Current Events

Global Warming: Be Skeptical

Warren Gibson Current Events, Liberty

I have been teaching advanced high school physics as a substitute teacher recently and enjoying it very much. But I was disturbed by what I saw in the text chapter entitled “Waves, Light and Climate Change.”

First of all, I don’t think a discussion of climate change belongs in an introductory chapter on light and its wave properties. Elementary texts should stick to firmly established science and mention complex, controversial issues as footnotes if at all. The authors thought otherwise – not only did they tack this topic onto the light/wave chapter, they headed the chapter with this alarmist quote:

Quite simply, I think it is no exaggeration to say that climate change is the biggest problem our civilization has ever had to face up to in its 12,000 years, because it requires a collective response.

What does “collective response” mean? Such bland phrases often translate into coercive wealth grabs by politicians. More importantly, the notion that human activity is having or will have a significant deleterious affect on our environment, which is what “climate change” means these days, is not firmly established at all in my view. (I have no expertise in climatology.)

There is a spectrum of viewpoints on global warming, ranging from outright denial at one extreme to hysteria on the other. Neither position is defensible. At one extreme, I was very disappointed to hear Ron Paul, a long-time hero of mine, describe global warming as a massive hoax. It’s not. The other extreme is represented by quotes like this, one of many printed in the margins of the physics text:

We are playing Russian Roulette with our climate … the Earth’s climate system is an angry beast subject to unpredictable responses …

Some facts that are not in dispute:

  1. There are “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere that block some of the re-radiation of solar energy; that is, light that bounces off the earth’s surface and would otherwise escape into space. This blockage increases atmospheric temperature, other things being equal. Without any greenhouse gases, so much solar energy would be re-radiated that we would freeze to death.
  2. The primary greenhouse gases, in order of their importance are H2O (water vapor), CO2 (carbon dioxide), CH4 (methane) and N2O (nitrous oxide).  Water vapor is self limiting – when its concentration reaches saturation, it rains. So there is no point in to trying to reduce atmospheric water vapor concentration. So if global warming is significant and we want to do something about atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, we have to concentrate on CO2.
  3. It is a fact that concentrations of CO2 have increased substantially, from about 280 parts per million in pre-industrial times to about 380 at present. Most of this increase can be attributed to burning of fuels.
  4. The arctic ice sheet has exhibited marked melting in recent years. But some reports have ice increasing in the antarctic.
  5. Solar flares are a major driver of climate change on earth.

Now it gets murky. To begin with, it is very difficult to generate a meaningful average temperature for the entire earth. Temperatures vary widely from place to place and from time to time. Therefore extreme care must be taken in aggregating and interpreting temperature data.

Secondly, computer modeling is a very tricky business. I know; for many years I did computer modeling of systems far simpler that the entire earth’s atmosphere, and there are lots of pitfalls, notwithstanding the sophistication of contemporary methods. In finite element analysis or computational fluid dynamics the analyst lays an imaginary gridwork over the system in question, with independent variables like temperature and pressure at each node point. He makes simplifying assumptions about the behavior of variables between grid points and may end up with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous equations to be solved repeatedly as the virtual clock is stepped forward in time. If the grid is too coarse or the time steps are too large or the assumptions too gross or the starting conditions are inaccurate or the integration algorithms are not robust or the software has bugs – the whole undertaking can go haywire.

Third, increases in temperatures or sea levels must be put in perspective. A small amount of warming – one or two degrees C – would be a benign outcome for almost all of us – perhaps reduced heating costs or shifts in agricultural production. A one foot increase in sea level would be trivial almost everywhere.

But what about the strange weather we’ve been having? Given the media propensity for focusing on disasters, it’s no wonder it seems that way but hurricane intensity, for example, compares with that of past seasons. Recent weather isn’t particularly strange.

We need to think through all sorts of approaches, including geo-engineering, and conduct cost/benefit analyses for each. The end goal – human welfare – must always be kept in sight. I highly recommend Bjørn Lomborg’s thoughtful book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” Lomborg is a careful scientist who acknowledges the reality of global warming and pleads for careful examination of all plausible approaches.

Lastly, we must realize that this is a global problem. Anything the U.S. might do to reduce CO2 emissions would be dwarfed by increased CO2 emissions in China, where automobile ownership is surging and new coal-fired power plants are being built. Certainly California’s program, which went into effect this year, will have no noticeable effect on global concentrations, unless it sets an example that the Chinese decide to follow. Even if they do, cap-and-trade schemes such as California’s may not work out as theory says they should. Such has been the record in Europe.

Taking Guns by Executive Order

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , ,

I wrote recently about one of the American attitudes and set of beliefs about private ownership of firearms. (“Guns” ; “America and Firearms…“).

I need an addendum in view of current developments.

First, I want to confess that I wouldn’t be all that opposed to banning high-capacity magazine guns and rifles that can be turned into the currently illegal assault weapons, if I thought that would be the end of it. Nevertheless, I would never agree to such ban in the current cultural context. That’s because I think American gun-banning organizations are mostly in bad faith.

Let me put it in more clear words: I suspect they lie all the time. They are not merely after my so-called “assault weapon” (already illegal). If I let them have anything, I think, they will be after my duck shotgun next. Then, they will want the handgun that never leaves my house. Then, they will demand that I turn over the b.b. gun (very small-bore compressed-air rifle) that I use to sting marauding raccoons in the ass. (I do this because they insist in defecating en masse under my grape arbor, near where I sit outdoors in the summer. If they learned to shit on the neighbor’s lawn for example, I would let them be.)

To summarize: Gun control advocating organizations are liberals-led organizations. Not all liberals are liars but liberals leaders almost all are liars. That’s in addition to having no respect for the US Constitution. Continue reading →

Religion and Liberty

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty , , ,

I’m not a religious person. I have an unconventional Mormon background but rejected the faith of my parents for a large number of reasons. I’m not hostile to religion, either. At least, I try not to be (it’s hard sometimes!). I’ve seen first-hand what religious organizations can do for humanity. When I was living in a Ghanaian village of no more than 300 people, I had access to no more than two hospitals in the village. One was run by the Seventh-Day Adventists, and the other I cannot remember (the SDA hospital was closer). It was most likely a Catholic one. Religious organizations representing Islam, Judaism, Christianity and even Buddhism were ever-present in Ghana, and they all provided much-needed skills and supplies to that magnificently socialist state.

I attribute my atheism and my libertarianism to my skeptical nature. If you can prove to me that God does indeed exist, or that paternalism is good for me and my fellow man, then I will turn on a dime. I don’t know very much about anything, after all.

Anyway, religion has been under attack in the West since the Enlightenment. There are both good and bad reasons for this. One of the best reasons is that religious authorities often burned dissidents at the stake for opposing their claims to authority. In much of the world today, especially in some Muslim regions, non-believers are subjected to stonings, beheadings, and torture when the authority of the ecclesiastical class is challenged. However, in today’s Western world, the war on religion is a rather petty affair. Most skeptics don’t want to argue about the existence of God, they simply want to denigrate believers at best, and persecute them at worst. Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links
  1. Forget Asia: Time to Pivot to Europe
  2. Islam and Constitutionalism
  3. Ever heard of the Serer religion?
  4. India: The Neverending Saga

Gold, Interest, and Land

Fred Foldvary Current Events, Economics, Liberty , , , ,

Three seemingly unrelated variables are in fact deeply connected. Gold has been the most widely used money, and in a pure free market, gold would most likely come back as the real money. Free-market banking would mostly use money substitutes such as bank notes and bank deposits, but these could be exchanged for gold at a fixed rate. Free banking would combine price stability with money flexibility.

Interest is ultimately based on time preference, the tendency of most people to prefer present-day goods to future goods, due to our limited lifespan and the uncertainty of the future. In a free market, the rate of pure interest would be based on the interplay of savings and borrowing. Interest is not just income and payment, but has a vital job in the market economy. The job of the interest is to equilibrate or make equal the amounts of savings and borrowing. This also equalizes net savings (subtracting borrowing for consumption) and investment. Investment comes from savings, and the job of the interest rate is to make sure that net savings is invested. Continue reading →

Gold and Money

Warren Gibson Current Events, Economics, Liberty , , , , , , ,

Nothing seems to arouse passions—pro and con—quite like suggestions that gold should once again play a role in our money. “Only gold is money,” says one side. “It’s a barbarous relic,” says the other. Let’s turn down the heat a bit and look into some propositions about gold. That should lead us to some reasonable ideas about whether or how gold might return.

Propositions About Gold

Gold has intrinsic value. Actually, nothing has intrinsic value. The value of any good or service resides in the minds of individuals contemplating the benefits they might derive from it. What gold does have is some rather remarkable physical properties that make it very likely that people will continue to value it highly: luster, corrosion resistance, divisibility, malleability, high thermal and electrical conductivity, and a high degree of scarcity. All the gold ever mined would only fill one large swimming pool, and most of that gold is still recoverable.

Only gold is money. Although gold was once used as money, that is no longer the case. Money is whatever is generally accepted as a medium of exchange in a particular historical setting. Right now, government-issued fiat money, unbacked by any commodity, is the only kind of money we find anywhere in the world, with some possible obscure exceptions.

Perhaps people who say this mean that gold is the only form of money that can ensure stability. That’s what future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan thought in 1967, when he wrote “Gold and Economic Freedom” for Ayn Rand’s newsletter. “In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation,” he said. When later asked by U.S. Rep. Ron Paul whether he stood by that article, Greenspan said he did. But he weaseled out by saying a return to gold was unnecessary because central banks had learned to produce the same results gold would produce. Continue reading →

“How China Became Capitalist”

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, History, Liberty , ,

That’s the title to this short piece by Nobel laureate Ronald Coase and his co-author Ning Wang published by the Cato Institute. Among the gems:

The presence of two reforms was a defining feature of China’s economic transition. The failure to separate the two is a main source of confusion in understanding China’s reform. The Chinese government has understandably promulgated a state-centered account of reform, projecting itself as an omniscient designer and instigator of reform. The fact that the Chinese Communist Party has survived market reform, still monopolizes political power, and remains active in the economy has helped to sell the statist account of reform. But it was marginal revolutions that brought entrepreneurship and market forces back to China during the first decade of reform when the Chinese government was busy saving the state sector.

Do read the whole thing. The Cato Institute ranks third on my list list of trustworthy think tanks. Hoover and Brookings are two that I think produce university-caliber research. Cato ranks far below Hoover and Brookings in my estimation, but it occupies a lonely third place, as none of the other think tanks out there are even close to Cato’s stature, either.

You can check out Cato’s website here.

The Civilization Bubble

Fred Foldvary Current Events, History , ,

There have been many financial and real estate bubbles during the past few hundred years, and there have been empire bubbles, but never before has there been the global civilization bubble in which we are now in. The bubble will collapse within a few decades. It will be the end of civilization, and will result in world-wide violence, deaths, and chaos.

Empire bubbles can last several hundred years, as for example the Mayan civilization or the Roman Empire. What brings down empires is invasion, bad economic policy, environmental exhaustion, or weakened tyranny. The Soviet Union, for example, was a statist bubble that was brought down by economic decay and weakened tyranny.

Most of the world is now in a global civilization. There are two enemies of this global order. One enemy is terrorist pseudo-religious supremacists. They could bring down the global civilization with electromagnetic bombs that would wipe out the storage and transmission of data that the world’s economy depends on. Very little is being done to protect the global electronic infrastructure from attack, thus the bubble.

The other threat to global civilization is internal, or as scientists say, endogenous. Global civilization is rushing towards an environmental collapse. There are hints of this in the plastic contamination of the oceans, the depletion of fresh water, the destruction of fish and corals, the eradication of forests, and possibly accelerated climate change. What will most likely bring down global civilization is the plundering and poisoning of the natural infrastructure of the earth. Continue reading →

The Future of Liberty: Reason or Superstition, Abortion Edition

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty

I have been having an ongoing back-and-forth with co-blogger Hank on abortion. You can find the latest volley here.

Among the gems:

The answer to my question is obviously ‘no.’ It has been the answer for 100,000 years. Not 10,000 years. Not 1,000 years. Not 100 years, but 100,000 years. At least. And, of course, this will continue to be the case in the foreseeable future as well. The last thing we need is to replace a fetish of the past with a fetish of the future when it comes to reproductive rights.

Libertarians use reason and facts to guide their thoughts, not appeals to an unforeseeable future or an omnipotent being (see my original post).

The liberty movement will continue to suffer as long as we have people who appeal to superstition and ignorance to make their points. Underlying this debate is a far bigger one: do libertarians really represent a different kind of politics, or are we, as some on the Left and the Right charge, merely Republicans who think smoking weed is not a crime?

The Beltway Consensus: Iraq Edition

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History , , , , , ,

The illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq undertaken by the Bush administration is one of the American republic’s darkest moments. I rank it as the fourth-worst policy in our history, just after slavery, the extermination of the Indians, and the invasion and occupation of the Philippines and just before Jim Crow and the New Deal. Invading and occupying Iraq rejected the American notions of liberty and justice, individualism, republican government, and free trade. It also further damaged American credibility in the eyes of the world.

For the most part, populations have been okay with Washington’s antics since the end of World War 2. There are certain expectations that everybody has of a world hegemon, and the Cold War atrocities that Washington committed were largely understandable. But attacking a third world despot in the middle of the Islamic world – for no apparent reason except to “bring democracy” to the region – not only undermined the US’s claim to be defender of the peace, but it exposed the extent of the republic’s intellectual decay that has been going since the New Deal. Not only does nobody believe our claims when we attack a helpless state, but they don’t think we have the intellectual capacity to do the job, either.

My own perspective on the crimes against humanity that Bush and his cronies committed are much more superficial, of course (I live in LA, after all!): we have basically copied the British imperial model. Not only are my taxes being spent on killing innocent people abroad, but Washington is not even doing it creatively! The following article in Foreign Affairs illustrates my point perfectly. Continue reading →

Adamson’s Book Signing

Brandon Christensen Books, Current Events, History

Dr. Adamson’s new book just came out two weeks ago, and he has passed along a couple of photos from his book signing event. More below the fold. Continue reading →

What’s Up with Inflation?

Warren Gibson Current Events, Economics, History, Liberty

Inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has been almost nonexistent for several years, though it started creeping higher in the first half of 2011. Yet many prices have been rising at double-digit percentage rates. Are official figures trustworthy? And what of expectations? There is a great deal of buzz right now about inflation but also talk of renewed stagnation with the Fed’s QE2 program having ended in June. Could renewed stagnation trigger enough deflation to counter inflation? Or might we get the worst of both worlds—stagflation—as in the 1970s?

We can’t get anywhere with these questions until we agree on the meaning of inflation. At one time the word referred to an increase in the money supply. Over time it came to mean a general increase in prices, an unfortunate turn of events not just because we lost the nice metaphor of an inflating balloon, but also because the shift in meaning tended to obscure the relationship between the two phenomena. Some free-market authors hold out for the old definition, but I suggest this is wasted effort. In my classes I use the phrases “price inflation” and “money inflation” to keep the distinction alive without getting too sidetracked by semantics.

In 1970 Milton Friedman said, “[Price] inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” This is not entirely true but understandable because he was writing at a time when the causal relationship had nearly been forgotten. We can have price inflation without money inflation when there is a supply shock. An overthrow of the Saudi government, for example, might well disrupt the flow of oil from that country. A surging oil price, because it is so important to our economy, would likely pull up the price level with it. In this situation the monetary authorities can help things by doing exactly nothing—letting higher energy prices do the work of encouraging marginal users to cut back. Supply shocks, as such one-time events are called, do not of themselves generate sustained price increases and are therefore not classified as inflation by some economists. Continue reading →

National-Socialist Management Practices; No Obama Derangement Syndrome

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Law, Liberty, Politics , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this essay first appeared on Dr. Delacroix’s blog, Facts Matter, on July 18 2009]

Quick update on health care on 7/20/09:

I have said before on this blog that there is something wrong with the way we deliver health care in America. It costs us twice more per capita than it costs Europeans and we die younger. That is true in spite of the fact that liberals lie a lot on the subject of health, especially, regarding the number of “uninsured.” The Republican Party missed that boat entirely and we are paying the price for it now.

The President’s insistence that bills must be passed before the August recess has only one explanation: He wants to avoid debate like the plague. Think it through. If our health care system is as bad as he says, it has been so for a long time and we can probably stand it for an additional three months, or six months , or a year. Decisiveness is not everything. (See below.)

After all, the President wants to dispose for the long run of 1/6th of our economy. Given the considerable slowdown in economic growth his other policies guarantee, given the aging of the population, it will soon be 1/5, or 20 % of the economy. There is nothing else like it. For comparison, national defense never took more than 5% since the Korean War.

Aside from anything I may believe about the influence of government on  effectiveness in health delivery, I am interested in the political consequences of the President’s plans, of all his plans. With health, he will make sure the government controls the economy to an unprecedented level. He is turning the US into a corporatist state. That’s another word for “fascist,” without the violent overtones. Continue reading →

(The Myth of) Gun Control as a Panacea

Amar Ali Current Events, Liberty

Just because this is my first post on this consortium, don’t feel shy to comment or rip in!

In light of the horrific tragedy in Connecticut, liberals (not to be confused with leftists[i] ) have decided to take this opportunity to push a political agenda. Inevitably, this leads to dubious arguments rushed to by emotionally moved people trying to justify drastic and sometimes extreme policy positions.

What better time and opportunity to deconstruct this myth and inject a broader perspective?

The most common and tired false rationalization is that guns kills, therefore, gun control, or banning guns would lead to less deaths. Coincidentally, on the same day as the Sandy Hook tragedy, 22 children in China were attacked by a man wielding a knife[ii]. Does this mean we must ban knives or have “Knife Control”? Most would respond no. In fact, it has been shown that more people have been killed with Hammers and Clubs[iii].

Of course the common retort is that guns are different, that they can be controlled and would lead to a decrease in crime. Problem with that theory is that criminals rarely follow the law. Does a person willing to commit an illegal homicide care whether their gun is legal? And in reality, it shows as crime has increased after bans in UK[iv], [v]  and Chicago[vi],[vii] and the after strict bans. Reports show that homicides in Chicago outpace that of Afghanistan[viii] and it is the only major US city to see increases in homicides.[ix]

Here gun opponents will eagerly jump up to point to Europe to demonstrate cases of “successful” gun control. Unfortunately Continue reading →

Abortion, the Conception of Life, and Liberty

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law, Liberty , , ,

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. – Thomas Jefferson, 1816

My blog post on freedom and feminism prompted a number of short but informative dialogues in the comments section, and I thought it would be a good idea to draw some of these arguments out a little more and really delve into the implications of what it means to be free.

My original post was meant to serve as a general outline of the major rift within libertarianism (and, by implication, the American Right) today: the cultural one. I think that the rift between libertarians on cultural issues is actually much less serious than the one between libertarians and conservatives, and the comments section highlighted this important disagreement. Instead of a mutual mistrust based upon suspicion of authoritarian tendencies hiding in plain sight, libertarians actively fight conservatives when it comes to the struggle between liberty and power.

Two key arguments will be exploited on this blog for the sake of showing Ron Paul Republicans and other, newer members of the libertarian movement just how nakedly aggressive and barbaric anti-abortion laws really are. Continue reading →