I had a set-to with Jonathan Adler of Volokh about DDT recently, so I was pleased to note this piece on free-market environmentalism and climate change, which makes a number of points I’d been thinking about following debates over at the Australian Libertarian blog. Rather than recapitulate Adler’s post, I’ll make a number of points of my own regarding the response of (most, though not all) libertarians to climate change, which I think are in the same spirit:
* First, I’m a bit surprised to find libertarians mostly on the wrong side of this debate. Global climate change is one of the few instances where lots of environmentalists (not all, by any means) are supporting a property-rights based solution (tradeable emissions permits), despite starting from a position (in the leadup to Kyoto) of almost uniform opposition to anything that didn’t rely primarily on direct and detailed regulation. it seems as if the ideological opponents are upset because the government-created nature of the property rights in question will be self-evident, rather than obscured by a century or two of history.
* I’m struck by the reliance of most libertarian critics, such as Indur Goklany, who debates Adler here, on consequentialist benefit-cost arguments in favor of climate inaction. As Adler says, it seems odd to find libertarians saying that it’s OK, for example, to completely wipe out the property of Pacific Island nations, on the basis that there will be a net social benefit for the world as a whole from doing so.
* If emission permit trading is rejected on ideological grounds (I can’t exactly figure out what these are, but I’m not well equipped to arbitrate on ideological disputes among libertarians) it doesn’t seem as if any the other solutions commonly proposed by the FME camp are applicable. Take for example the Coasian favorite of tort action. For a global congestion problem, this would require everyone in the world to sue everyone else, presumably in some newly created world court (Goklany disputes this, saying, in effect “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”, a principle that renders any sort of response to pollution impossible)
* This has led lots of libertarians, and others on the right, to write as if the mainstream scientific view on global warming renders libertarianism untenable, or, more succinctly[1] “global warming equals socialism”. If only it were so easy! Even it the scientific evidence weren’t overwhelming, it’s surely a big problem for a political viewpoint if its viability depends upon assumptions about cloud feedbacks. As I’ve said, I don’t think any such concession is necessary. A successful response to global warming is vitally important, but it doesn’t imply (or, I should note, preclude) radical changes to the existing social order.
fn1. This is from a conservative, not a libertarian, but the same sentiment is evident among many libertarians.
John Quiggin 
Of course Libertarians who read this blog will rightly state that there is no official orthodoxy on the matter of climate change from the Great Libertarian Oversight Council. But yeah, it seems beyond odd to me that there is a common view among libertarians to deny the impacts of climate change and to fail propose sensible, workable mitigation measures.
I think there are more sub-themes than just libertarian vs conservative. Firstly Stern argued for imposed carbon pricing on the grounds of market failure. Some economic conservatives agree completely, others say the problem is self correcting. Then there is the recent upsurge of global warming denial illustrated by a string of articles in Online Opinion. My pop psychoanalysis is that the deniers are quite moral people who can’t come to grips with the magnitude of the problem and therefore devise convoluted arguments to dismiss it. Then there is arty/leftie stance perhaps exemplified by Peter Garrett. These people seem to have a visceral revulsion to both coal and nuclear energy (not frequent flying mind you) and they see carbon trading as a path to a golden age of renewables. In all the shouting the middle ground struggles to be heard.
The part of this I’ve never understood is that denying a problem in fear of government regulation is often a good way to induce a lot more government regulation later on.
I think “libertarian” is just a pompous (self-)label for right of centre. Many go strangely quiet on things like drug-taking, abortion etc.
Where’s Terje?!
As a generalisation many on the right support higher consumption taxes in return for lower income taxes, but at the same time oppose so-called ‘green taxes’.
Well hello? What is a carbon tax if not a consumption tax by another name?
Pr Q says:
I think that Pr Q is being a little too sanguine if he thinks that serious ecological conservation is consistent with sociological conservatism, let alone civil liberty. Energy control is a political hot potatoe. Both WWII and large bits of the Cold War were fought to control Eurasian oil fields. And lets no mention the ME.
A major shift in energy source and consumption patterns will drasticly shift the global balance of power and also cause significant swaps in local status-hierarchies. Well entrenched alpha-males dont go down without some sort of a political fight. And libertarians are nothing if not spokespersons for that Push.
The libertarian political instinct is also sure, even if philosophicly suspect. Antho Global Warming has been called “the greatest [free] market failure the world has seen”. So its not surprising to see libertarian free marketeers trying to ignore the problem, or hoping that it will somehow disappear through some magical invisible hand.
But this is only because ideology is a fairly poor guide to political action. Most political action is partisan, in favour of interest groups not ideas.
And most libertarians are essentially Right wing ie supporters of using high-status groups (frequent flyers, oil industrialists, white male powerful car owners etc) who inevitably flagrant carbon emitters. Such people can reap the benefit of a carbon economy whilst insulating or insuring themselves from the long-term costs.
Pr Q’s admirable summary of the regulatory-lite emissions trading system shows that there are some catallactic methods of controlling AGW. But they will no way be enough.
The inconvenient ideological truth is that AGW will require significant reductions in individual liberty, a fact that liberals of all ideological stripes are loathe to admit. AGM will revive the power of centralised institutional authority, starting with the UN-authorised ecological bodies cracking some sort of whip. SOme authoritative body will have to set the over-all rules and targets.
So far the only serious AGW policy that has made a serious, if unintended, dent in global carbon emissions are high fuel taxes in the USE and the single child quota in the PRC. We will also have to impose straight out bans on some forms of transportation and mechanization. Plus resort to subsidised alternative energy including nuclear fuels.
Not exactly a poster-program for libertarianism in either its right-wing economic or left-wing cultural forms. Liberals are deluding themselves if they pretend that that Leviathan will not be licking his lips at the prospect of the power to control power.
Lord Sir Alexander “Dolly” Downer Says: June 15th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
There is some sort of truth in that. Rightwing Libertarians are mostly interested in the accumulation of professional property, not the protection of personal liberty.
However Milton Friedman, the intellectual god-father of libertarianism, was one of the Public_policy_positions”>foundational theorists of drug liberalisation.
Barking mad policy of course, which explains why Lord “Dolly” takes it as a serious committment to liberty.
I have been looking for a liberatarian response to global warming from the reasonable libertarians for a while now. It has yet to emerge.
Libartarian ideology is based, first and foremost, on the idea that government always makes you worse off. Not that markets are superior. It is firstly anti-government and only then pro-market. Libertarians do not hold their beliefs of increased economic efficiency, but because they believe in the evil of government. In that context the lack of support for carbon markets by libertarians is easily explained. Libertarians do not believe that government should enforce property rights. They believe it is up to the individual to enforce property rights. Take copyright as an example. Libertarians don’t believe the government should prosecute people for violating copyright. They believe its the responsibility of the copyright owner (and only them) to seek redress from the copyright violater via the courts.
Global warming creates a twofold problem for libertarians.
1) If governments are necessary to fix GW then the end of government is impossible. This makes the ideology of libertarianism untenable since it seeks to eliminate something we can’t live without.
2) There is nothing particularly unique about the problem of global warming other than its size. If, as seems the case, government is necesarry to fix global warming then there is no fundamental reason why government is not necessary in lots of other areas.
I had never seen that pointed out before. Very interesting. Especially in light of Rudd’s commitment to increasing migration. How much extra will Australian per person carbon emissions have to be reduced to compensate for the fact that we will have to share the same reduced amount of carbon emmissions among a larger population?
Debating measures to combat global warming is nonsensical until we have confirmed the CO2 hypothesis by comparing the model predictions to actual data. This is especially important because the first round of climate models failed quite considerably to predict current climate conditions.
Now this does not mean necessarily that the CO2 hypothesis is false, but it does mean that the consensus can be wrong. The post facto claims of variability just don’t cut it due to the huge record of consensus spokespeople predicting warming for this decade.
This libertarian wants to see the dice before throwing down the cash.
I would have thought that at a minimum libertarians would be arguing for zero-rating electricity from non-fossil sources and solar and wind generating equipment for GST purposes.
I think there needs to be some distinction made between Libertarians and Anarcho-Capitalists.
Anarcho-Capitalists I assume could be internally consistent in opposing any kind of government intervention in relation to climate change. Libertarians on the other hand, as consistent with their ideology, could reasonably support some level of government intervention in this case.
I think Libertarians are often misunderstood (often due to their own inconsistency, or self-misrepresentation); Libertarianism does not equal no government. Milton Friedman often said that he supported the regulation of vehicle braking systems, but not that of airbags. This sentiment is echoed by the classic Reagan quote; “Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves”.
I’m broadly of the Libertarian view, and I would generally support government action on climate change. I might support this to a lesser extent than others, and would advocate a limit on government action to the greatest reasonable extent. There are not many areas where a garden-variety Libertarian would support strong government action, but I think if there is any area where the government has a legitimate justification for action, it’s in response to climate change. [And the classic three areas of justified government intervention under the Libertarian philosophy of the judiciary (property rights enforcement), national defence, and other (true) public goods would surely allow for government intervention on climate change.]
Cheers
#10, so we’ll sit on our hands for 50 years to see how accurate the models turn out to be before doing anything. or maybe 100?
Its also “no accident”, as Uncle Joe used to say, that the most fervent ecologic conservationists are the egalitarian statist Greens. Whilst the most fervent economic accumulationists are the libertarian capitalist “Browns”.
I do not think that either movement has ideological “false consciousness” about their social position. Both realise that the success of either political movement is linked to the failure/success of industrial Alpha-males currently currently in power.
Obviously the Greens want these Alph-males to go down badly. Whereas the libertarian Browns (eg Ayn Rand) kind of like the thrusting smoke belching, fast car driving types.
Of course both could be wrong in their political quest. united action in the public interest, in the long run, looking at the big picture, is best for the system and the system manager/owners.
“We must hang together, gentlemen…else, we shall most assuredly hang separately.”
Benjamin Franklin
“The inconvenient ideological truth is that AGW will require significant reductions in individual liberty, a fact that liberals of all ideological stripes are loathe to admit. AGM will revive the power of centralised institutional authority, starting with the UN-authorised ecological bodies cracking some sort of whip. SOme authoritative body will have to set the over-all rules and targets.”
That’s piffle jack, although it is true that believers in the ‘free market’ have never understood that it’s only ‘free’ within the confines of specific jurisdictional, constitutional marketplaces. When they understand that implicitly, then they can begin to grasp that certain current CMs inherited from the science of muddling through are now under serious strain and no amount of well meaning incrementalism can salvage them. Banging on about working families and pricewatchers in the next breath is a case in point. As to the need for some overarching international body to mandate and police more twiddling at the margins to achieve some perceived environmental aims that is facile on 2 counts. Firstly it presumes any international, centralised power body could be the font of all wisdom and secondly that it would have the wherewithal to enforce its conclusions. History is not on the UN and its gaggle of gangsters’ side in both respects. Much better to have a competitive, green Olympics, exemplary approach between the various juridictions, in order to throw up the true verifiable answers. Investing all our eggs in one monolithic basket risks the obvious in that regard. The true choice is between market green policies and those that dispense favour to the plethora of special pleaders and economic rent seekers. Never more in their darkest hour did the serfs need a true knight champion to enforce their sheltering Magna Carta, to protect them from the depradations of their new king and his errant nobles. Who will save them from the depradations of their Toyotas and Prius preferers? ‘Here have fifty millonsMr Watanabe'(you know the same funny money they can’t give the serfs because of all that budget surplus/inflation tradeoff) ‘Err..umm, we’re not quite sure how we’ll spend it’ says dumbo put on the spot, which Toyota execs quickly override with the pat spin. Woops! Back to putting on the wheel nuts on the line for you boyoh.
“The true choice is between market green policies and those that dispense favour to the plethora of special pleaders and economic rent seekers”
Given your preference for green taxes of market-based solutions I take it you prefer the latter.
I look forward to the several thousand words you’ll undoubtedly pen in response.
I won’t read them but it will keep you out of other mischief for a while.
Paulidan:
“Current climate conditions”. That’s a curious concept. The alternative explanation credulists will never accept anything a climate model says until one can forecast the weather for years in advance. Neither will ever happen.
PrQ,
What I am “struck” with is your attempt to make it appear as if libertarianism is a unified body of belief. The simple fact that those that self-identify as social democrats generally cannot agree on a single position on most topics, if not all, makes me surprised that you seem to expect it of any other self-identified political grouping.
From my own point of view it is hardly surprising that many people have adopted a position dead set against government action on this. The record of government action on the environment (as in many other areas) is not a happy one – often combining faulty planning, poor execution, bad objective setting and atrocious cost control into one fabulous waste of time and wealth.
The fact that there is opposition on this topic I see as being down to the old fable of Aesop – “The Shepherd’s Boy and the Wolf”.
Perhaps, though, if you want to see some of the discussion going on, go here.
“The record of government action on the environment (as in many other areas) is not a happy one – often combining faulty planning, poor execution, bad objective setting and atrocious cost control into one fabulous waste of time and wealth.”
Is the record of private enterprise any better?
Does the word Minamata ring a bell?
Ian,
Interesting you bring up Minamata. Yes – the primary cause was the release of methyl mercury from a private company. Oh – but yes, it also took 10 years for any real government action. Hardly a compelling case for what I presume was your point. The action was … poor, badly planned, slow and with no thought for how bad it was going to be, resulting in much larger human suffering and expense that if the government action had been swift, well planned and executed correctly.
Thanks for the help – although I doubt you planned it that way.
Not to pretend that I have followed the argument, but surely climate change does imply radical social change, in that the absence of experiential/cultural understanding was a major precondition for the problem.
Science is both subjective and objective interrelated, otherwise how are the hypotheses that produce paradigm change discovered? Paradigm is another name for culture, and there is a lag between cultural practice, both consciously and unconsciously realized, and the understanding of science. Materialist, objective science cannot come to terms with consciousness.
“What I am “struckâ€? with is your attempt to make it appear as if libertarianism is a unified body of belief.”
Have you actually read the post AR? It starts with a favorable cite to a libertarian and then notes that “most, not all” libertarians oppose action on global warming.
It’s rare to find complete agreement in any grouping on any topic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t identify a general trend of thought, as you implicitly concede.
O’Neil, if it will never happen that means that the theoretical prediction will never match empirical data which means that global warming will never have scientific validity.
The whole point of global warming is that increasing levels of the chemical Carbon Dioxide will drive global mean temperatures upwards. This is an empirical, not a spiritual claim. As an empirical claim it can only claim validity from empirical observation. If it fails observation, we must reject this chemical link.
wmmbb, science is not a cultural norm but rather a set of procedures and analyses that can be undertaken by any intelligent human being regardless of race, religion, tribe, gender, sexual orientation and so forth. All that scientific analysis requires is the creation of a theory, then a prediction from the theory, and finally an experiment to determine whether the prediction matches observed reality. This procedure can be done regardless of the the cultural background of the scientist.
Global warming need not be a partisan issue. Clean air and clean water are basic necessities for everyone, irrespective of politics.
The environmental community, by and large, is more than willing to work with anyone to achieve solutions. Give us a try!
Clean air and clean water are not related to the chemical question of whether Carbon Dioxide emissions by humans causes increases in the global mean temperature.
Satellite Microwave transmissions, EHF and Higher, are causing Polar Ice cap melting and Global Warming. This is due to radio frequency heating on a global level. See article at http://globalmicrowave.orgfree.com/.
Thank You
James Richardson
As regards Paulidan, can I remind everyone not to feed the trolls. If Paulidan is in serious doubt, he can read the IPCC reports.
Depends what you mean by clean. Certainly global warming is expected to have significant impacts on clean water availablility. And while CO2 might not seem to intuitively make air “dirty” (it’s still perfectly breathable), we are still significantly altering the composition of the atmosphere.
FWIW, the empirical claim that CO2 drives up atmospheric temperatures was validated long ago, and is at any rate basically dictated by the laws of thermodynamics. The only possible point of contention is the feedback effects necessary to magnify this effect sufficiently to cause temperature rises of a degree necessary to trigger damaging side-effects.
“Oh – but yes, it also took 10 years for any real government action. Hardly a compelling case for what I presume was your point. The action was … poor, badly planned, slow and with no thought for how bad it was going to be, resulting in much larger human suffering and expense that if the government action had been swift, well planned and executed correctly.”
And what was the private corporate respond Andrew?
Oh that’s right – they caused the problem and kept pouring out mercury as long as they possibly could.
Presumably you also believe the police are primarily responsible for serial rapes and murderers for not catching the perpetrators sooner.
Empirically validated by current cooling?
JQ: thanks so much for not immediately deleting #26 as link-spam, as it ranked among the most innumerate of the (anything-but-GHG) sites I’ve seen.
With a lightning back-of-the-envelope calculation:
According to UCS ACtive Satellite database, they know of 873 active satellites, for which those whose total power is known average ~3,200W (that’s W, not KW). The biggest was 18,000W.
To be generous, let us assume there are 1,000 satellites averaging 5,000W. That yields 5MW total, i.e., about 5 big (but not biggest) windmills.
Suppose they were all orbiting about 6500km from the center of the Earth (i.e., Very Low Earth Orbits :-)), and all the power was being radiated at the Earth (it isn’t).
The surface of a 6500km sphere is about 530M sq km (= 4*pi*r^2) which means the incoming energy would be 5MW/(530M km^2), or ~ 1W /km^2, or about a millionth of a Watt/m^2.
The IPCC AR4 (Figure SPM.2) gives Total net anthropogenic forcing as 1.6 W/m^2 [0.6 to 2.4].
So, I’m afraid James is only off by a factor of ~million.
re: #28 wizofus
Well, actually, see Stanford Prof. Mark Jacobson’s tesimony to Congress on health impacts of CO2. Read page 5 of the oral testimony for the bottom line:
in some places (CA is one, especially LA), higher local CO2 causes increased mortality, due to side-effects on low-level ozone.
Empirically validated by current cooling?
Dude, you’re mistaking noise (or more specifically, internal variation) for cooling.
Sorry Paulidan, just to make it clear, because I know you will persist, the owner of this website does not engage in debate about the general theory of anthropogenic climate change. He thinks it’s a waste of time, if you’re not convinced by now you never will be, and i thoroughly support his position. (Hopefully) no one will respond to your questions. If you don’t like the rule, you can get a refund at the door.
Andrew Reynolds, you say
Well I say that is absolute bollocks. We have a far cleaner environment than only thirty years ago, and that is entirely due to government regulation, education and other action. If we’d relied on the wondrous private sector, there would be tens of thousands more ‘externalities’ dying every year.
“Given your preference for green taxes of market-based solutions I take it you prefer the latter.”
Ian, I prefer that the prices we all face reflect better the true social cost of those activities and present a level playing field for all the players. To achieve that we need to understand that the various forms of positive and negative taxation(subsidies)intimately impact those prices and hence need to address that process fundamentally and right now. The taxes raised can be used to feed incomes of those necessarily impacted and I have no problem with that, particularly when the economic pie must necessarily be shrinking. Addressing shares as we deal with AGW(or simply peak oil)and biodiversity is a no-brainer for me. I am a total skeptic that handing that precious taxing power to big corpora via cap and trade will address that, or that relying on picking winners at the margins of our inherited CM, will cut it in that regard also. Banging on about working families and pricewatchers and then in the next breath the need for cap and trade tells me that.(I’m a firm believer C&T = tax+corporate welfare) However, I and my patch will do just fine in whatever CM you choose, or simply continue to muddle along with. I just think the less adroit deserve better from their thinkers, movers and shakers to address the challenge, but I could be just another well meaning ditherer too.
The “noise” was just discovered in May by the German researchers. I challenge you to find me one single IPCC source that predicted the current cooling and understood the mechanism behind it.
Furthermore because we have just discovered this kind of variation we do not know where it is leading. The IPCC models did not include the factors that produced it, so new models including it must be made and contrasted with observed temperatures.
The “noise� was just discovered in May by the German researchers.
Citation please.
I guess too Ian, that in the long run I might have to be philosophical that if the less adroit can’t get in on the ground floor with all that certainty, like the Toyotas and hedge funds, etc and to a lesser extent myself, then they’ll ultimately get a slice of the action via ‘their’ Future and Super Funds. After it’s all been suitably sliced and diced of course.
Ian, I would take Quiggin’s policy to heart.
Sorry, Ken Miles, not Ian.
Thanks for that link John – although of course if Mr Paulidan disputes that rising CO2 levels cause the global mean temperature increase he can just as well dispute that CO2 causes local changes in ozone levels. In fact I do wonder just how global warming denialists do determine which science to believe in, and which not to.
In an attempt to answer Paulidan’s concerns:
1) The IPCC models have stood up quite well to the test of time. If anything, they are too conservative. See this freely available article in Science: Rahmstorf et al, “Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections”
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1136843
2) On cooling, you are possibly referring to the paper by Keenlyside discussed on RealClimate here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/the-global-cooling-bet-part-2/
That paper makes it clear that the temporary cooling they predict is the result of natural, cycles, in this case something called the meridional overturning circulation in the Atlantic, which IS a factor included in the IPCC models; it’s like a northern hemisphere La Nina. It doesn’t in any way invalidate global warming, the IPCC, etc. IF the cooling trend does occur, it buys us a few years. No more.
In principle Willful, I agree with JQ’s policy, but… I don’t think that it is a good look to have a bunch of unanswered questions sitting around on a thread providing fuel for conspiracy theories.
James, I suspect that you’re correct about Paulidan referring to Keenlyside’s 2008 paper. In which case Paulidan should learn about the difference between a prediction and an observation.
Ian,
#29. I was not contrasting public / private in regulatory response, as the private sector does not have (by their very nature) regulatory powers. The Government does. I did not say, or even imply, that the government is responsible for releasing the pollutant. All I said was that the history of government action is not a happy one. Minamata is a good case in point on this. It took decades to do what should have been simple – stop the flow of a known, undoubted deadly chemical and allow the affected people to claim compensation. It took a decade for the flow to stop – and even this was not occasioned by regulatory action but by the company itself. 50 years later and the compensation issue has not been satisfactorially concluded.
Minamata does not act as a good example of swift, effective government action – which was exactly the point I was making. As I said, thanks for the help.
.
wilful,
Please re-read the above – it may help.
PrQ, if you want to quote John 8:7, please get it right: “So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” The usage “let he…” is widespread but not very grammatical. As we are mostly not without sin, your use of the quotation is apposite, of course.
Yep, read it, it doesn’t help. Private industry has been dragged kicking and screaming to clean up their act over the last 40 years (since around about the invention of EPAs). They have opposed at every turn the actions that governments have taken to fix problems they created.
That’s all a bit simplistic wilful, as if ‘they'(ie industry) are not really ‘us’ but our Govts always are. Particular groups of people locked into particular industries can be overcome by events and time, particularly epidemiological risk. JH is a case in point. Now while they ceased with all asbestos use in the early 80s, ‘our’ govts saw fit to allow asbestos brake shoes in cars until Dec 2002. Clearly they accepted the tradeoffs on our behalf which JH had previously argued to some degree. Should they now instantly ban the use of fossil fuels because of its ‘known’ greater threat to us all now? Think about why not and that’s always the particular industry’s tack too at the time. What’s the moral difference we may well ask?
I’d also suggest that China is a good example of what happens when there’s insufficient government regulation over the environment. China’s equivalent of the EPA has something like 300 employees total – to look after a country with over a billion people, and surely by the greatest number of polluting industries anywhere in the world. The results are not pretty.
Having said that, I do tend to agree that expecting the government, especially high-level government, to do most of the work in improving treatment of the environment is folly. After all, governments still spend more on projects known to damage the environment (roads, etc.) than they do on projects intended to improve it.
Pr Q says:
This is the part where the libertarian prescript for resolving social conflict achieves its reduction to absurdity. The Right (quite properly sometimes) complains about the over-lawyering of all social risks. But then the libertarian Right has no answer but lawyering when it comes to mitigating risk or redressing faults.
A society of polluting cross-litigants might be zero-sum gaming in theory. But it would be negative-sum gaming in practice, given the massive deadweight cost of a plague of lawyers.
The blunt answer to this problem was given by Thomas Hobbes who argued that when the mutual exercise of rights leads to counter-productive fights then civilised man must surrender his individual right to fight to the sovereign Leviathan.
I daresay that men will also have to largely surrender their right to drive o solo mio if the Stern report is implemented. I cant see the atmosphere surviving with 3 billion cars on the road, no matter how much capping and trading is done. Top Gear, just about my favourite show, already has a kind of premature nostalgia about it.
Slightly OT, I once questioned Hugh Morgan about WMCs global mining ventures. The subject of sovereign risk came up. He was full of praise for Cuba which took great pains to smooth the path of some industrial investments.
This raised the ire of a nearby American journalist. But Morgan dismissed him by remarking that he would prefer to invest in Cuba, rather than America since “at least the Cubans dont have the lawyers from hell working overtime their!”.
Pr Q says:
This is not quite fair to the key libertarian theorists. The most eminent amongst them – Friedman, Mises and Hayek – were telelogical utilitarian “calculationist”. They aruged that capitalist property transactions were a means to greater happiness, not an end in themselves.
Its only the lesser lights of libertarianism – Rothbard and Rand – who were deontological proprietarian contractualist interested in “justice, though the heavens might fall”. As they may, in this case.
Of course both forms of Rightwing economic libertarianism like to have a polemical bet each way, depending on the politics of the situation. The Right wing libertarians are no better than their Leftwing cultural libertarians counterparts, who are prone to using the same dodge. Sometimes arguing that the excercise of free speech will make useful additions to knowledge and sometimes arguing that it is good in itself. eg the Henson brouha
Liberalism in the post-modern era (ie libertarianism) has become the rallying cry for shameless ideological harlots. Its proponents will hop into bed with any philosophy so long as it will win the cheap applause of the free and easy.
I suppose I should be pleased that libertarians have rated a mention on a blog such as this. I call myself a libertarian not because I fit any complex unified set of beliefs but simply because I generally think that the government is too large (by most measures) and the merits of cooperation (instead of coersion) are under rated and under mentioned and under considered. Qualifying for the title of libertarian isn’t really any more complex than that in my view. Beliefs about global warming is certainly no barrier to entry as far as I’m concerned. Anybody that believes strongly that global warming is a threat requiring governemnt action should still feel welcome to identify with the libertarian cause.
Personally I do remain skeptical about global warming. I don’t think I’ve been blinkered by my political views but thats just my subjective assessment of me. I’m skeptical because I think models of complex systems need a better track record at delivering forcasts successfully before they should be taken as proven or even as somewhat certain. I’m mindful of complex mathematical models about economies cast around at previous times that have since proven quite fallable and are now never much mentioned. Of course given the timeframes involved in climate forcasts I accept that it will be a long time before we have well proven climate models (if we ever have such a thing). A models ability to predicts the past is in my view necessary for success but not sufficient.
Note that I’m not saying that the earth isn’t warming or that it isn’t due to humans I’m just not convinced that such assertions are as knowable as advocates such as John imply. Perhaps my political views and my views about the climate science share a common antecedent state of mind. Then again maybe Johns willingness to accept the viability of complex models and his political views also share a common antecedent state of mind.
In policy terms I have endorsed a broadening of the fuel tax to cover coal etc on a CO2e emissions basis because I think broadening the fuel tax would be a worth reform in any case and it answers the call to action on global warming made necessary by the politics even if not the science. Some details in comments here:-
http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=3445&cp=15
Things have moved on since then. I now think a carbon tax has more merit than a trading scheme. However I was at the time very thankful that Kyoto got legs instead of some of the alternatives ideas that were on offer. Sorry if I don’t still go on about it but I did at the time.
I suppose the following article give me and many other aussie libertarians who offered comment an exemption:-
http://alsblog.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/heroin/