue for another day.
Kevin Carson makes a valid point about Rachel Carson. I, myself, has been taken in by the disinformation on DDT, and it took anarcho-libertarian J. Kent Hastings — author of the blog Permakent at http://permakent.com — to remediate me on that case.
Global warming, however, is an entirely other kettle of fish. The proof that it’s phony long precedes the coup de grace that the whistle-blowers releasing the Anglia emails represents.
Water vapor represents 95% of greenhouse gas on planet earth. Carbon dioxide and methane are marginal as greenhouse gasses to begin with and anthropogenic increases or decreases in release of carbon dioxide are submarginal.
The data shows that climate change on earth matches most closely with climate change on the other planets in this solar system, strongly indicating that changes in solar weather is the controlling element in terrestrial climate change.
Then you add in how the CRU data from Russia alone has been fraudulent and case closed.
What I find most troubling, however, is why “mutualist” Kevin Carson — who clearly shows himself once again to be a socialist aligned with the United Nations — is regarded by anti-statists as in any sense being either an anarchist or pro-free-market.
Neil: If you’ve “discovered” me to be “a socialist aligned with the United Nations,” it must have been a secred message from your old buddy God rather than anything in the actual wording of my post.
If you can find any evidence of my affinity for the UN, I challenge you to produce it.
I’ve never concealed the fact that I consider myself a socialist in the same sense as Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker or Dyer Lum.
But I’d like to see the UN Security Council down on the bottom of the Indian Ocean right along with every carrier group in the U.S. Navy.
J Neil Schulman wrote: “What I find most troubling, however, is why ‘mutualist’ Kevin Carson — who clearly shows himself once again to be a socialist aligned with the United Nations — is regarded by anti-statists as in any sense being either an anarchist or pro-free-market.”
Then maybe you should gather knowledge the old fashioned way, Neil. Y’know, like actually reading something that Kevin’s written instead of pulling absurd accusations out of your ass.
I didn’t really know much about J Neil Schulman, but I have immediately lost a lot of respect for him.
Kevin Carson must not have noticed that Yvo de Boer does not have a seat on the UN Security Council, and that the COP15 UN Climate Change Conference was also not a function of the UN Security Council.
And it’s no surprise that Kevin Carson — who has been trying to convince anarchists and libertarians that labor theory of value wasn’t trashed by Ludwig von Mises — supports junk science. He’s a practitioner of it. If Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker Dyer Lum, or Voltairine de Cleyre, for that matter, had lived long enough to read Human Action they would have understood why labor theory of value is the refuted nonsensical notion that a thousand hours of labor to make a grandfather clock makes it worth more than a jug of water to a man dying of thirst.
But the statement that Kevin Carson makes that he’d like to see every carrier group of the U.S. Navy on the bottom of the Indian Ocean shows what a vulgar radical Kevin Carson is. Kill thousands of men and women merely to satisfy his radical flash? Perhaps Mr. Carson isn’t aware that hard-core libertarians like Brian Singer — who commented on Carson’s post to Brad Spangler on Facebook — is currently serving in Iraq as a volunteer member of the United States Army, and might have caught a ride on an aircraft carrier. Is Brian Singer someone you want on the bottom of the Indian Ocean, Mr. Carson?
JNS
“If Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker Dyer Lum, or Voltairine de Cleyre, for that matter, had lived long enough to read Human Action they would have understood why labor theory of value is the refuted nonsensical notion that a thousand hours of labor to make a grandfather clock makes it worth more than a jug of water to a man dying of thirst.”
And if J Neil Schulman had better reading comprehension, he would stop falsely attributing beliefs to people. Have you ever actually read Studies in Mutualist Political Economy? If so, I give section another read and make it much more thorough this time. You clearly did not understand any of the points Kevin made in it.
“But the statement that Kevin Carson makes that he’d like to see every carrier group of the U.S. Navy on the bottom of the Indian Ocean shows what a vulgar radical Kevin Carson is. Kill thousands of men and women merely to satisfy his radical flash?”
And this statement shows that J Neil Schulman doesn’t understand figurative language. For God’s sake, Neil, you’re a published author.
Sorry, that should have read “I’d give section one another read.”
JNS may not have noticed my failure to endorse any UN Climate Change activities, or my explicit denial of support for carbon taxes and cap and trade. He may not have noticed my explicit statement that climate change–if it exists–is a result of government failure, and that the market is the solution to it.
And if JNS understood the issues in contention between actual labor theories of value and marginalist-subjectivist theories of value, rather than just strawman caricatures of the former and dumbed down summaries of the latter in Classic Comix, he wouldn’t trot out that example like it’s new and telling. I’m surprised he didn’t throw in the mudpie example while he was at it. I challenge Jesus Neil to demonstrate any direct knowledge whatsoever of the actual points of contention between Ricardo et al and Jeavons, Bohm-Bawerk et al, or to refute my analysis of the points in contention between them.
My comment on the aircraft carriers was part hyperbole, as Andrew says, but if a literal version of the outcome described were the only alternative to a successful projection of power against Iran or Venezuela, I’d prefer it–no matter how many decent people died on those carriers. I’m sure there were some nice guys in the Wehrmacht, too.
It’s a lot harder when you can’t just delete people for disagreeing with you, eh?
I’ll let it rest here, now that Carson has proved himself willing to commit mass murder.
Defending innocent lives is mass murder, Neil?
As for you claims about the LTV, you might want to check out this old blog entry Kevin wrote to address ignorant critics like you:
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/04/more-things-change.html
“Worst of all, [the critics] discuss the LTV as though it made embodied labor the basis of some intrinsic value in a good. In fact, the LTV and other production cost theories of value simply assert that the price of reproducible goods gravitates toward a “normal” equilibrium value determined by cost of production (which is nowhere directly refuted by the subjectivists, since their claim to have replaced cost with utility as the basis of value is based on a very specialized and artificial understanding of those terms, and not on their meanings in ordinary usage).”
Andrew,
I spent half a million bucks and three years of my own and many other people’s labor to make the movie Lady Magdalene’s. The value of that movie now that it’s on the market has fuck-all to do with any of the costs of production, and any idea that there is some sort of equilibrium that entitles me to box office receipts, VOD sales, or any other sort of distribution is what I called it — junk science. It’s 100% what von Mises said: the value of the movie I made is only that placed on it by a buyer at a specific instant in time.
And since Kevin Carson is now on the record stating that it’s worth the life of Brian Singer and thousands like him to save the command rule of Hugo Chavez and the command rule of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I call on all anarchists and libertarians to reject him as having any proper role in our movements. He’s a stealth statist invading our movements with bullshit economics and outright advocacy of murder.
“Jesus” Neil Schulman
1. Equating predictions of normal equilibrium price with an “entitlement” to income. Fail.
2. Misapplying a paradigm that applies only to reproducible goods to works of art. Fail.
3. Equating a statement that it’s better for uniformed military forces engaged in aggression to die than to succeed with a call to “murder” them in order to “save the command rule” of anybody. Epic fail.
You’ve demonstrated you have no coherent definition of murder, and no knowledge of any of the issues in contention in debates over theories of value.
Keep digging the hole deeper, dimwit. As always, when you can’t win a debate on logic you sound more and more like Gorgan the Friendly Angel: “Death to you all! Death to you all!” But this time you can’t shut me up for talking back.
“I spent half a million bucks…”
Neil, it’s still pretty clear that you have no idea what the LTV is. No one’s disagreeing with you about the subjective nature of value. Are you going to educate yourself or keep looking like an idiot?
“And since Kevin Carson is now on the record stating that it’s worth the life of Brian Singer and thousands like him to save the command rule of Hugo Chavez and the command rule of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…”
What Kevin said was he’d rather see the Navy’s ships sinks than see the US start another war. He never advocated murdering anyone. Once again, work on your reading comprehension. And in case you’re unaware of how wars work, heads of state aren’t the only people killed. Every time the US invades a country, thousands of innocent civilians die. But I guess their lives aren’t worth anything, right?
Andrew:
“human survival IS one of the major concerns, if not THE major concern, of most environmentalists. I’ve never heard anyone claim that we ought to prevent global warming because the earth’s current range of temperatures has some sort of intrinsic value, but I hear constantly about how global warming will lead to problems like water shortages which have a direct impact on human lives.”
Nonsense. As I noted here http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/09/07/environmentalists-are-a-cancer-on-the-earth/ , they say things like: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” And as I noted there: “this is the real reason the alleged environmentalists oppose nuclear energy, even though it is an obvious way to combat “global warming” and pollution. … These fake “environmentalist” misanthropes basically believe humans are a cancer on the earth. These anti-human, anti-industrialist sickos are the real enemies of humanity.”
If they really valued human life and had an ounce of technical literacy (which they should have to go spouting off), they would be out agitating for nuclear power. Do they? No. Because they are either ignorant (and should shut up and let the grownups talk), or misanthropes.
Kevin: I’d be careful citing that evil misanthrope ignoramus Lovins favorably. Have you read Petr Beckmann’s The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear?
As for energy being cheap–nonsense. It is far more expensive than it would be on the free market (see. e.g. L. Neil Smith’s talk here http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/11/07/how-much-richer-would-be-in-a-free-society-l-neil-smiths-great-speech/ ), and certainly nuclear power would be much cheaper if you remove state regulations and taxes.
As for AGW and CO2–did you read the Pournelle and Dyson links? Take a look.
Neil (and Kevin): please consider this perspective. First, I believe that mutualism is not libertarian, as I have argued here ( http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/08/02/a-critique-of-mutualist-occupancy/ ). I think mutualism and left-libertarianism does have bad economics in parts. Yet, I think by their word “socialist” they do not mean what we mean by it–we mean by it some form of statism. They mean by it some kind of cooperative order; and by “capitalist” they mean the current system of statist corporatism. We mean by “capittalist” “free markets”. So in part this is semantic.
Also, by Kevin calling for the Navy to be at the bottom of the ocean (along with the UN–which you accused him of endorsing), I think he merely means to indicate he thinks they are criminal or illegitimate. Neil, this is simply an implication of anarchism. Carson is indeed anti-state, and that is what he has in common with anarcho-libertarians. I really don’t care that he predicts, or even likes, the idea that in a free market we would have a bunch of worker cooperatives etc. I think we’d have big business even more prosperous and big than now. As long as we are both willing to have a free market and see what wins, or happens, that’s fine (though I would oppose the mutualist idea of workers or tenants expropriating the property of the employer or landlord–so on this issue I disagree w/ Carson–but I think in a free market the carping of leftist communalists would be more amusing than a threat, as they were overwhelmed and absorbed by the capitalist-technological wave of progress). In short–I don’t think Kevin is calling for mass murder: as a proper anarchist he regards the US Navy as criminal. I thought you were anarchist–isn’t Alongside Night an anarchist novel? Since when do anarchists glorify the military–enforcement–branch of a criminal state?
1. “Normal equilibrium price” having any meaning other than in socialist economics. Fail.
2. Not understanding that prints, DVDs, and VOD views ARE reproducible goods. Fail.
3. Calling for sinking American aircraft carriers and murdering all hands when there is no call for an invasion of Venezuela or Iran. Epic fail.
I don’t need to silence you, your phony economics, your statist paradigms infiltrated into the libertarian movement.All I have to do is quote you widely among sane libertarians.
JNS
1. Then Bohm-Bawerk was also a socialist, not that you’ve actually read him OR the socialists. None of the marginalists, in arguing that price was set by marginal utility given the spot conditions of supply and demand at the point of exchange, ever denied that supply and demand themselves changed over time in response to objective factors. Normal equilibrium price is simply the normal value that the price of reproducible goods will gravitate toward over time. Bohm-Bawerk conceded that this was the case–although he played with the causal mechanism a bit–because he wasn’t stoopid.
Note the word “marginal” in marginal utility. That means the subjective utility of the marginal good depends on total supply. You don’t suppose there might be objective factors that govern the change in supply over time, and hence the movement of price? If you do, then SHAZAM–you believe in normal equilibrium price.
2. If your movie is treated as a freely reproducible good, and not a logoright which you enforce with the help of your friends in the firm of Smith & Wesson, then its price will reflect the marginal cost of reproduction. But if you enforce your “logoright,” the content itself is unique, and not in elastic supply. But wait–I guess elasticity of supply is another one of those socialist ideas?
3. Well, since I said I preferred the sinking of the carriers to a successful American attack, and specifically qualified with the word IF, it looks like you fail in reading comprehension once again.
Feel free to quote me, if you can ever manage to figure out what I actually said in less than five (and counting) tries. Keep trying, Gorgan. You might eventually figure out a mischaracterization of my position that’s sufficiently plausible and non-clumsy to fool someone past third grade–assuming they don’t already know you.
Speaking of quoting people widely to sane libertarians, your dismissal of normal equilibrium price that only socialists believe in should be good for a few chuckles.
I will try to have a blog post about this comment thread soon.
I’d always wondered what genuine schadenfreude felt like up until reading this thread. This is legendary.
Agreed. It’s almost like Schulman’s speaking a different and none of us have realized it yet.
That should’ve read “a different language.” Gah, I really need to proofread before I post.
dudes, like, the UN comment should’ve made it clear that jesus neil schulman is a paranoid fool.
reminds me of the blabbering of glenn beck, or something.
Just noticed that bit about “statist programs.” I’d be interested to know exactly which “statist programs” I’ve infiltrated into the libertarian movement. Or maybe evidence-based arguments are unnecessary when you’re working from a paradigm of “alternative rationality.” But to be fair, I probably wouldn’t piddle around with stuff like that either if I had a pipeline to the Big Guy. I’d be afraid he’d do something awful like touch my heart and kill me.
global warming, whether true or false or somewhere in between, is just one of many eco/environmental concerns. (garbage? pollution? desertification? etc)
what you “vulgars” don’t get is that we live on a finite planet. production, as is, cannot go on forever.
s. kinsella:
“better to live in a world of energy and AGW problems, than to live in a world without energy”
why is this so?
keep masturbating to those smokestacks,
a green anarchist. (as in, just as much against the state as you are)
p.s. after the state is gone, you might watch out for all those non-market “externalities” destroying your production sites.
BTW, AnarchoJesse, now you’ve got some idea of what things were like in the last days of the LeftLibertarian list. Except we’re not deleting Neil’s comments and banning him.
And I look forward to your post, Brad. If it’s attention Neil wants, he should enjoy it. We’ll see who quotes whom to sane libertarians, by God.
Kevin: “Just noticed that bit about ’statist programs.’ I’d be interested to know exactly which ’statist programs I’ve infiltrated into the libertarian movement.”
C’mon Kevin, don’t play dumb. We all know how many libertarians you’ve tricked into supporting the UN.
Kevin: “Just noticed that bit about ’statist programs.’ I’d be interested to know exactly which ’statist programs’ I’ve infiltrated into the libertarian movement.”
C’mon Kevin, don’t play dumb. We all know how many libertarians you’ve tricked into supporting the UN.
Chris : “I didn’t really know much about J Neil Schulman, but I have immediately lost a lot of respect for him.”
Not know much about him?? What? Have you not read his classic libertarian novel Alongside Night? That alone is enough to justify giving him a goodly amount of deference and respect. I will forever be grateful to him for this heroic achievement in the cause of liberty.
I’m happy to acknowledge the greatness of Alongside Night, and pay it the respect it deserves as an achievement. I’ve read it three times, and found new things to enjoy in every reading. But when it comes to respect for Neil as a person, he deserves no more respect than he earns by the way he treats others. And his flaming shitheel behavior in this thread is pretty typical of everything I’ve ever experienced from him. He has never been able to disagree with anyone about anything without being an asshole about it. Someone who acts like an asshole is going to get treated like one–even if he invented the polio vaccine.
A great achievement entitles you to respect for the achievement, but it’s not a license to be an obnoxious dick. I imagine history is full of people responsible for all sorts of great achievements, who were honored for those achievements–and who were also utter horses’ asses in their dealings with other people, and rightfully treated accordingly.
Below is a comment by Stephan Kinsella, which apparently triggered some sort of automatic moderation software because of the number of links.
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Andrew:
“human survival IS one of the major concerns, if not THE major concern, of most environmentalists. I’ve never heard anyone claim that we ought to prevent global warming because the earth’s current range of temperatures has some sort of intrinsic value, but I hear constantly about how global warming will lead to problems like water shortages which have a direct impact on human lives.”
Nonsense. As I noted here http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/09/07/environmentalists-are-a-cancer-on-the-earth/ , they say things like: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” And as I noted there: “this is the real reason the alleged environmentalists oppose nuclear energy, even though it is an obvious way to combat “global warming” and pollution. … These fake “environmentalist” misanthropes basically believe humans are a cancer on the earth. These anti-human, anti-industrialist sickos are the real enemies of humanity.”
If they really valued human life and had an ounce of technical literacy (which they should have to go spouting off), they would be out agitating for nuclear power. Do they? No. Because they are either ignorant (and should shut up and let the grownups talk), or misanthropes.
Kevin: I’d be careful citing that evil misanthrope ignoramus Lovins favorably. Have you read Petr Beckmann’s The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear?
As for energy being cheap–nonsense. It is far more expensive than it would be on the free market (see. e.g. L. Neil Smith’s talk here http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/11/07/how-much-richer-would-be-in-a-free-society-l-neil-smiths-great-speech/ ), and certainly nuclear power would be much cheaper if you remove state regulations and taxes.
As for AGW and CO2–did you read the Pournelle and Dyson links? Take a look.
Neil (and Kevin): please consider this perspective. First, I believe that mutualism is not libertarian, as I have argued here ( http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/08/02/a-critique-of-mutualist-occupancy/ ). I think mutualism and left-libertarianism does have bad economics in parts. Yet, I think by their word “socialist” they do not mean what we mean by it–we mean by it some form of statism. They mean by it some kind of cooperative order; and by “capitalist” they mean the current system of statist corporatism. We mean by “capittalist” “free markets”. So in part this is semantic.
Also, by Kevin calling for the Navy to be at the bottom of the ocean (along with the UN–which you accused him of endorsing), I think he merely means to indicate he thinks they are criminal or illegitimate. Neil, this is simply an implication of anarchism. Carson is indeed anti-state, and that is what he has in common with anarcho-libertarians. I really don’t care that he predicts, or even likes, the idea that in a free market we would have a bunch of worker cooperatives etc. I think we’d have big business even more prosperous and big than now. As long as we are both willing to have a free market and see what wins, or happens, that’s fine (though I would oppose the mutualist idea of workers or tenants expropriating the property of the employer or landlord–so on this issue I disagree w/ Carson–but I think in a free market the carping of leftist communalists would be more amusing than a threat, as they were overwhelmed and absorbed by the capitalist-technological wave of progress). In short–I don’t think Kevin is calling for mass murder: as a proper anarchist he regards the US Navy as criminal. I thought you were anarchist–isn’t Alongside Night an anarchist novel? Since when do anarchists glorify the military–enforcement–branch of a criminal state?
@Kinsella: I haven’t seen the context of that quote so I’ll need to check out your link before I commit to any position, but I don’t see how it contradict anything I’ve said. Perhaps some environmentalists believe that “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun” because they believe that energy use causes greenhouse gas emissions and that greenhouse gas emissions are a threat to human survival.
Moreover, even if *some* environmentalists do believe that maintaining the environment as is is a worthwhile goal, it’s quite clear that not all do. And you certainly haven’t demonstrated that the majority of environmentalists have this belief.
Kinsella, when you equate having an obscure book written by a fringe author published by a relatively insignificant publisher that only really to helps increase the length of libertarian circle jerks as a “heroic achievement in the cause of liberty”, you not only come close to a gross parody of the Soviets or Maoist communists when they would talk of the glorious success of the proletariat in face of all the odds, but also cheapens the real sacrifices and hardships endured by the likes of Goldman, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Sacco, Vanzetti, the Haymarket Martyrs, et. al.
As for environmentalists who oppose nuclear energy… perhaps they’re just worried about another Chernobyl? I’m not saying these fears are necessarily justified (I honestly don’t know very much about nuclear power), but I don’t think there are many “man-hating” environmentalists out there. I know plenty of people who consider themselves environmentalists and not one of them fits your description.
Stephan: I’ll have to take a look at the links later.
AnarchoJesse: Alongside Night really is an important book. Members of the Movement/Alliance of the Libertarian Left are probably a plurality of Molinari/C4SS supporters, and those movements go back to Samuel Edward Konkin III’s agorism, which was influenced mainly by Rothbard’s pro-Left period. Konkin’s New Libertarian Manifesto put forth counter-economics as a form of revolutionary praxis. And Alongside Night was the first major attempt at a fictional portrayal of an agorist revolution.
You say “obscure book written by a fringe author” like it’s a BAD thing.
Kevin: I wasn’t trying to marginalize his accomplishment in regards to his book or any small, independent authors and publishers (I have hard copies of both yours, his, and dozens of other independent/alternative writers sitting on my shelf a few feet away from me), and I’m familiar with the general history of the ALL and similar groups, so the impact it had on them is not lost on me. I was just pointing out that equating the publication of Alongside Night (which, to be frank, isn’t the best work of fiction ever written, even if it does present some pretty interesting concepts and ideas) with something akin to an incredible victory is really a gross overstatement when we take even just a slight glance the very real struggle endured by those who have come before us.
Carson et al,
Let’s leave out what I’ve read and not read. I’m not making arguments from academic authority.
Great ideas can be stated simply. It takes a philosophunculist to write so densely that it takes an unschooled, degree-less idiot like me to come along and say that the emperor has no clothes.
The labor theory of value was a simple idea: the labor that goes into making something determines its value.
Subjective theory of value is also a simple idea: nothing other than desire — not cost of production, not utility — gives value to a thing.
Marginal “utility” is actually a mistake. It’s marginal “desire.” I could be entirely mistaken about the utility of a thing and still desire it. It’s the desire that influences my choice; not what the thing can actually do. That’s why there’s a concept of buyer’s remorse.
If this correction makes me an economist, I’ll take it. I have little formal higher education and ignored most of what I learned in lower school because I was too busy reading what I felt was important. Like Lincoln seeking a job in the old PSA, I’ve read and studied, sort of on my own.
The idea of trying to “subjectivize” labor theory of value is nonsense. Subjective theory is a whole concept. There’s no way to add desire into a theory of labor-value anymore than there’s a way to add labor into a theory of desire-value. They are entirely discrete concepts. It’s like trying to say that both a planet and a star into the same thing because from a distance they’re both lights in the sky. You get close enough and you know instantly that it’s false.
Carson writes above, “Normal equilibrium price is simply the normal value that the price of reproducible goods will gravitate toward over time.”
The term “normal” in the above sentence is the use of a circular argument. There is no such thing as a “normal” price. All prices are unique events at the point of sale. A market price can change in an instant — as anyone who owned real estate in California — as I did — learned in the last few years. What will be the normal equilibrium price of a barrel of oil the day after Mr. Fusion — out of Back to the Future — is released on the market? Might not have the same value and normal might be abnormal rather suddenly, huh? Academics spend their lives avoid the reality that both catastrophic and eucatastrophic change are as normal as steady state.
That was the lesson I learned from reading Robert Heinlein. Change is normal and can be lightning fast. One day there are “blue chip” stocks and the next day there aren’t. Academic treatises that talk about “normal” are whistling past the graveyard.
Honestly, I’ve been asking myself all day why I am so pissed off at Kevin Carson. I’d like to put aside his ad hominems against me all day, and the insufferable smugness of the academician — and get to the root of it.
It comes down to this. I believe Kevin Carson is an outcome-based rationalizer. He wants to bring back labor theory of value not because there is any actual reason to do so now that we understand how value is really arrived at but because it allows him to bring back all sorts of outdated arguments from people who were really good for their time and because we venerate these people as forward-thinkers we have to listen to them debate ideas that were wrong but they didn’t know any better.
He does this because in his heart it’s not state capitalism he has a problem with but the actual free-market which has the nasty outcome of winners and losers, and no soft fuzzy blankets which he can use to remain popular among the socialists and communists who are looking to deny the reality that libertarian economics means they have lost.
He hates the United States not because it’s statist and imperialist but because — at least for another few hours — morally superior to the socialist sewer.
I’m sorry I visited your page. The effort of trying to figure out your errors made my brain hurt.
JNS
Neil, I’m sorry you visited here as well. You do the seagull routine everywhere you go: fly in, do a lot of squawking, leave a huge pile of shit, and fly out.
If your head hurts, it’s probably because you don’t even understand what you hold up as the truth, let alone my points of contention with it. You have once again restated strawman versions of both the labor theory of value and the subjective theory of value. Neither is as simple as you describe, or anywhere near the caricature you make of it. And if you think MY argument was so dense as to hurt your poor little noggin, perhaps you should try working your way through Capital and Interest or The Positive Theory of Capital. Not stated very simply, believe me.
What it boils down to is you’re too intellectually lazy to know what you’re talking about before you shoot off your mouth. So let’s NOT leave off what you’ve read and not read. You’re the one making assertions about the tenets of a theory you got from bad second-hand summaries, and making howlers left and right.
Finally, I’ve got to say it takes a martyr complex the size of Jupiter to come in here and issue all the personal insults you have, and then whine about MY ad hominems. “Mommy, he hit me back!” I’ll bet an unusually large proportion of the people who have to deal with you on a personal basis utterly loathe you–not because they disagree with your ideas, but because you are such a thoroughly unlikeable person. If you’re too big a pussy to handle getting your own insufferable asshole behavior thrown back in your goddamned face, then you know the old saying about staying out of the kitchen.
So boo hoo hoo. Take your fucking ball and bat and go home.
Ho ho ho holy shit, this is priceless.
Neil, do you need a with hand with that cross? It looks pretty darn heavy.
BTW, Neil. I’m not an academician. I empty bedpans for a living. My income from freelance writing this year was about $6,000, on top of the paycheck from my day job. I slogged my way through Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises and Rothbard on my own, because I wanted to understand their ideas. I also read Smith, Ricardo, Mill and Marx for the same reason. I compared Bohm-Bawerk’s critique of Ricardo to the way second-handers like you have caricatured it, and felt like I was uncovering the ruins of Nineveh. So I’ve also worked my way through the things I wanted to understand and know more about–FIRST–and THEN I ventured to express an opinion on them.
Kevin,
I apologize for calling you an academic.
I’ve read a lot, too.
That you regard complexity of ideas as a good in itself shows to me that you don’t understand the elegance of simplicity.
No, to state an idea simply isn’t to caricature it. It’s to make it essential.
You obfuscate the simple. I mistrust the needlessly complex.
By the way, thank you for the compliment on Alongside Night but otherwise, go fuck yourself. You don’t think well enough for me to regard you as a colleague and you’re too vile for me to regard you as an ally.
JNS
How about we let all the sailors disembark at Norfolk and then sink the carriers? Everyone happy now?
Kevin, face it. You don’t think well enough and are too vile. We will all have to retire to our fainting couches after reading you. We will close our eyes, clutch our pearls, listen to our Heinlein audiobooks and think fondly of colleagues and allies of the America we once loved and who don’t give us vapors.
ANYway…you guys ever considered a troll-feeding policy here at C4SS?
By the by, there is a fun book by Gar Lipow that puts paid to kinsella’s false dichotomy above about living in a world with energy and AGW vs. a world with no energy. It can be found at:
http://www.nohairshirts.com
Kevin Carson,
I let my emotions get the better of me today and wrote insults to you that I am ashamed of.
I take it back.
JNS
“I’m not an academician. I empty bedpans for a living. My income from freelance writing this year was about $6,000, on top of the paycheck from my day job. I slogged my way through Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises and Rothbard on my own, because I wanted to understand their ideas. I also read Smith, Ricardo, Mill and Marx for the same reason. I compared Bohm-Bawerk’s critique of Ricardo to the way second-handers like you have caricatured it, and felt like I was uncovering the ruins of Nineveh. So I’ve also worked my way through the things I wanted to understand and know more about–FIRST–and THEN I ventured to express an opinion on them.”
Kevin speaks the bloody truth.
I don’t accept the labour theory of value. I have significant reservations concerning Carson’s political project, or more precisely the dangerous directions which I expect others may take ideas whose harmful potential remains concealed by Kevin’s personal kindness and humanity. I’m no longer a left-libertarian or any kind of libertarian, and I do not think that I shall ever again be a political radical.
None of this changes the fact that Kevin Carson is a political economist of historical quality. If a functioning intellectual society exists in 2109 there will be scholars debating Carson’s reorientations of our conceptual frameworks surrounding the notion of “capitalism”. The fact that he has achieved this in the teeth of disgustingly unjust socioeconomic oppression does not increase his intellectual stature, as history is unfair and considers only what has been built, and does not care if the construction was easy or difficult, or unjustly easy or difficult. But if there is any measure whatsoever by which we should judge individual heroism, Carson’s achievements in the face of conditions which would grind most human souls to paste should make us all feel proud to be human, and perhaps a little shamed by comparison. Indeed we might wonder what potentialities all of us have lost, hidden away inside.
Human history is already enough of a mangled pile of corpses clawing atop one another. If statists were speaking to Carson the way some of you speak to him here we could at least shrug and say that this is what one expects of those who prefer status to truth. But the pseudo-intellectuals guarding the statist establishment have hardly had a chance to defame him, because those who call themselves ‘libertarians’ have already done everything in their power to obscure, slander, tear down, and bury his ideas. Libertarianism is dying for a lack of original intellects of genuine stature. Even those who disagree with Carson should recognise the value he confers by his presence, and strive to better themselves by refuting him rather than scurry to level down the threat of a serious mind.
This repulsive species! Any decent civilisation would be offering Carson a university position, not a life of carrying sick people’s shit. He might disagree with me there- I’m not certain of the precise scope and nature of his egalitarianism- but one doesn’t have to accept the nation of a natural aristocracy to detest what is being done here. Libertarians are supposed to have read the Fountainhead. They’re supposed to support individual achievement against ignorance and prejudice. I remember the 90s culture wars, when libertarians would shrug and say that they just cared about intellectual standards and that it wasn’t their fault if they couldn’t find real writers who were black or female or working class or whatever. I personally think they never bothered to look. But put that aside: boys, here’s your chance to prove that what you truly credit is achievement and the awesome spectacle of being some rich white guy who went to the right schools.
You don’t. Okay, fine. I don’t believe there is any justice at work in the movements of human history, and the hard cold truth is that most of the time the powerful succeed in pushing the rest down, leaving nothing for the oppressed but a battered lifetime in which to stew and rage and pray. But even cynical Machiavellians ought to remember what happens when the powerful grow so stupidly insular that they can no longer recognise excellence clearly enough even to try to destroy or coopt it. And the same principle applies, on a smaller scale, to the formal or informal structure of political movements and intellectual communities. There’s little left of libertarianism that couldn’t be blown away like rotten cardboard. Reject Carson’s theories if you like, but they are real theories, containing a glance or two of understanding of something important to human life. If the alternative is Rockwell’s excuses for racism of Reisman’s excuses for export processing zones, then the alternative to Carson is nothing.
Which it probably is. Robert Jensen maybe twisted upon himself in loathing, but he’s right that movements for any possible vision of social justice or sane world are fighting against the clock of a global system gone self-referentially mad. I, personally, think that it’s hopeless. I think that we’ve passed the point of saving the Enlightenment, and that you are going to lose. But nothing I shall ever do will make a future like Cormac McCarthy’s the Road more likely than the gratitude which the good and the just show their prophets.
“What I find most troubling, however, is why ‘mutualist’ Kevin Carson — who clearly shows himself once again to be a socialist aligned with the United Nations — is regarded by anti-statists as in any sense being either an anarchist or pro-free-market.”
Where’d that come from? It’s enough to discredit everything else he writes.
“He does this because in his heart…” And how do you know what’s in his heart? What a load!
JNS, you don’t “take it back”, you apologize. Who raised you, clown?
Sorry. I wasn’t gonna feed the troll. Couldn’t help it.
Re the LTV-subjectivist debate, I’d like to remind, or inform, folks about Bohm-Bawerk’s article “Value, Cost, and Marginal Utility,” which argues/shows that price is determined by the marginal cost of inputs, i.e., the marginal utility of the other things the inputs could be used to produce — a thesis championed by none other than George Reisman, no fan of Kevin’s. It’s here: http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae5_3_5.pdf
There’s too much talking past each other on this issue. I found this quote from Marx in a footnote in B-B’s “Capital and Interest”:
“A thing cannot have value, if it is not a useful article. If it is not useful, then the labor it contains is also useless, does not count as labor and hence does not create value.” (Capital, vol. 1) So much for labor yielding mud pies.
Andrew: “Perhaps some environmentalists believe that “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun” because they believe that energy use causes greenhouse gas emissions and that greenhouse gas emissions are a threat to human survival.
Moreover, even if *some* environmentalists do believe that maintaining the environment as is is a worthwhile goal, it’s quite clear that not all do. And you certainly haven’t demonstrated that the majority of environmentalists have this belief.”
I am sure many of them are not misanthropes. I consider myself and libertarians to be genuine enviromentalists, of course. But a goodly number of soi-disant enviros are either misanthropes, or so reckless with the truth as to be the same (witness Gore); or they are statists, and are too ignorant or callous to care that the state is the greatest threat to the environment; or they are technically illiterate pipsqueaks who should shut up and not weigh in on matters they don’t care to educate themselves about.
“As for environmentalists who oppose nuclear energy… perhaps they’re just worried about another Chernobyl? I’m not saying these fears are necessarily justified (I honestly don’t know very much about nuclear power), but I don’t think there are many “man-hating” environmentalists out there.”
Anyone who really believed in AGW and wants to reduce carbon emissions and pollution would be favoring a worldwide Marshall plan to build hundreds of nuclear power plants. Period. That they don’t shows that they are either ignorant, or that they don’t really care about what they say they care about–I think among the average suburban housewife enviro it’s more the former; among activists it’s more the latter: their real goal is to use this as an excuse to further the grip of the state over the market and industry. Re nuclear power see various posts on it here http://www.stephankinsella.com/tag/nuclear-power/, esp Beckmann’s works mentioned here http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/11/18/beckmanns-economics-as-if-some-people-mattered/.
Neil: Thank you for your gracious remarks at No. 48. I also should have counted to ten before posting some of my comments.
josh: It’s a policy I usually adhere to, but I’ve been first among violators today. And I’m completely satisfied with how Neil worded his apology, BTW.
Aster: Thanks so much for those wonderful comments. I have to say, though, it hasn’t been quite as heroic a struggle as all that–certainly not comparable to the difficulties you’ve contended with. And I’ve actually been gratified by the extent to which my work has been accepted, considering I’m a self-educated person with no academic credentials. Among those who’ve directly and critically addressed my arguments, those attempting to argue in good faith against what I actually wrote (e.g. Bob Murphy in JLS) have probably outnumbered people like Reisman. And as for libertarians in assorted blogs and bulletin boards dismissively yammering about ideas they’re aware of third-hand, what else is new?
Sheldon: Thanks for the Marx quote. Re Neil’s remarks on simplicity and complexity, I have no problem with a simple summary of an idea. But it’s imperative to keep in mind that the map is not the terrain. The LTV and STV can be summed up in the way Neil did, but it’s a summary that only makes sense in light of what it’s supposed to be summarizing; it’s meaningless without looking at what the classical political economists, and Bohm-Bawerk and Mises, and finding out what those summaries actually mean in light of their detailed arguments. And those summaries cannot be taken at face value outside the context of the work from which they’re abstracted. If you look at what Bohm-Bawerk and Mises wrote, “subjective preference determines value” means something a lot more complex than what that bumper sticker seems to imply on its face.
On recent controversy…
http://bradspangler.com/blog/archives/1494
Well done, Brad. I followed your link to Neil’s blog, and was surprised to find that our objection to his moderation policies concerned what he allowed–”allowing libertarian ideas on a libertarian list”–and not what he *didn’t* allow. And prior to his liberation of the captive list, we (apparently meaning you, me, Roderick, Sheldon, Charles, et al) had “taken it over” (apparently by posting our opinions on it, since nobody deleted posts or banned anybody). Reminds me of a little quip from a National Lampoon comic called “G. Gordon Liddy: Agent of CREEP”: Daniel Ellsberg was a member of THEM, a nefarious and shadowy conspiracy whose goal was “to overthrow the U.S. government by defeating it in an election.”
Getting back to the whole simplicity vs. complexity thing, Smith and Ricardo saw labor determining exchange value through a subjective mechanism: as James Buchanan pointed out, Smith’s illustration of a hunter and trapper exchanging deer for beaver, at a ratio based on the labor time it took to acquire them, was a fairly straightforward example of rational utility-maximizing behavior. And Bohm-Bawerk acknowledged that the supply of reproducible goods would change over time to adjust itself to demand, always tending toward a quantity at which the marginal utility of the last unit purchased would equal the cost of making it. In other words, the classical political economists believed simultaneously, and without contradiction, in a cost of production theory of value and a subjective utility theory of value. So did the early Austrians and Jeavons. These things are facts. Any shorter and simpler summary of their ideas must be read in light of them.
To repeat: a map is a useful abstraction for reality so long as it’s understood to be a simplification for limited purposes, but it’s not an adequate replacement.
Some state-socialist Kevin turned out to be. From his latest book:
“In every case, the basic rule is that, whenever the economy deviates from market price
as an allocating principle, it deviates to that extent from rationality.”
With state-socialists like that, who needs free-market libertarians?
An important distinction is to be made here.
Whatever one may think of Carson’s arguments re: AGW theory (and I, like Kinsella and Schulman, am a skeptic), he most definitely does not favor government interventions to ameliorate the supposed effects of AGW. 10 minutes at his blog or even a careful reading of the above commentary while maintaining a firm grasp of the English language should make it abundantly clear that his view is that a free market–not government bureaucracy or UN stooges–would be the superior remedy. Now, the burden of proof is still on those of his view in order to persuade market actors to *voluntarily* alter their production and consumption patterns and avert the presumed crisis, but that’s just the point: He does not favor the initiation of force in service to his theory.
Schulman, on the other hand, giving unwarranted credence to an equally specious theory–let’s call it “Terroristogenic-Destruction-of-the-Entire-Civilized-World” theory–has no problem being a cheerleader for the Military-Industrial-Cogressional complex, perhaps the greatest of all threats to American liberty. So in service to his particular dementia, he has no problem with taxes and inflation of the currency at home–a major factor in perhaps the greatest economic crack-up since the Great Depression–and the mass slaughter of innocents abroad. This is hardly compatible with the voluntarily cooperative nature of libertarianism.
As for Brian Singer, why in the hell should Singer or anyone else be upset with Kevin Carson of all people? Kevin Carson didn’t stick him in a foreign country to force others into a governmental system favored by the Washington consensus, George W. Bush did, and it’s Barack Obama who’s keeping him there. So go yell at the Bush-Obama gangs, Schulman, not people who didn’t want to put Brian Singer on an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean in the first goddam place.
BTW, I missed JNS’ comment at #48 before I wrote the above. Nonetheless, I still think what I wrote needed to be pointed out.
Ok, I don’t have a lot of time on my hands these days for lengthy comments, but my name got brought in to this whole fracas way up there at the top, so now I’m going to have to throw in my 2 cents.
First, Neil: Please don’t bring my name, or my job in to an argument to make your point. I didn’t ask to be a part of this debate. Frankly, I doubt someone who doesn’t even know me gives a rats ass one way or the other what I do, or whether I’m alive or dead. I don’t really care. For the record, if for some reason tomorrow, the entire United States Military were out of business, I’d just pack my bags and head home, and wouldn’t shed a tear. In fact, I might even jump for joy.
Also for the record, my mind is just not made up on this whole global warming/ environmentalism/ DDT etc etc. issue. I’m a smart guy. I know what I know, but more importantly, I know what I don’t know, and I’m not affraid to admit it. I don’t know where I stand. I’ll have to do a lot more reading.
Frankly, I think the whole labor theory of value is complete garbage. I’m not going to go in to a long winded explanation of why, but suffice it to say, I stand pretty firmly in the Mises camp regarding what determines price. I’m not about to pay an extra $50 for a playstation because I think the guy who built it worked really hard that day and deserves a tip. If I can get you to buy an original pressing of a Pablo Cruise LP from 1978, or whenever, for $260.45, than that’s what it is worth to you.
The following comments are addressed to no one in particular, but I tend to write as if I’m talking to one person… deal with it:
I’ll never understand this concept of libertarian socialist. To me, it’s a way of saying that someone leans toward liberty and wants to be able to smoke pot in the park, but just can’t make the leap to understanding that a controlled market, and a controlled society is what it is, whether you’re trying to help the little guy out of some misguided notion of compassion or not. Freedom and socialism are mutually exclusive in my book. Liberty all boils down to individual property rights. Socialism all boils down to collective property rights. Oil and water.
On the other hand, go ahead and call yourself what ever you want. You could call yourself a tunafish for all I care. If you stand with me and recognize that the State is the enemy of all freedom, and are willing to dedicate your life to expanding liberty and throwing off the chains of government control, than I’m going to talk to you, and find out what you have to say. Hell, you could call yourself a libertarian voluntariest socialist anarcho christian syndicalist, but if you live near me, I still want to go out to the range with you and maybe knock back a few beers at the end of the day, and see what kind of common ground we can find.
We’ve all got our pet issues that we get fired up about. Environmentalism just isn’t one of mine. Frankly I just see every environmental problem, and every proposed solution as more evidence of the government being the culprit behind it all. I point to Rothbard’s comments about overgrazing in the west in “For a New Liberty”. Individual property rights people. Argue about the minutae all you want.
Me, I get fired up, heated and blood vessel bursting irate about gun control and fiat currency. Oh there are other issues to be sure. When I get back to the States, I’ll gladly have a beer with anyone and sit down to tell you all about what I’ve learned from first hand experience about wasteful government spending and who really wins in a war… that’s a whole ‘nuther ball of wax.
Like many on this board I too have a problem with the labor theory of value – in whatever form one decides to argue it. I also, however, am continually challenged but what I read of Kevin Carson’s. For example, the idea of the corporate entity, personhood and limitation on liability being a state granted privilege, i.e, an intervention on the market and therefore not actually free market along with the idea of a Panglossian vulgar libertarianism are real contributions. I must say I had similar thoughts on the corporate entity in law school but I thought the “utility” of the fiction to be valuable – I can say I don’t think that any more.
At any rate, I don’t find this parsing of “left”, “right”, “socialist” libertarianism all that fruitful. If we are all anarchists and believe that people on the free market would make decisions in their best interest then who gives a shit what label you put on it. Be for anarchy and let the free market aftermath decide the “victors.” This is not to say that strategy discussions are not important – on that I actually side with the agorist approach – but it is to say that this “you are not free market and I am – nah, nah, nah” is for children.
The goal is the same (I think) for all anarchists. The means is what matters. As Carl Watner puts on the Voluntaryist masthead – “When one takes care of the means, the ends will take care of themselves.” The didactive discussion of labor theory of value v. subjective theory of value is fine as far as it goes but it is neither the ends nor the means. Both sides are in favor of polycentric, anarchist order – let’s derive the means to get there and stop leaving bodies along the way.
Bob Kaercher: I don’t even ask people to voluntarily alter their energy consumption for altruistic reasons. In fact, one of my objections to Al Gore’s feel-good approach is that it turns energy conservation into a consumption good or lifestyle choice for smug yuppies. I just want to eliminate the market distortions that encourage extensive addition of energy inputs, and let the market price system operate–when that happens, the correct behavior will follow entirely out of self-interest.
In general, I hate paternalism of all kinds. I get pissed, for example, when the mommy wannabe at the public library frowns at the size of the documents I print out. I’m paying fifteen cents a page. If printing out documents at that price imposes costs on the system, then they need to adjust the price accordingly and then leave us the hell alone to print as much as we want instead of hovering over us. Generally speaking, correct market pricing eliminates any ostensible need for busybodies.
Brian Singer: Thanks for stopping by. FWIW, the LTV doesn’t mean anyone’s *entitled* to a price based on embodied labor, despite the outcomes of an actual free market. It’s a *prediction* that, in a free market, prices of reproducible goods will tend toward the labor embodied in production. And my “socialism” is a function mainly of my predictions about what would happen in a genuinely free market, when rents from state-enforced privilege and artificial property are removed. I totally agree that the state is the enemy of freedom, and that the main item on our agenda should be removing subsidies and privileges and allowing the market to operate; what I mean by “socialist” is that in such an environment the rates of interest, profit and rent would be dramatically lower. But let’s just eliminate the subsidies and barriers to competition and see what happens.
And for the record, I hope you’re safely disembarked at home before the carriers sink.
Stephan: I’m skeptical, to say the least, that energy would be cheaper in a free market. A major part of U.S. foreign policy consists of externalizing on taxpayers the cost of keeping the sea lanes open for oil tankers, and contesting other great powers’ attempts at sovereign control of access to strategic oil reserves. And fossil fuel extraction is protected to a considerable extent from liability for torts it commits against the general public. As L. Neil Smith himself suggested, in the link you provide, there’d be a lot less pollution if pollutors feared lawsuits under the terms of traditional common law standards in their full vigor.
More importantly, we’re experiencing a shift from relatively cheap to relatively expensive fossil fuels for purely technical reasons that govern the cost of extraction and the maximum feasible rate of extraction.
Re nuclear power in particular, I have to wonder how a “Marshall Plan” for that industry could be reconciled with libertarian principle. I suppose a Marshall Plan for fixing bottlenecks in the freight rail system would also be beneficial, compared to what he actually spent stimulus money on, but I don’t see how that would pass libertarian muster either. The very fact that nuclear power would require a Marshall Plan says something about it’s state-dependent business model. Back in the ’50s, Westinghouse execs testified before Congress that they simply wouldn’t develop nuke power if they were forced to do so on their own nickel without government subsidies. Virtually every step in the value chain, from uranium mining (government funding of roads to uranium mines on public lands) to waste disposal, and the assumption of liability in between (Price-Anderson), is heavily subsidized by the state.
I’m not a nuclear aginner on principle. If innovations in nuclear technology make it possible to generate power more cheaply than it’s historically been done (and it’s quite plausible that’s the case), then more power to it (no pun intended). I just don’t think the nuclear industry would have been very competitive to date with existing technologies, absent government help.
I haven’t read what you reference by Lovins, but on the stuff I know–lean manufacturing, and the incredible efficiencies that can be achieved by whole-system approaches to design–he’s one of the best. For more info, go to my latest C4SS paper and search for “Lovins” in the text.
Kevin, why are we supposed to believe that you get the DDT story right, or better than Roger Bates, however wrong he could be? There is no reference to check, nothing except assertion. At least there are some references on the junkscience.com page.
Xavier M: I’m supposed to write these columns in a syndication-friendly format, which means no hyperlinks and a minimum of italics, blockquotes, etc.
Here are a couple of links:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/29/rachel_carson/
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3186
Kevin:
I like some of your comment above about some of your LTV views being merely a prediction about profit etc., and “let’s have a free market and see what happens.” Indeed. This is my view also on the inter-Austrian debate about free-banking (I think freebankers would get egg on their face and would love to see this teaching moment).
“I’m skeptical, to say the least, that energy would be cheaper in a free market.”
Almost everything would be cheaper on a free market. We’d be significantly wealthier. An order of magnitude, say.
“A major part of U.S. foreign policy consists of externalizing on taxpayers the cost of keeping the sea lanes open for oil tankers, and contesting other great powers’ attempts at sovereign control of access to strategic oil reserves. And fossil fuel extraction is protected to a considerable extent from liability for torts it commits against the general public. As L. Neil Smith himself suggested, in the link you provide, there’d be a lot less pollution if pollutors feared lawsuits under the terms of traditional common law standards in their full vigor.”
Agreed. But the state has costs. Remove the externalizing actions, you remove the costs of supporting the state too. This liberates industry.
“Re nuclear power in particular, I have to wonder how a “Marshall Plan” for that industry could be reconciled with libertarian principle.”
It can’t. I spoke too carelessly. I didnt’ mean “everyone” or that we should favor this. I meant that those who favor state action, if they really believed in the AGW problem, and were honest and sincere and technologically literate, should be out favoring this. It’s a point about their sincerity (much like Tribe, I think it was, said once that if liberals were honest and treated the second amendment like the ohters they would want the state to provide guns to people as a right).
“Virtually every step in the value chain, from uranium mining (government funding of roads to uranium mines on public lands) to waste disposal, and the assumption of liability in between (Price-Anderson), is heavily subsidized by the state.”
Yes, and hte fact remains that IF you internalize the costs of fossil fuel, then nuclear is by far the safest, cleanest power source that is practical for mass power needs.
“I’m not a nuclear aginner on principle. If innovations in nuclear technology make it possible to generate power more cheaply than it’s historically been done (and it’s quite plausible that’s the case),”
Preach it!
” then more power to it (no pun intended).”
Yes. That is my view too.
” I just don’t think the nuclear industry would have been very competitive to date with existing technologies, absent government help.”
As with your comment above: let’s have a free market and see. We need power. Lots of it. Soft sources can’t provide this. The choice is nuclear, polluting fossil fuel, or return to the stone age. The choice is obivous–whatever the cost of nuclear.
Stephan: The remarks below are at the heart of our disagreement, I think.
“Almost everything would be cheaper on a free market. We’d be significantly wealthier. An order of magnitude, say….
“Agreed. But the state has costs. Remove the externalizing actions, you remove the costs of supporting the state too. This liberates industry.”
The point is, there’s no “we.” In cases where there is presently a zero sum relationship between the subsidizers and the subsidized, the subsidized industries will NOT be significantly wealthier. If government spending that currently goes to keep the seal lanes open were eliminated, and the money returned to the taxpayer, the refunds would be generally distributed–not just to the present primary beneficiaries of cheap energy inputs. And since the cost of maintaining security for the oil tankers would thereafter be reflected in the price of gasoline and diesel fuel, the industries that previously externalized that part of their real energy cost on the state would be poorer by that amount. Some parts of our economy are richer than they’d be in a free market.
Interesting thread. Coincidentally, as I’m trying to catch up with some feeds, here’s what an environmentalist says:
“For example, if 25% of mankind is wiped out, it might be a good thing considering how overcrowded we are.”
http://telicthoughts.com/the-lexicon-of-cons/#comment-249416
My opinion on environmentalists, needless to say, duplicates that of Mr. Kinsella.
Kevin, you are very compassionate, and saying that really meant a lot to me. But you make my lot in life sound tragic, which is terrible publicity, and incidentally untrue, and (while we’re at it) deeply unjust to the majority of humanity who are spiritually and materially in terrible pain. I just had a lovely friend over for Christmas eve After prezzies we honoured the memory of Alice B. Toklas (=). Tomorrow I’m spending the day with the mom (and incidentally with the mom’s impressive cooking). Then comes what promises to be an interesting week. I doubt that I would exchange lives with 2% of the people on this planet. Life is beautiful- and certainly not worse for having read your work.
Merry Solstice, everyone, and may you all enjoy yourselves immensely. One piece of chocolate before bed. (curls back up in warm)
(=) blond with obscene quantities of chocolate chips, dusted with cinnamon and powdered sugar.
Kevin, good post. By the way, it is doubtfoul that those emails hacked prove to be a real embarrasment for the cientific consensus concerning climate change. Most of them were quoted in a selective way, and say nothing of what “skeptics” imply. See the story:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/
“Maldoror wrote:
By the way, it is doubtfoul that those emails hacked prove to be a real embarrasment for the cientific consensus concerning climate change. Most of them were quoted in a selective way, and say nothing of what “skeptics” imply. See the story:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/”
How is quoting the people who are revealed to be conspiring to doctor data, destroy data and corrupt the peer review process supposed to be credible. The site RealClimate was created to attack the M&M papers that revealed the hockey stick errors in MBH98/MBH99. It failed because both the NAS and the Wegman Committee found that Mann, Bradley, and Hughes to have made significant statistical errors that were not caught by reviewers and editors that did not have sufficient mathematical understanding to understand them.
It is clear that AGW is based on junk science because none of the temperature profiles used to push the scary scenarios can be independently reconstructed from the raw data. The tree proxies clearly diverge from the instrumental record since the 1950s, which means that they are not reliable. The raw surface data shows that in most places the 1930s were warmer than current temperatures. The entire temperature increase seems to have come from an artificial warming signal added to the real measurements. As such, we cannot accept any of the IPCC claims as valid until we have independent confirmation of the results.
And if one looks at the DDT ban, it is also clear that the reason for it (bird mortality) was not supported by the science. And if we look at the malaria mortality issues, it is clear that deaths exploded when DDT was banned. We can make up narratives and excuses, point to opt out clauses that look as if governments had various options to keep using DDT, but the facts are what they are; millions died because faulty science was used to push a ban that did not accomplish much good.
Kevin wrote:
“the industries that previously externalized that part of their real energy cost on the state would be poorer by that amount. Some parts of our economy are richer than they’d be in a free market.”
Similarly, global warming is nothing more than individuals externalizing costs upon their fellow human beings – a “tax” in kind but not in name.
As is the use of privilege (private legislation/laws) by rentier classes (bankers, landowners, owners of capital operating as corporations, etc) to “tax” or PLUNDER the wealth of those excluded by the privilege (peons).
The net effect would NOT be that ALL are more “wealthy” – rentiers & externalizers would all be relieved of the labor-based wealth they have STOLEN from the peons!
ALL law-based property via privilege allows rentier classes to LEGALLY steal the labor-based property of those excluded by the privilege.
There is ZERO NET NEW WEALTH created by the privileged rentier classes because the creation of wealth has to include LABOR. It is THEFT pure and simple that violates the absolute right of ownership of those PEONS excluded by the privilege!
Aster: Likewise. I suppose there are things I wish I’d done differently, as with most people, but I don’t think I’d change anything in my life that was necessary to bring me to this point.
Frank Chodorov: In addition to everything else that’s happened in this thread, I’ve managed to bring you back from the dead. I suppose I deserve some credit for that.
Rachel Carson did not ban DDT, she wrote about what she understood to be its effects. Killing the messenger is very popular among neo-cons. But it remains foolish.
The science on DDT that she wrote about was wrong. And bad science. And not settled. Science never is settled, nor should it be. To claim science is settled is to assert infallibility for humans who are notoriously fallible.
William Ruckelshaus did ban DDT, and its use was broadly discouraged. Many countries that were expecting help in eradication programs were screwed out of it by the ban, and related policy changes. Ruckelshaus is a mass murderer, on the scale of Mao.
The evidence for anthropogenic global warming is also very poorly presented. If it were robust and hard to deny, the government climate scientists would not be hiding their data, hiding their curves on presentation graphics, hiding the Roman warm period and Medieval warm period data, lying about Russian weather data, copying September 2008 data into the column for October 2008 for 500 Russian weather stations, refusing to correct a Y2K error that made 1998 seem like the warmest year on record when 1934 was the warmest year in the USA through 2009, and they would have an explanation for the warm period at 1200 BC when there were no coal fired steel mills.
You are welcome to believe anything you wish, but as Karl Popper noted many years ago, belief has no place in science. A warm place in your heart for anthropogenic global warming does not make you dispassionate, objective, nor scientific.
When junk science is funded by government and when the peer review process which was allegedly to protect the scientific process from becoming political despite government funding, you have another government failure. Remove the tens of billions of dollars in government funds for science and return science to market sources for funding and we can talk about how junk science is used by libertarians who are, in your estimation, bad and wrong because they are so heartless. Meanwhile, the state continues to fund science, including junk science, in order to create new policies to benefit the cronies of those in power.
Perhaps when the climate change hysteria results in death camps to eradicate hundreds of millions of “carbon emission units” including your friends and neighbors, you’ll admit that government funding of science is a major failure. But I doubt it.
For a fascinating look into the Bearded Spock universe, check out Neil’s parallel world account of the dispute here at his blog post, and in the comments below it:
http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/2009/12/the-great-ideas-are-simple/
It was interesting to see from the thread that Neil believes he was “drawn into a flame war” in “self defense” by my provocations, and views his own part in it as acting against his better nature under MY provocation. Apparently his apology here was pro forma, akin to the Christian who snarls “I’ll pray for you” when what he really means is “I’d like to rip your dick off and shove it up your ass sideways.”
I actually thought, on reading his apology yesterday, that it was motivated by some sort of good will and that we could agree to disagree with some amount of mutual esteem. I rebuked josh for getting one last kick in at Neil, on the assumption that Neil was actually trying to be halfway decent and behave with some degree of good grace. Stupid me. I see his comments about me at the link are as virulently personal as ever, and motivated by the same personal dislike and open suspicion of my peronal motivations.
As I learned a long time ago and keep forgetting, arguing with Neil makes about as much sense as arguing with a tree stump. When Neil decides he “knows” something or is right about something, he simply will not hear or understand any arguments made in response. And when it’s all over, he’ll see the whole thing as yet another iteration of the “Neil as victim” narrative that runs through his head.
It’s interesting that, two years later, his characterization of the dispute on the LeftLibertarian list is that we objected to his “allowing libertarian comments on a libertarian list”–not that NEIL started banning posts that he disagreed with. As far as I know neither Roderick, Sheldon, Brad, Charles or I ever had moderator status on the old LL list, or deleted any posts by any of the “real libertarians” who’d supposedly been driven underground by our “junta.” We posted our opinions, and anyone else was free to do the same or not, as they saw fit. Ugh! Couldn’t have that, now, could we?
As Neil pointed out, SEK3 had exercised his moderation authority as list-owner at times, in keeping with his vision of the lists’s purpose. But the problem was not so much the moderation itself, as the fact of someone with Neil’s personality exercising it. Once Neil decided on a post’s topicality or “libertarianness,” he was literally unable to conceive that he might even possibly be wrong about it, or that there might be more than one legitimate perception of the issue. Once he’d solidified his position, there was only one correct view, and anyone who challenged it was persecuting long-suffering Messiah Neil. And so the primary focus of the list became Neil’s exercise of his moderating authority, and whether each deletion was a good idea or just another fit of childish pique by Neil. All Neil, all the time! And in every dispute, the topic thread eventually ended up with Neil yet again yelling “Death to you all! Death to you all! I’m deleting you! And you! And you! And you! Bwahahahaha!”
When Sam exercised some editorial control over the list, this somehow never seemed to happen. But then, people liked Sam.
Let this be my last word here. If Kevin Carson’s collectivist writings are more popular among anarchist-libertarians and Agorists than my own defenses of individual rights — and from reading comments made back to me by those who appear to represent the mainstream of the libertarian movement that may well be true — then the libertarian movement I knew and loved died with Rand, LeFevre, Rothbard, and Konkin.
I have no use for a libertarian movement that thinks the United States government is more evil than those of Venezuela or Iran.
I have no use for a libertarian movement that is tolerant of as immense a globalist-statist fraud as human-caused global warming.
I have no use for smug atheists who consider that a reason-based conclusion that God exists is worthy of ridicule.
But I’ll be damned before I allow the legacy of Samuel Edward Konkin III — trained as a scientist, a Misesian-Rothbardian Austrian in economics, an Objectivist in ontology and ethics, a skeptic of court history, a lover of Heinlein, C.S. Lewis, and Doc Smith, a believer in human reproduction and expansion into the universe, and a total individualist and propertarian in outlook — to be confused with mutualism, socialism, collectivism, egalitarianism, neo-Malthusianism and anti-industrial Ludditeism.
If libertarians today consider that these ideas deserve respectful consideration, then I’ll just slink off and re-read Ayn Rand in a bad mood.
If that little old babushka were here, Carson, she’d kick your ass.
Uh huh. So I guess even “tolerating” anyone who keeps an open mind about the possibility of anthropogenic climate change is an example of that “dogmatism” you got so exercised about. Just like we got so mad at you on LeftLibertarian for “allowing libertarian comments to be made” by, you know, deleting posts you disagreed with.
But I guess I’d better stop now. I wouldn’t want to “make you lose your temper” like I did last time–since you were initially so inoffensive and courteous and all before I “provoked” you. Anyway, my face is sore from rolling my eyes so much.
Yeah, Carson. Let’s also give a respectful hearing to the Nazi racial theories, or terracentric astronomy. Let’s invite the NASA-faked-the-moon-landing advocates into the libertarian movement because, after all, we wouldn’t want to silence dissent.
See what I mean? It’s not enough to agree to disagree on whether increased atmospheric CO2 leads to increased average global temperatures, and what the implications of it are. Once Neil has decided that the evidence is unconvincing to him personally, it’s a closed issue on which anyone who disagrees is either a fool or a knave, and becomes a libertarian litmus test. Once Neil has spoken, no other opinion on the matter should even be “tolerated.” This should create a sense of deja vu for anyone who experienced the last days of the LeftLibertarian list.
Neil has vowed to “expose [me] as a fraud” ( Oh, no, Neil. Please don’t. ), but his behavior in this thread and over at his own blog has done a pretty good job of exposing HIM.
Here’s something your readers might discovered from the discussion over at my own blog:
1) I deleted the comments about exposing you. I have more important things to do.
2) Here’s an excerpt from one of my replies to one of your fans:
The proof that Global Warming is not science but a scam can come down to two easy to understand points:
1) The major greenhouse gas on planet earth — 95% of greenhouse gas — is water vapor. Carbon dioxide — which comes out of our mouths when we exhale — and methane — which comes out our asses when we fart — are a tiny fraction of the atmosphere compared to water vapor. Yet these con artists have gotten away with the idea that fractional increases in fractional gasses which living things make will destroy the environment. It’s an obvious lie which anyone with an IQ above room temperature can understand.
2. Climate change on earth tracks closely with measurements astronomers have made of climate change on other planets in the solar system, where human beings don’t exist, where living things don’t exist, where capitalism and industry don’t exist. That makes it obvious that the sun controls the major climate changes on this planet, not human beings, living things, or capitalist industry.
Either one of these is a proof that man-made capitalist global warming is horse shit. You don’t need to know more science than this to understand that they’re lying for reasons of seizing political power.
And when they cripple the energy supplies human beings need to survive and suggest the cure for global warming is reducing the population, you understand the object of the fraud is totalitarian control.
Yes, Neil, I read your argument over there. And it’s a reasonable case for skepticism. It’s certainly worth throwing into the marketplace of ideas for consideration.
But stop and dig yourself, man. You’re not just saying people who disagree with you are mistaken on the issue and trying to persuade them otherwise. Once you’ve examined the evidence for yourself and decided it’s “obvious,” anyone else who isn’t convinced has ipso facto excommunicated himself from the libertarian movement and revealed himself to be a secret water carrier for totalitarianism. No other interpretation of the evidence is possible. Neil has spoken. No need for anyone to think for themselves. Until Neil makes up his mind on something, it might be OK to have more than one opinion on the subject, but once the libertarian pope has weighed all the evidence and issued a magisterial pronouncement, it ceases to be an issue for permissible debate.
If you had even the slightest capacity for self-reflection, or for imagining just how arrogant and overbearing you come across to others, you might stop to think that could *just possibly* make your complaints about “dogmatism” look a little hypocritical.
And say–for someone who’s had your “last word here,” you’re certainly very chatty. But maybe you meant your last word here assuming you had the absolute last word on the thread and nobody else posted any comments. If that’s your meaning, I’ll be more than happy to give you the last word, Comment No. 83. No matter how vile or personally insulting it is, I won’t respond any more. You got the last word. You won! Happy?
The difference between arrogance and confidence eludes you because you don’t have any sense based on living in the world. You’re all theory — typical of ideologues and intellectuals. To you all ideas are of equal possibility because experience doesn’t impact on you. So, you feel free to scoff at a man who says his atheism was overcome by a concrete experience of God.
But let’s leave my own personal experience out of this and talk of things anyone can figure out if they’re not in the mind-numbing grip of an ideology.
To come to the conclusion that fractional changes in the amount of a single gas — carbon dioxide — in the earth’s atmosphere could create a catastrophic change sufficient to flood continental lowlands one has to be able to make a firm statement that “all other things will remain equal.”
No scientist could ever make such a firm statement. The human biosphere is pretty much a closed system with solar weather and rare impacts of large extraterrestrial objects — being the only major external factors from outside the atmosphere, and eruptions from underneath the earth’s crust entering our biosphere being the other major external factors.
Leaving those aside for a moment, and concentrating just on human-caused factors, we’re already having to account for the impact of 6.7 billion humans going about their daily lives before you could focus on the changes of a single factor such as carbon-dioxide emissions.
Every time someone made a hire, you have to account not only for the release of carbon dioxide — which theoretically could have a warming effect — but the fire releasing particulate matter into the atmosphere, which would have a cooling effect.
Every time someone put a pot on the stove to boil water the release of the major greenhouse gas — water vapor — would have to be accounted for
Every time someone changed the tiles on their roof from a dark, solar-absorbing color to a light solar-reflective color one would have to account for the difference.
Is your swimming pool full or empty? Do you have a cover on it? Major factors that would to be accounted for.
A water desalination plant removes salt from sea water and it’s released back into the ecosystem as fresh water. Major changes that need to be accounted for.
A city switches from diesel buses that release particulate matter into the atmosphere — blocking sunlight — to a fleet of methane-engine buses. Has to be accounted for.
A heavy snowfall at the sources of rivers can change the saline content of the bays they empty into — has to be accounted for.
Now you have those extra-bubble events for which human beings have no control: meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions, changes in solar weather. A single volcanic eruption can shoot more sunlight-blocking particulate matter into the atmosphere in a few days than is contained in the entire history of human industrial pollution.
Is this enough? Anyone who lives in the world and has an elementary-school understanding of earth sciences — or at least when I was in school a half century ago — could figure out pretty quickly that for anyone to claim that minor changes in a single fractional gas — carbon dioxide — to be able to be claimed as causing GLOBAL warming, you would first have to be able to account for all these millions and millions of other independent factors.
It’s obviously false. To state the obvious isn’t arrogant. To call people who state as even possible such an absurdity anything less than liars or dupes is to doubt one’s own sanity, one’s entire understand that we live in an ecosystem far too complex for any real scientist to make categorical predictions worthy of crippling the production and supply of plentiful human sources of energy in favor of this crackpot Big Lie.
So that you take it seriously is a strong indication to me that either you have no working intellect or you have a hidden agenda and don’t care what the truth is — the very charge you made against libertarians like me and riled me enough for me to lose my temper and forget my manners.
I simply do not have much of a capacity for people whose head is firmly stuck up their own ass.
The quality of this thread has deteriorated because there is one libertarian whose debating tactics mimics exactly those typically employed by “liberal democrats.” In a sense, Carson having to defend himself of the charge of being a UN-loving Fabian Socialist sort of verifies the implicit argument that he was making in the first place, regardless of the separate argument pertaining to the scientific merit of “global warming.”
My own view on the subject of anthropogenic climate change, as it pertains to the scientific modeling, is here http://freedomdemocrats.org/node/3661#comment-7828. I do have skepticism about the reliability of boundary condition fluid dynamics modeling, which is what is used to model/predict “climate change.” I have real problems with “alarmists” such as James Hansen, and if you don’t share his alarmism, then you are a “denier,” which i suppose is something being akin to a young earth creationist. However, the one commentator here who talks about CO2 in relation to water vapor–in between denounciations of fabian socialism infesting the libertarian movement–fails to acknowledge, or perhaps isn’t aware of the nonlinear positive feedback coupling of net increases in carbon in the atmosphere with such things as water vapor. It is these types of “feedback loops,” both positive and negative, which are really at the heart of the climate change debate.
In any event, whatever your opinion of anthropogenic CO2 induced climate change, the reality is that such is but a crude form of geo-engineering. Humans are going to develop more direct and sophisticated ways to (intentionally)engineer changes in climate, regardless. The topic of Anthropogenic climate change is not going to go away. The cause of liberty will not be served by libertarians burying their hands in the sand and following the lead of the likes of J Neil Schulman on this matter.
FYI, I replied here on Neil’s post: http://jneilschulman.rationalreview.com/2009/12/the-great-ideas-are-simple/comment-page-1/#comment-196
Neil:
What difference does it make?? Why… because the libertarian–who believes in “individual freedom”, expressed usually in terms of individual rights against aggression–opposes all forms of aggression as being unjust… he opposes both private aggression (crime) and public aggression, and he recognizes that states of necessity commit aggression–or, as you might say, infringe on “individual freedom.”
As we are conceptual, language-using beings, it helps to use words for various concepts.
I had formed the impression, given Alongside Night and other writings of yours, that you would have agreed with all this, so I can’t understand your disagreement here.
Over on Carson’s thread, BTW, you wrote, inter alia, “I have no use for a libertarian movement that thinks the United States government is more evil than those of Venezuela or Iran.”
I am not sure how you measure these things, and it could be that individuals in charge in those little states may be “more evil” than our own politicians, but all 3 of these states are criminal organizations, and there is no doubt that in meaningful terms the US gov’t is a bigger threat to, say, me, than the others–I have an obscene sum stolen from me every year by the US. I’m willing to entertain arguments for why … Venezuela is an even bigger threat to me than the bully in my back yard who robs me every f*cking day. What *I* have no use for is a libertarian movement that tolerates the legitimacy of this criminal gang, that whitewashes its nature and history and motivations.
BTW, I actually agree with many of your criticisms of the substance of mutualism, environmentalism, though I don’t share your disdain for or hostility against Carson. He seems honest and sincere to me and certainly a fellow traveler, in his opposition to the state. (And he has a respectable argument, though I disagree with it, that mutualism is at the end of a spectrum of libertarian property views.) The state–and yes, the US state–is our biggest enemy nowadays, and opposition to it has to be the central focus for the libertarian.
Of course Hussein was a bad guy and we should no more mourn for him than for a mafia boss killed by agents of a competing mafia. BUt to say the US military “should” have done X, Y, or Z is to ignore the nature of the state–it’s not gonna do what you think it “should” do. As Mises wrote, “No socialist author ever gave a thought to the possibility that the abstract entity which he wants to vest with unlimited power—whether it is called humanity, society, nation, state, or government—could act in a way of which he himself disapproves.” The same applies to any state at all, IMO.
Moreover, even if the army had done only what you suggest, it would still be unjust and unlibertarian: it would still have resulted in many civilian deaths–what we libertarians call “murder”; and it would be done at the expense of me, the American taxpayer. We libertarians condemn this as theft.
This is not a surprise, though. And praising Bush for violating international law, for murdering civilians, for robbing the US taxpayer–it is mind boggling how this could be praiseworthy. This “if Bush had just…” seems to be of the idea that if we just get the right people in power, the state can be run right, in a libertarian way. This is a pipe dream.
Neil, I understand your argument. I disagree completely with it. I think it completely fallacious. There is a reason so many libertarians have woken up to the fraud that is IP (and yes, logorights is just another type of IP). I have no doubt you are sincere but your argument for IP is wrong.
Incidentally, for further discussion of fallacies of Schulman’s “logorights” IP idea, see http://www.stephankinsella.com/2009/07/02/on-j-neil-schulmans-logorights/
Kevin, thanks for the links.
Regarding the battle above, I’ve decided it is entertaining. And let’s be clear about this. Anyone who disagrees with me on that (as on everything else) cannot be considered as a libertarian. I have spoken.
There’s probably a paper just waiting to be written on the topic of “the psychopathology of right-libertarianism.” Subtitle: “Why J. Neil Schulman squeals when he gets goosed in his bourgeouis comfort zones.”
Psychopathology. Bourgeois comfort zones. It sure sounds like you’d like to see me in a gulag, comrade.
Mr. Schulman,
I’m with Szasz on the subject of involuntary commitment/treatment for “mental illness.” But … paranoid much?
J. Neil Schulman’s “Last Word Here,” Part 37: The Saga Continues
Neil: I thought that giving you the last word and ceasing to respond to you would mean finally being rid of you, but since you’re going to keep coming back here as long as *anyone* posts comments I might as well say what I thought of your last “argument.”
You argued that the case against anthropogenic global warming was so “obvious” that anyone who questioned it was either stupid or a liar. But I get the impression that for you, ANYTHING on which you come to a conclusion becomes so “obvious” as to preclude any further honest difference of opinion. And I think anyone who experienced your moderation behavior on LeftLibertarian can attest to it.
You gave a bunch of reasons why you thought it was “obvious” that AGW was a fraud. Fine. They’re reasons worth considering.
You’re an autodidact. Fine. So am I. But one of the dangers of being an autodidact is reinventing the wheel, or thinking you’ve discovered some amazing new argument that’s so iron-clad as to be beyond dispute, while cutting yourself from any critical feedback from other specialists in the field.
The argument that water vapor is the main source of greenhouse effect has been raised before. So has the argument that solar intensity is the main cause of average temperature variation. Interestingly, both arguments are directly addressed here:
“It’s the sun, stupid”
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/28/090/30666
“Mars and Pluto are warming too”
http://www.grist.org/article/mars-and-pluto-are-warming-too/“Water vapor accounts for almost all of the greenhouse effect”
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/22/222357/40
According to that site, there’s no evidence of increased solar intensity in recent decades.
According to that site, water vapor is indeed the main greenhouse gas. But it’s not, as you said, the source of 95% of greenhouse effect. It’s more like 70%. The 95% is one of those things that’s been picked up and recirculated on the Internet, like the false “statistic” some feminists putting out about spousal abuse rates spiking on Super Sunday. And in any case, if most greenhouses are normally regulated by a homeostatic mechanism for long periods of time, and that mechanism is disrupted by a few percent increase in a greenhouse gas input that’s *not* compensated by the mechanism, it can destabilize things very quickly.
This last is a basic logical flaw in your argument that any climatologist might have pointed out to you, if you hadn’t been so sure you’d discovered the one “obvious” truth that listening to others was a waste of time.
That’s the danger of being an autodidact: coming up with an argument that’s so “unanswerable” that you don’t know, or care, that someone else was already aware of it and did attempt to answer it. If you’re not convinced by the answer, that’s fine, but to be so arrogant as to refuse to listen is intellectual suicide.
Good autodidacts at least leave themselves open to listening to orthodox scholars in their field, just as insurance against overlooking something “obvious” that they didn’t take into account, and against developing a hothouse theory that won’t stand up to critical examination. That’s why I actually debated Austrians and other subjectivists in the course of writing MPE, and have continued to do so since. That’s why I had a courteous exchange with Bob Murphy and Roderick Long, both of whom disagreed with me strenuously on many things but were able to do so without being jackasses (not to mention being able to understand what the arguments actually were before they started shooting off their mouths).
But you’ve done the opposite. Your modus operandi is, by independent study, to come up with a first approximation–and then to be so sure you’ve received THE OBVIOUS TRUTH from Mt. Sinai that you set it in concrete and angrily cut yourself off from any critical review, denouncing anyone who questions the “obvious” nature of your revelation as either a knave or a fool. In other words, you’ve fallen prey to the worst danger of autodidacticism, and your personal arrogance has reinforced that tendency.
You mentioned in the comments at your blog just how badly my “religious” approach to economics enraged you, as an explanation of your behavior here. But as those who dealt with you in the last days of the LeftLibertarian list can attest, this rage and arrogant refusal to listen to anyone who argues with you on a matter you think is “obvious” are how you dealt with everyone who disagreed with you on anything.
Now, it might be that so many people are so badly wrong on everything, and you’re so right about everything, in all areas of disagreement, that it would be “anti-mind” and “anti-life” for you to obey basic rules of civility and courtesy.
Or it could just be that you’re a jackass, and your obsession about being right about every goddamned thing in the world and turning every dispute into a little morality play where Neil is being picked on reflects some weird insecurity complex of yours.
You say my approach to economics is “religious,” that my writing consists of “Marx said this, Ricardo said this, but on the other hand Bohm-Bawerk said this.”
Well, since the first part of Mutualist Political Economy was intended as an examination of claims that Bohm-Bawerk and Mises had “demolished” the labor theory of value or classical political economy, I thought it would be worthwhile to examine what both the classicals and Austrians actually SAID. I thought it would be worthwhile to examine the points of contention between them and ascertain whether they were talking past each other. I thought it would be worthwhile to examine Bohm-Bawerk’s criticism of Ricardo and Marx, and see if it was a valid criticism of what they’d actually said, or rather something they’d already anticipated and answered (IOW a strawman).
When I constantly see second-hand arguments by those who’ve never actually read or understood either the classicals or Bohm-Bawerk, putting forth things like the “mudpie” argument or the existence of radical fluctuations in short-term price, as if they were unanticipated and telling critiques, I think it’s especially worthwhile to see whether they’re criticizing something that Ricardo and Marx were guilty of, or whether it’s an issue that Ricardo and Marx (unbeknownst to their second-hand critics) actually dealt with.
In short, in examining whether the subjectivists “disproved” the classicals, I think it’s a good idea to understood what they all said.
I guess I should have saved time by reducing each side to a bumper sticker–that’s the scientific approach.
If Bohm-Bawerk can be summed up by a sentence, with no danger that the sentence might be misleadingly simple or sweep necessary complexity under the rug, I’m surprised he went to the trouble of writing those two long books over a long period of years. If Christianity can be summed up by a single sentence, I’m amazed people have wasted their time reading the New Testament.
Finally, Neil, you say you won’t “allow” Sam’s Agorism to be confused with mutualism et al. I don’t think anyone does confuse them. The core of the ALL is Agorists and left-Rothbardians influenced by SEK3, but I’m not one of them. Their website specifically says that they’re an alliance that also includes mutualists, Georgists, etc. I have been heavily influenced by Sam’s thought, and I’ve borrowed what I found useful; but I’ve never called myself an Agorist or a Rothbardian.
The thing is, Sam was likeable enough, and secure enough with himself, that he could engage in dialogue with Georgists and anarcho-socialists that was frank and strenuous, but also friendly and courteous. You mentioned once that you studied the first few months of LL’s archives to ascertain that Sam did sometimes delete posts. True enough. But if you’d gone beyond the first few months, you might also have seen that extended tag-team debates went on with Georgists, some of the most prominent thinkers in the Georgist world, for months at a time. And Sam carefully read and considered what they wrote, and answered it in a calm and courteous manner. Sam wasn’t afraid that anyone might confuse his ideas with those of others he disagreed with, because *HE* wasn’t AFRAID of anything. Sam wasn’t a writhing ball of insecurities, whose psyche was a dank snake pit of fears that he might look weak or silly, fears that he might be wrong about anything, or a compulsive drive to see himself in every dispute as the poor suffering good guy who was picked on by the others. Sam wasn’t personally loathsome, a travelling freakshow of a personality who’d take a team of a million Freuds a million years to figure out just why he as so fucked up.
In other words, Sam wasn’t a jackass.
So you might ask yourself, Neil, whether the truth is such a fragile thing. You might ask yourself whether it’s really necessary for you to adopt your pose as the poor martyred soul, Gary Cooper grinding his badge in the dust, who loses his temper because he just CARES SO DEEPLY about the truth. Or could it be that you’re just a jackass?
Someone desperately needs to check in to the Wilhelm Reich Reeducation Centre for Treatment of Issues Related to Bourgeois Comfort Zones.
Incidentally, C.S. Lewis is very strange bullet point to put on a rationalist’s C.V. Ayn Rand’s comments upon Lewis’ the Abolition of Man in the Marginalia were largely phrased in rather impolite language. Lewis was certainly an intensely civilised man and a brilliant stylist of uncanny psychological insight. But as a guide for thinking and living he is spiritually ruinous and deeply authoritarian:
Lewis’ utopia in Out of the Silent Planet is a feudal (and racial) caste system where everyone accepts their place and is happily obedient to the unchanging regime of an angelic dictator.
To allow C.S. Lewis to stay in an unwatched place in one’s mind is to walk in chains, and anyone who desires spiritual freedom should toss him out of their conscience and bolt the door. Lewis is a diseased Platonic intrinsicist who abusively tells you to live your life in awe and guilt and fear of a nonexistent metaphysical order at the price of this world. One can admire his tragic nobility, but he teaches intelligent minds to see the world tragically when they don’t have to, and many Christians consciously use his works to stunt developing reason in the young.
I find the discussion invigorating. A few further thoughts.
“The man baits me and makes me lose my temper…” writes Neil about Kevin. Yes on one, no on two. Yes, Kevin clearly baits Neil. Neil rises to the bait, like a big ol’ fish.
Your temper is your own. No one can make you lose it. If you lose your temper, the guy to take to task for its loss is the one looking back from the mirror.
Rothbard was very interested in Marx. I don’t dismiss Rothbard because he clearly read what Marx had written. Nor do I dismiss Kevin Carson. (I do dismiss Rachel Carson.)
There is clearly a class struggle going on today. It is not the struggle between Marx’s classes. But it is the struggle between Konkin’s classes: the productive and the political. The producers and the parasites. The fact that the political elite consider themselves to be true ubermenschen who must overwhelm and eradicate the rest of us is the main reason we find ourselves in a class war.
Anthropogenic global warming is hokum. It is an excuse for the elitists to slaughter hundreds of millions of persons and claim carbon tax credits for getting rid of them.
Anyone who looks at the temperature curve expressed in ice cores knows that there was a much warmer Medieval warm period, a series of warmer Roman warm periods, and even one in the time of Homer’s epic poem about 1200 BC – long before there were any coal fired steel mills.
There are union thugs who have caused much damage, attacked property, plant, and equipment, used Luddite reasoning against productivity enhancing technologies, and even some who have killed for their labor socialist ideology. There have also been thugs such as the Pinkertons hired by thugs such as John D. Rockefeller to slaughter the miners in the tent cities in Colorado and by other robber barons to forcibly end labor strikes with violence and murder.
Rockefeller and his ilk used government power to impose their monopolies, called competition wasteful, entertained Karl Marx when he came to visit, and lusted after more power to more completely centralize everything. The consolidation of the railroad industry and the banking industry were just the beginning of their march to mix government authority with private capital to form a great American fascism. It would be a mistake to constantly come down against union thugs without ever considering who they were opposing.
Neil has no use for me. Venezuela does not have 805 military bases in 130+ countries, nor does Iran. The USA does.
Neither Venezuela nor Iran has nuclear weapons, and neither country has used them against any military target in war time. The USA has nukes and has nuked two cities in war, plus a bunch of civilians in the USA have been deliberately exposed to fall out after nuclear detonations in the Nevada desert. The USA has also deliberately tested chemical and biological weapons on American civilians.
So, yep, the USA government is a greater threat to my freedom, peace, prosperity, and future than the government of Venezuela and the government of Iran, combined. No other government has done as much to thwart individual initiative in space achievement. No other government is as centralized, as collectivist, as elitist as the USA government and what William F. Buckley described as its totalitarian bureaucracy.
Neil has no use for me because I don’t want American troops to invade Venezuela or Iran. Okay. I don’t mind. I don’t want to be used by him.
1) There was a loophole but Western charity groups made their help contingent on the non use of DDT against malaria.
2) Absolutely false. DDT is still very effective in INDOOR spraying.
3) The anti-DDT campaign was designed to fight overpopulation. Simply put, Western liberals used malaria as a biological weapon to actively reduce the black African population. This is genocide. Period.
Global warming theory is not a fad. See the following paper:
Peterson, Thomas & Connolley, William & Fleck, John (September 2008). The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus. American Meteorological Society. http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf
The hypothesis was proposed over 100 years ago, and has been a focus of serious research since the 1950s or so, and has been the consensus opinion of climate researchers for about 20 years now.
The fact that most of the public kept their heads in the sand (with the help of plenty of politicians and propagandists) through this process is irrelevant. Science does not progress by going back to square one at the request of every ignoramus who decides that he wants to passively investigate some phenomenon as a part time hobby.
@kinsella
Before you insist that we read all sorts of fringe opinions about climate change, why don’t you go and read some mainstream scientific publications? Many of your questions will be answered, and the opinions of eco-freaks will be put in context next to the opinions of people who actually have some influence in the world.
I personally like the reporting in Scientific American and the Economist (not a science publication, but they have a good science section). I bet that Popular Mechanics is good also, and probably the science section of the NYTimes (which covered Freeman Dyson’s complaints, IIRC). If you have access to Science and Nature, check them out (though beware that they are sometimes hyping the original research that follows their news and reviews sections).
There are also plenty of books. I’d advise against “Storms of my grandchildren” on the grounds that the author typically engages in tiresome moralizing and policy prescription, but you may appreciate it as an example of the opinions of a fanatic who actually has some influence in the world. There’s some discussion of it here: http://freedomdemocrats.org/node/3661
@tehdude:
On point #3, you are proposing an implausible conspiracy theory, so you need to provide same strong evidence.
How much money have western countries dedicated to providing healthcare to Africans? How is that consistent with the accusation that they want to kill off Africans? Is malaria even an effective means of population control? It only kills about one percent of its victims–so it does more to prevent economic growth than population growth (and economic growth is often connected to population stabilization).
How many people must have been involved in that conspiracy in order to implement it? Hundreds? Thousands? Your conspiracy seems to require that a lot of people were honestly duped into thinking that the DTT restrictions were helpful. Was Rachael Carson really in a position to dupe that many influential people who have the resources to have other scientists confirm her findings?
Returning to the issue of mainstream scientific opinion on climate change, one under-utilized resource in public discussions of science is the National Academy of Sciences and their publishing arm, National Academy Press.
They have a webpage dedicated to climate change:http://dels.nas.edu/climatechange/
They have a page discussing some of the issues related to ClimateGate (BTW, I’ve seen no indication that anything in the emails undermines the standard theory of climate change, nor have other scientists seen any damning evidence): http://www.nationalacademies.org/morenews/20091203.html
Here are their reports on climate change: http://books.nap.edu/collections/global_warming/index.html
Finally, if anyone doubts the effective consensus among active researchers, here’s a roundup of what has been published:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
@ ricketson
thank you very much for your comments.
Being a libertarian in Germany is hard enough without 90% of the American libertarians being conspiracy theorists concerning global warming…
It is not very believable that most environmental problems can by solved by the market if the people saying so seem to be illiterate concerning science constantly referring to the lunatic fringe.
@ axel: thanks, I was afraid that his thread had died and i was just talking to myself
@kinsella: I checked out a few of those links, and they do not provide any meaningful argument against there being a substantial risk from AGW.
Dyson was acting like a gadfly, and he admitted as much. Much of what he wrote was purely speculative, and his accusations that climate scientists don’t actually go outside are unfounded. Many of them have spent a lot of time collecting data (as is apparent to anyone who has read the basics of the field), and even if some of them are purely theorists, there are also a lot of theorists in other fields of science (particularly physics).
Hayden’s “one letter disproof” only applies to the details of the climate predictions, and not the general prediction that AGW is happening and increases the risk of increadibly disruptive climate change.
To interpret either Dyson’s or Hayden’s arguments as justification to dismiss the risk from greenhouse gas emissions is to confuse the limitations of our knowledge with the complete absence of knowledge. We have enough knowledge to act. I’d prefer to avoid drastic actions, but to do so we need to give serious attention to this problem now. Really, we should have given it serious attention 20 years ago, but a bunch of people decided that they would rather sow doubt about the established science rather than look for solutions. They argued that we could not act until we had absolute certainty, and we lost valuable time in which we could have adjusted at minimal cost. They decided to deal with a political dispute by attacking the science (and it doesn’t matter if the eco-freak illuminati were the first to muddle the political and scientific issues).
The longer we delay, the more it will cost to adjust our behavior, and any blame for these costs will rest on the denialists just as much as it does on the radical environmentalists.