The Koch Brothers and climate change

[Prospero]

Heydrich and Trotsky are utterly different figures for a variety of reasons - as you well know. A stupid remark, an8150, and beneath you.

[robertlouis]

Hm, let's see how far I get proclaiming my amusement at having an avatar of Reynhard Heydrich.

Not very far. That's a ludicrous comparison.

[Prospero]

An... you do have a point about openness and think tanks. The true colours of all should be transparent. And in many cases are.
The difference here is that an immensely rich industry is funding bodes whose aim is to challenge what the vast majority of scientists believe to be hard evidence on the sources of climate change. And they do it not in the interests of a genuine argument but to protect their profits. And as we also know they fund the irrational in the shape of the tea party

We need strong watchdogs - the state and on industry.

I accused you weeks ago of naive idealism in that you seem to believe that innate good human nature (the impulse to altruism) will prevail if rules and regulations are removed. All the evidence over centuries of history points the other way. Maybe we are a species that values "enlightened self interest" as argued by Matt Ridley. But there is pretty overwhelming evidence otherwise.


The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley
Steve Jones takes issue with the argument that self-interest and private enterprise are in our DNA


The Guardian, Saturday 19 June 2010
"In the second century of the Christian Era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind. The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. Their peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury." Thus the first paragraph of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and thus, more or less, the entire contents of Matt Ridley's latest book.

Gibbon went on, in half a dozen thick, square volumes, to chart the collapse of that earthly paradise and its replacement by barbarism. Ridley is more hopeful. The Rational Optimist is an anthem, sung by a celestial choir to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus, of undiluted praise for the free market in cash and ideas, from the stone age to the present day, and on into a sunlit and biologically inevitable future.

Its rationale comes from Self-Help, a work published in 1859. As Samuel Smiles put it in his Victorian bestseller: "The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual", and Matt Ridley (once chairman of Northern Rock, albeit "under the terms of my employment there . . . not at liberty to write about it") agrees.

Another volume, published on the same day as Self-Help, gives Rational Optimist a theme. The word "evolution" does not appear in The Origin of Species, but plays a large part here. In its Latin form, the term was applied to the unrolling of a scroll. Ridley examines the scroll of history and finds that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. In spite of the earthquakes, literal and metaphoric, that now and again perturb humankind's placid course, there is inevitability in his view of life, for the laws of nature, inscribed in our bodies and brains, have made us, and our economies, what they are.

The book is – like Ridley's earlier works – beautifully written and extensively researched. It is decorated with well-chosen facts and anecdotes which will, no doubt, be pillaged by future authors, and outlines a theory of history from which historians will, no doubt, learn a great deal.

Biologists may be more cautious. This Candide-like account of our past turns on the belief that what is natural must be right and what is right, natural. Free exchange, self-interest and private enterprise made us what we are, and must be coded in the recesses of our DNA. Ridley uses the origin of sex, and the spread of genes, among individuals that it promotes as an analogue of the market and of the movement of capital and of inventions. In fact, the beginnings and the rationale of sexual reproduction remain biology's biggest unsolved questions (although – like capitalism – the process is expensive, for it involves a whole class of parasites, males rather than market-manipulators, who depend on a productive or reproductive mass of workers or females to do the actual labour).

Like his predecessor, the Rev William Paley, Ridley summons up an artefact – in fact two – to make his case: not a watch upon a heath but a stone axe and a computer mouse. He makes a telling case that to manufacture either involved group intelligence, an exchange of goods and ideas among hundreds or thousands of people, most of whom were unaware of the collective power of their actions. He is no doubt correct, and there is plenty of evidence that the division of labour improves productivity (for those programmed to own one, a glance at a £20 note with its quotation from Adam Smith makes that clear).

True indeed, but nothing to do with Darwinism. The problem is hindsight or, worse, foresight. It easy to imagine that, if one found a computer mouse upon a heath, there must, somewhere, be a mouse-maker – and, of course, that would be correct; for that object, like all modern technology, depends on planning, forethought and design. Life does not. Darwin despised Lamarck not because the latter believed in the inheritance of acquired characters, for he himself thought the same, but because of Lamarck's insistence that there was an internal force that drove life to become more and more perfect (or, at least, French): as he wrote, "The production of a new organ in an animal body results from the appearance of a new want or need".

Plastic mouses (or stone axes) certainly emerged from wants and needs, but the furry rodent did not. Darwin (check the £10 note) insisted that there was no intrinsic direction to evolution, and modern biology shows that he was right. From Moses to Macaulay and Marx – all three quoted here – politicians and economists disagree. They have produced their own grand visions of history (often, like Marx, with reference to the Sage of Downe). Ridley is in that tradition and is, like his predecessors, happy to ignore the exceptions. Russia, where male life expectancy dropped by five years after the collapse of communism, is no advertisement for the joys of free enterprise and neither, for that matter, is the USA, which lags in that measure behind Cuba.

The recent accession to power of the Eton and Oxford gang, with their motto, from Samuel Smiles, of "a place for everything and everything in its place" – their place, as an immutable fact of Nature, being In Charge – is bad news for optimists, rational or otherwise. Gibbon saw history as "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind". I look forward, come the election of May 2015, to a second – and much revised – edition of The Rational Optimist that pays tribute to that uncomfortable truth.

[Stavros]

I gave up debating minarchism with you, Stavros, just as an aside, when it became clear to me that, for all your undoubted learning, and perhaps because of your undoubted learning, you don't understand it.

An honest, if feeble cop out on your side.

I don't know how you got the impression that I do not understand what you call 'minarchism' -perhaps you don't want to debate it because I do understand it and you are not sure you can handle the debate? I am aware, for example, that just as conservatives lump together a disparity of thinkers under the label 'cultural Marxism' that there are differences and disagreements between, for example, Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand -one detested the other, possibly because of the cult that was built around her on 36 E 36 (which she did nothing to stop) as much as the 'emotionalism' of Atlas Shrugged. I have linked below a perceptive memory of Ms Rand by what used to be thought of as the Conservative thinker William F. Buckley, though to most libertarians these days he is presumably but a flag's width away from Marxism.

Fundamental to 'minarchism', as I understand it, is the belief that taxation is theft, and government evil. Although the intellectual foundations of Rothbard's perspective are stronger than Ayn Rand's, his vision is flawed in so many ways it is hard to believe he was ever taken seriously. I don't mind that he considered Adam Smith a plagiarist and a Proto-Marxist; but the extremity of his views was summed up when he said

Taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States... (For a New Liberty: the Libertarian Manifesto, 1973).

I won't go on at length about this thinker, and presumably you will interject the name of some other theorist rather than Rothbard, but in essence the attitudes to taxation, government, and private property are shared by most libertarian-anarchist thinkers, much as most Marxists believe as a fundamental truth that capitalism cannot exist without exploiting the workers. The historical evidence of what happens when there is no taxation, no government and economic relations are shaped by the market, is chilling.

Yet even today, and in spite of layers and layers of nasty taxes, interventionist government, private property under pressure, multinationals like Microsoft use the same system of taxation denounced by minarchists- to avoid paying taxes!

A stellar example of private property in action is Rupert Murdoch- even though he only owns a controlling share in News International and its subsidiaries not the whole lot outright -nevertheless, treating the Sunday Times as his private property -presumably with full approval of minarchists, in this last week he forced the editor of the newspaper to issue a public apology for printing a cartoon by Gerald Scarfe, who has been publishing deliberately shocking cartoons in the Sunday Times for 50 years. The cartoon ridiculed the government of Israel. A few years ago Murdoch also used his 'rights of ownership' to prevent the publication of the revelation that a friend of his, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, was a serial pederast and unashamed of it, claiming young boys liked it. Freedom, in this case the freedom of a newspaper to print a cartoon or a news report, is not an absolute value -it remains to be negotiated by the proprietor, much as slaves in the United States were the 'human livestock' and private property of their owners.

In the absence of government, the free market heaven the minarchists dream of is somebody else's idea of hell on earth. But I welcome a debate.

Here is Buckley on Ayn Rand -the review of her book he mentions, by Whitaker Chambers, can be found after the youtube link.



http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-.../2705853/posts

[fivekatz]

There is plenty of evidence of the dangers of laissez faire economics. I thought one of the saddest moments I have every watched was Alan Greenspan appear before Congress after the 2008 meltdown. To paraphrase him the flaw in his entire life's work was that the markets would always govern themselves by not taking undue risk. Rather remarkable that the former Fed Chairman still held that view after the bankruptcy of Enron demonstrated that businesses, their banking partners and even their accounts could be so swayed by greed that they would take undue risk.

The reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th Century was spurred on by the fact that in the absence of other rules, greed becomes the only rule.

The very nature of the corporation is to have single minded focus which is to create significant profits for shareholders. Their charters do not concern them with perserve eco-systems for future generations and the corporation has proven at moments to be so myopic in its pursuits that the creation CDO and Synthethic CDOs went on unfettered though everyone in the process knew when the merry-go-round final stopped people were going to get hurt.

Government is flawed in as much as it is very vulnerable to the power and money that capital can bring to bare BUT it does serve the purpose in theory of protecting all members of the community of man since every citizen is in theory a share holder.

The worst art of the 2008 meltdown is that the very men that took due risk (Thain, Fuld, Blankfein, Dimon) have been untouched by their risks, in fact all of them are still very rich while millions have lost their homes and their livelihoods.

When the Koch Brothers succeed in convincing millions of citizens that climate change is a hoax they risk far greater catastrophy than the bankers and market makers did and blow will not be such that the government can soften the blow with a bailout.

[an8150]

Heydrich and Trotsky are utterly different figures for a variety of reasons - as you well know. A stupid remark, an8150, and beneath you.

You're quite right, Prospero. How about an avatar of Rudolph Hess, then? Or Julius Streicher? Or Ernst Rohm?

[an8150]

There is plenty of evidence of the dangers of laissez faire economics. I thought one of the saddest moments I have every watched was Alan Greenspan appear before Congress after the 2008 meltdown. To paraphrase him the flaw in his entire life's work was that the markets would always govern themselves by not taking undue risk. Rather remarkable that the former Fed Chairman still held that view after the bankruptcy of Enron demonstrated that businesses, their banking partners and even their accounts could be so swayed by greed that they would take undue risk.

The reform movement of the late 19th and early 20th Century was spurred on by the fact that in the absence of other rules, greed becomes the only rule.

The very nature of the corporation is to have single minded focus which is to create significant profits for shareholders. Their charters do not concern them with perserve eco-systems for future generations and the corporation has proven at moments to be so myopic in its pursuits that the creation CDO and Synthethic CDOs went on unfettered though everyone in the process knew when the merry-go-round final stopped people were going to get hurt.

Government is flawed in as much as it is very vulnerable to the power and money that capital can bring to bare BUT it does serve the purpose in theory of protecting all members of the community of man since every citizen is in theory a share holder.

The worst art of the 2008 meltdown is that the very men that took due risk (Thain, Fuld, Blankfein, Dimon) have been untouched by their risks, in fact all of them are still very rich while millions have lost their homes and their livelihoods.

When the Koch Brothers succeed in convincing millions of citizens that climate change is a hoax they risk far greater catastrophy than the bankers and market makers did and blow will not be such that the government can soften the blow with a bailout.

You guys just don't do first principles, do you?

[fivekatz]

You guys just don't do first principles, do you?

I must admit I don't get what you mean?

[an8150]

An honest, if feeble cop out on your side.

I don't know how you got the impression that I do not understand what you call 'minarchism' -perhaps you don't want to debate it because I do understand it and you are not sure you can handle the debate? I am aware, for example, that just as conservatives lump together a disparity of thinkers under the label 'cultural Marxism' that there are differences and disagreements between, for example, Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand -one detested the other, possibly because of the cult that was built around her on 36 E 36 (which she did nothing to stop) as much as the 'emotionalism' of Atlas Shrugged. I have linked below a perceptive memory of Ms Rand by what used to be thought of as the Conservative thinker William F. Buckley, though to most libertarians these days he is presumably but a flag's width away from Marxism.

Fundamental to 'minarchism', as I understand it, is the belief that taxation is theft, and government evil. Although the intellectual foundations of Rothbard's perspective are stronger than Ayn Rand's, his vision is flawed in so many ways it is hard to believe he was ever taken seriously. I don't mind that he considered Adam Smith a plagiarist and a Proto-Marxist; but the extremity of his views was summed up when he said

Taking the twentieth century as a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most imperialist government has been the United States... (For a New Liberty: the Libertarian Manifesto, 1973).

I won't go on at length about this thinker, and presumably you will interject the name of some other theorist rather than Rothbard, but in essence the attitudes to taxation, government, and private property are shared by most libertarian-anarchist thinkers, much as most Marxists believe as a fundamental truth that capitalism cannot exist without exploiting the workers. The historical evidence of what happens when there is no taxation, no government and economic relations are shaped by the market, is chilling.

Yet even today, and in spite of layers and layers of nasty taxes, interventionist government, private property under pressure, multinationals like Microsoft use the same system of taxation denounced by minarchists- to avoid paying taxes!

A stellar example of private property in action is Rupert Murdoch- even though he only owns a controlling share in News International and its subsidiaries not the whole lot outright -nevertheless, treating the Sunday Times as his private property -presumably with full approval of minarchists, in this last week he forced the editor of the newspaper to issue a public apology for printing a cartoon by Gerald Scarfe, who has been publishing deliberately shocking cartoons in the Sunday Times for 50 years. The cartoon ridiculed the government of Israel. A few years ago Murdoch also used his 'rights of ownership' to prevent the publication of the revelation that a friend of his, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, was a serial pederast and unashamed of it, claiming young boys liked it. Freedom, in this case the freedom of a newspaper to print a cartoon or a news report, is not an absolute value -it remains to be negotiated by the proprietor, much as slaves in the United States were the 'human livestock' and private property of their owners.

In the absence of government, the free market heaven the minarchists dream of is somebody else's idea of hell on earth. But I welcome a debate.

Here is Buckley on Ayn Rand -the review of her book he mentions, by Whitaker Chambers, can be found after the youtube link.



http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-.../2705853/posts

Oh, do come along, Stavros, you and I debated this for page after page in that other thread! Accusing me of copping out is contrary to that history.

I suspect you'll find most libertarians/minarchists (why the scare quotes, btw?) have little time for either Rupert Murdoch or Microsoft. The former, especially, most of us regard as no more than a particularly well-connected crony capitalist. I realise that, like the Koch brothers, GWB and Berlusconi, he's one of those right-wing hate figures for you guys, which, as with the others, almost makes him attractive to me, but really, most libertarians I'm in contact with assume that these sorts of people would, in our ideal world, either have to find some other way of earning their billions, or they'd end up as road-sweepers. Either way, neither of those business empires are poster children for that which we advocate. As you would understand, if you understood.

I know, I know, nobody understands me...

[an8150]

I must admit I don't get what you mean?

Then may I refer you to Prospero's initial post and to my initial comments on it?