January 2012

On the Nature of Change: Calm Down!

by Ryan Young on December 14, 2009

in Environment, Global Warming, Zeitgeist

One of history’s great debates is whether we will die in fire or ice. The proportion of the populace crying each variety of wolf varies according to the fashion of the time.

Vikings newly introduced to Christianity, taking note of their surroundings, sided with ice. They conceived of hell as a cold place, filled with blue devils.

A few centuries later, Dante wrote his Divine Comedy. Its famous first canticle, “Inferno,” had a very different, much hotter picture of hell.

Fast forward to our time. In the 1970s, ice was the fashion once again. Grant-seeking scientists and credulous journalists warned of imminently fatal global cooling. A new ice age was dawning.

In this decade, fire is all the rage again. Many of those same grant-seeking scientists and credulous journalists have changed their minds. Now global warming will cause catastrophe. And these 690 other things (!).

The particular charges change from generation to generation. But the verdict is always the same: apocalypse. A common thread runs from the Book of Revelations to Nostradamus to Rachel Carson to James Hansen. That threat is imminent doom. As one doomsayer after another is proven wrong, the litany gets quite tiresome.

The Earth has cooled over the last decade; will we die in ice?

But it’s gotten warmer over the last century. Fire, then.

But it’s cooler than it was in the High Medieval period. Ice.

But warmer than during the Dark Ages. Fire.

And so on.

Global temperatures will continue to change, ebb, and flow, whether or not we emit large amounts of CO2, and whether or not we care. Yet many people view climate change as a horror. It must be stopped at any cost.

There is a reason why global warming alarmists don’t like to use the phrase “global warming.” They prefer “climate change.” The prospect of a world two degrees warmer than the one we live in now isn’t very scary. But the notion of climate change does scare people. Framing it that way has been devastatingly effective in getting publicity and funding. It’s good for business.

Today’s dominant mindset that any climate change at all is bad is puzzling. It implicitly assumes that today’s climate is the best of all possible climates. Maybe that’s true. But maybe it isn’t. The trouble is that few climate activists seem to have had that thought. The idea of change is so scary that nobody has the presence of mind to ask if that’s a problem or not.

I give them the counsel of Marcus Aurelius, who lived during the (rather warm) second century AD: “To be in the process of change is not an evil, any more than to be the product of change is a good.”*

No, change simply is. It is a part of life. Let us observe, adapt, and live in peace with each other and the world that we all call home. I’m not scared. You shouldn’t be, either.

*Meditations, IV.42; trans. Maxwell Staniforth.

Regulation of the Day 83: Citations

by Ryan Young on December 14, 2009

in Regulation, Regulation of the Day

The Code of Federal Regulations contains a regulation on how to cite the Code of Federal Regulations. It reads as follows:

The Code of Federal Regulations may be cited by title and section, and the short form “CFR” may be used for “Code of Federal Regulations.” For example, “1 CFR 10.2” refers to title 1, Code of Federal Regulations, part 10, section 2.

See for yourself at 1 CFR 8.9.

Standard citation formats are extremely useful. That would be why, even without regulation’s guiding hand, the private sector evolved the Chicago and MLA styles, among others.

Yet another example of spontaneous order at its finest.

Financial Fiasco

by Ryan Young on December 12, 2009 · 2 comments

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Regulation, Stimulus to Nowhere

I recently finished reading Swedish economist Johan Norberg‘s book about the financial crisis, aptly titled Financial Fiasco. It’s both short and informative. Six chapters and 155 pages, all of them worth reading.

The first two chapters are about the two big regulatory causes of the recession. One, monetary policy that was too easy for too long. The price system works. When the Fed messes with that price system, prices send out the wrong signals. People behave accordingly. Two, a decades-long drive to raise homeownership rates caused a lot of people to take out loans they couldn’t afford. It was only a matter of time before the consequences would come to bear.

Chapters 3 and 4 are about how the private sector reacted to the incentives regulators gave them. Let’s just say they acted badly. If people can game the system, they often will. Norberg’s criticism of overly-complicated securitized mortgage packages is both shocking and infuriating.

Chapter 5 is about how the government and private sector reacted to the crisis once the housing bubble popped. The $700 billion bailout program to reward bad behavior comes under fire.

Norberg is in top form in Chapter 6. Having looked at the causes and consequences of the crisis, now he offers a way out. One lesson is that politicians will always behave badly. “Politicians who distribute pork they cannot afford are reelected; butcher shops that sell pork they cannot afford go bankrupt. (p. 150)” Politicians are just like you and me. They go wherever their incentives lead them. We need to approach them accordingly.

The way to a full recovery is not bailouts. It is letting bad companies fail. And just as important, letting good ones prosper. “Government support for companies is thus not a way to save jobs, as politicians try to make us believe. It is a way to move jobs from good companies to bad companies.” (p. 151) In the long run, bailouts keep the economy down by keeping jobs and resources away from where they would do the most good.

Financial Fiasco has echoes of Tocqueville; a foreigner is trying to figure out how America works. Norberg, like Alexis de Tocqueville, is uncommonly perceptive. His experience living under an economy more thoroughly mixed than America’s allows him to see things that have escaped American commentators. This is extremely valuable. The fact that his book is concise, well written, and accessible to those of us who don’t have economics Ph.Ds makes it even moreso.

Flu Watch Dec. 11 – What Swine Flu ISN’T Doing this Week

by Michael Fumento on December 11, 2009

in Odds & Ends

New infections are way down this week to only about 480 reported by CDC-monitored labs, compared to 1,370 just the week before and 11,470 at the height of the epidemic. So that’s a drop of 65% in one week and a plummet of 96% from the height. Deaths are the same as last week at what appear to be about 70 (you can only eyeball the bar graph, the CDC doesn’t release exact figures), while hospitalizations appear to have been cut by about half. Remember that according to CDC estimates, about 257 Americans die of seasonal flu per day during flu season – which is what we’re in. Of course, the bar graphs show counted deaths versus estimated deaths so it’s not a completely apples-to-apples comparison.

Only 14 states still report widespread activity, although expect to see that go up again shortly as we’re about to enter the time of year when seasonal flu normally begins to hit hard. Finally, cases do continue to come in at above the epidemic threshold. I predicted last week that we might go endemic this week but not yet.

The American College Health Association’s latest weekly survey of CDC-defined “influenza-like illness” shows college campus cases are actually up 27% from the week before, but that’s from a low 4.1 cases per 10,000 students to 5.2. This would seem to indicate that the epidemic on campuses has now ended and that we’ve entered the endemic stage where we can expect numbers like these probably into March. Cumulatively, out of about 87,000 cases reported there have been only three deaths. There have probably been more deaths from goldfish swallowings at fraternity initiations.

The CDC also released a new estimate, that 50 million Americans have been infected, with more than 200,000 hospitalizations nearly 10,000 deaths. That’s just one death per 5,000 cases, yet as I’ve pointed out, that’s probably high considering that France’s estimate is one per 48,000 infections while Japan’s is one per 140,000. Either our health care system really is as bad as some claim or the CDC is playing fast and loose with the figures.

In any case, the CDC estimates that for seasonal flu it’s a death rate ranging from 417 – 1,667 so any way you look at it swine flu is vastly milder. And all of those 50 million Americans have essentially been inoculated against the seasonal flu. We’re in for a mild flu season, indeed. The only question is whether they CDC will ultimately admit it.

Utopia and totalitarianism — Revel’s new book

by Fran Smith on December 11, 2009 · 1 comment

in Culture, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty

On my booklist for gifts this Christmas is Jean-Francois Revel’s “Last Exit to Utopia,” reviewed in the Wall Street Journal today. Revel died in 2006, and this newly translated work had been available in French for almost a decade, according to reviewer Bret Stephens.  Stephens notes that:

“Revel’s great subject was totalitarianism, not just its practice but also its intellectual methods, deceits and disturbing psychological attractions. In books such as “The Totalitarian Temptation” (1976) and “How Democracies Perish” (1983), he dissected the mind-set of Western intellectuals who, living in democracies, found much to admire in gulag countries like the Soviet Union and Cuba and much to detest in free ones—the U.S. most of all.

. . . . .

“Of this mental fortress, Revel acidly writes: “Utopia is not under the slightest obligation to produce results: its sole function is to allow its devotees to condemn what exists in the name of what does not.” Thus the political collapse of communism offered members of the hard left an avenue of ideological resurrection, since they could return to their favorite pastime of lambasting globalization and other American conspiracies to enslave the world without having to suffer any unpalatable reminders of some of the alternatives—the Berlin Wall, for instance.

He was one of the 40 Immortals of the Académie Française.  Here’s his NYT obituary from 2006.  Sounds like this book is very relevant today.


Why was that? “The totalitarian phenomenon,” Revel observed years ago, “is not to be understood without making an allowance for the thesis that some important part of every society consists of people who actively want tyranny: either to exercise it themselves or—much more mysteriously—to submit to it.”

Marcus Aurelius: Emperor, Philosopher, Economist

by Ryan Young on December 11, 2009

in Culture, Economy, Odds & Ends

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall begins with the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD. It was all downhill from there.

Besides being a well-regarded emperor who was succeeded by an ill-regarded son, Marcus was a philosopher. Reading the works of Epictetus turned him into a devoted stoic as a young man. Marcus’ book Meditations remains the sterling example of the stoic mindset: civility, moderation in all things, and above all, taking triumph and tragedy with the same quiet dignity.

Marcus also had a bit of the economist in him. Despite predating Adam Smith by sixteen centuries, Meditations contains an excellent example of opportunity costs. Only the law of demand is more important in the economist’s toolkit. As a way of saying “mind your own business,” he writes:

Do not waste what remains of your life in speculating about your neighbours, unless with a view to some mutual benefit. To wonder what so-and-so is doing and why… means a loss of opportunity for some other task.*

*Meditations, III.4; trans. Maxwell Staniforth.

World Meteorological Organization blows hot air on global warming

by Michael Fumento on December 11, 2009

in Global Warming

“The decade of 2000 to 2009 appears to be the warmest one in the modern record, the World Meteorological Organization reported in a new analysis on Tuesday,” according to the New York Times. “The announcement is likely to be viewed as a rejoinder to a renewed challenge from skeptics to the scientific evidence for global warming, as international negotiators here [in Copenhagen] seek to devise a global response to climate change.”

Yes, and a false and misleading rejoinder at that. The statement appears here in what’s obviously a propaganda sheet. At a glance it would seem to refute my recent assertion in Forbes that there’s been no warming over the past decade.

But it’s a matter of which interpretation do you think counts. Yes, the last decade was warmer than the previous decade. But there has been no warming within that decade. My point remains intact: During the last decade GHG emissions and ambient levels have gone up every year whereas warming has not as this chart shows. That’s the only point I was trying to make, that even as every year the world poured more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the ambient concentrations of those gases rose, there was no rise in warming. The formula of “more GHGs = more warming” is overly simplistic; something is going on in nature that’s seriously impacting temperatures.

Oh, and as far as that “modern record” stuff goes, that’s sneaky stuff too. As I pointed out, and as this graph shows, it was much warmer in the medieval warming period – you know, back when those Viking ships were pumping CO2 in the atmosphere and when the Carolingian empire got most of its power from coal-fired power plants.

So, yeah, the WMO is kinda basically lying.

The Intoxicating Effects of Privatization

by Michelle Minton on December 10, 2009

in Odds & Ends

As I blogged about earlier this month over at the Objective Standard, states are beginning to understand the benefits of privatization. Unfortunately, few of them seem to understand the mechanism of why open markets actually financially benefit their state economy and even fewer legislators understand (or at least talk about) the individual rights component of getting government out of business.

While it is wonderful news that Washington state Senator Tim Sheldon wants to privatize the state-run monopoly on liquor sales, his argument comes from the same old place: that privatization would save the state millions and they could still collect plenty of taxes.

Lots of vituperative comments to Palin’s WaPo op-ed

by Fran Smith on December 10, 2009 · 1 comment

in Culture, Environment, Global Warming, Personal Liberty, Sanctimony

Sarah Palin’s op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday on ClimateGate and the Copenhagen conference has spawned a blizzard of comments from Post readers.  Almost 4,000 comments as of this morning.  Many of them – no friends of free speech — attack the newspaper for publishing Palin’s article at all. Huffington Post sycophants are similarly energized in their hatred for Palin and for free speech.  Their comments on a cross-posting of Palin’s article number 5,750. Here’s an example:

“someone like palin who does not even understand the difference between climate and weather should not be allowed to do the forecast on a local tv news station, let alone write an op-ed piece for a once respected newspaper like the washington post. . . .”

Interesting that instead of commenting on the substance of the article, detractors are more interested in ad hominems.  May sound familiar to skeptics of catastrophic global warming or the “deniers” as they’re often referred to.

Regulation of the Day 82: Veterinarians

by Ryan Young on December 10, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Health and Illness, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

Did you know that the federal government is in the veterinary accreditation business? It’s true. Federal certification requires completion of veterinary school, state certification, plus an orientation course that covers:

(A) Federal animal health laws, regulations, and rules;
(B) Interstate movement requirements for animals;
(C) Import and export requirements for animals;
(D) USDA animal disease eradication and control programs;
(E) Laboratory support in confirming disease diagnoses;
(F) Ethical/Professional responsibilities of an accredited veterinarian; and,
(G) Animal health procedures, issues, and information resources relevant to the State in which the veterinarian wishes to perform accredited duties.

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