Tyler Cowen thinks they should.
State Capacity Libertarians are more likely to have positive views of infrastructure, science subsidies, nuclear power (requires state support!), and space programs than are mainstream libertarians or modern Democrats.
This is the most interesting post I have read this year. Note that I am composing this on January first.
What’s not to like about state capacity?
One strand of conservatism, represented nowadays by Yuval Levin, sees the state taking away functions from other institutions, weakening them. For some folks, that is a feature, but for these conservatives it is a serious bug.
One mainstream libertarian argument against a strong state stresses the lack of skin in the game. Wrong coat, wrong price, in Milton Friedman’s famous explanation. But that is a distributional problem, and Tyler doesn’t care much about distribution or static efficiency. Focus instead on growth.
Rent-seeking? Again, if it only affects static efficiency, it’s a second-order problem. Same with Hayek’s knowledge problem.
Perhaps minarchism was appropriate when wealth was embedded in tangible land and capital. Just have government protect private property.
But Tyler would argue that intangible sources of wealth require more complex rules and more concentrated expertise.
I don’t think that it follows that we need more state capacity. Private coalitions can put together rules. The Internet Engineering Task Forces are an example. If you respect technocrats, fine. Just don’t pretend that government does a great job of hiring and incenting them.
In a democracy, politicians specialize in instilling fear. I see the climate issue as an illustration of fear-installation rather than as an issue where our best hope is more state capacity.
It is true that state capacity and development are positively related. But I suspect that once you control for average cognitive ability the state-capacity variable drops out of the growth equation.
Typo: the link is missing a colon ‘:’ after the https.
Tyler seems to be begging the question in an attempt to appeal to liberals. Libertarians are not against infrastructure. In a way, it reminds me of the compassionate conservatism argument where I thought, “Wait, you are saying conservatives are not compassionate?”
I’m not sure that Cowen is trying to appeal to liberals; he is trying to define his own beliefs from those of neoliberals and anarchist libertarians.
Anarchist libertarians are very much against public infrastructure; infrastructure should be privately owned and a price is attached to its usage, in their opinion.
I do think the marginalrevolution guys are trying to appeal to liberals. I think they think that they can make a bigger difference pulling many liberals slightly more libertarian than they can with non-liberals. It’s low hanging fruit. I’ve thought that ever since Cowen was so intellectually infatuated with Ezra Klein and Tabarrok has followed. It’s all fine but I think he makes a caricature of libertarianism so that he can rebrand normal libertarianism now that he has some credibility with the left.
Kling said:
This is very true but I think it is useful to think about shared infrastructure at the city level to appreciate that local government is a simple viable solution. The problem with Cowen’s unsticky “State Capacity” label, in my opinion, is that it guides us to the much broader nation-state level. Shared resources and collective action (e.g. defence) is real but much more abstract at the nation-state level but shared infrastructure (roads, water delivery, sewage, parks) is very tangible at the municipal level.
I don’t think Cowen is arguing for more State Capacity but he is trying to define his brand of libertarianism that accepts ANY State Capacity. In search for a sticky alternative name to “State Capacity”, perhaps “Institutional Libertarians” is a step in the right direction and gives a nod to the Grass Roots Institutional Conservatives like Yuval Levin. “Institutional” is vague about the openness to government institutions so maybe “Governable” libertarians or “Governing” libertarians are imperfect adjectives but acceptable labels.
Here is an attempt at a simple quiz to distinguish State Capacity vs. Anarchist libertarians:
1. if you were starting a nation-state from scratch would create a central bank?
2. if you were starting a city from scratch would you build public roads?
This is a nice focusing question. Thank you
I’d prefer to call State Capacity Libertarianism “Public Goods Libertarianism”. I think there is more to it for him than just differentiating between libertarians who think there are slightly more public goods than the tiny number of anarcho libertarians.
I think someone in the comments mentioned that we already have a good word for what Cowen is talking about. State Capitalism. It’s been around for awhile.
Many others pointed out that its basically neoliberalism without the specific neoliberal focus on military-industrial spending.
It all kind of sounds like “I want my government to be as efficient as Denmark or Singapore, but without the high IQ homogeneity”.
Me too bud. But you can’t always get what you want.
He seems to be arguing against a radical big L libertarianism that only existed amongst academics and cranks, making it a pretty pointless exercise.
Cowen’s big bit is “we can have growth and redistribution”. Maybe, but he doesn’t have a whole lot to say about how. It’s not clear that libertarians have a ton to contribute on how to create growth, and it’s not clear that agreeing to more redistribution would buy them opportunities to promote growth.
His emphasis on climate change is a clear indication that this is a fools errand where the state capacity libertarians are luckily to be gullible chumps.
The term State Capitalism accurately defines modern China and Singapore. A libertarian like Cowen specifically objects to the illiberal nature of those nation-states. If you are a fan of authoritarianism then State Capitalism is a perfectly good description.
Cowen recently linked to an article Race, IQ, and Wealth by Ron Unz that I had not read before. It criticizes the views of Richard Lynn as outlines in his book “IQ and the Wealth of Nations”.
Every argument we have had in the past about IQ and Race comes down to my view that matches Ron Unz’s against your view that matches Richard Lynn’s. I accept that Lynn’s view is plausible but unlikely to be true. I think you view Lynn’s view as truth. If we can accept that Unz’s article is a fair description of two opposing views that are both plausible but as of yet unproven, then we might be able to avoid future noise on this topic.
https://fee.org/articles/is-singapore-a-libertarian-paradise/
Within libertarian circles, Singapore generally enjoys a good reputation for its economic freedom. The country often comes out on top of the rankings of the annual Index of Economic Freedom as well as the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Index as one of the freest economies of the world. Property rights are secured and respected (it should be noted however this has not always been the case historically), contracts are enforced and its government is often touted as an ideal corruption-free bureaucracy, ranking 9th in the 2016 Rule of Law Index.
Considering how illiberal Singapore is as described in the “civil liberties” section, I think this article makes my point more than it contradicts it. The question is whether Singapore is a “Capitalist Paradise” for those who tolerate or are not impacted by Singapore’s illiberal policies. If you are an Anarchist libertarian then the intrusiveness of the state in Singapore is unacceptable. If you are a State Capacity libertarian, then you love the capitalism, admire the efficiency, but distrust the illiberalness of the Singapore state.
I have spent time in Singapore and have seriously considered making it my home. I view the world through a lens of tradeoffs and Singapore is a case study in social tradeoffs.
“Authoritarian” conjures up images of jack booted thugs and book burnings.
That Singapore engages in common sense lawmaking to prevent anarcho-tyranny is simply them being better at making a society. If that is “authoritarian”…a lot of people are going to sign up.
You’ll note to that even poor little Denmark is considered authoritarian by Cowen in that post because they want to break up the backward Muslim ghettos in their country (and they restrict immigration!)
I’ve read Unz’s views on this and I’ve found them unconvincing. We aren’t going to hash them out in the comments section.
If by plausible you mean “low probability event that isn’t impossible, but very unlikely” then I will say the view is plausible. Only direct genetic measurement that is not currently possible could get the probability down to perfect zero.
But I don’t think we should base our actions and policies on the highly unlikely, but the highly likely. Differences in IQ between individuals and groups seems highly likely to me. Hence all that I support related to that.
If I’m wrong…its not clear to me that my views should change that much. In the event that people in the third world really have just as high genetic IQs as the developed world…this should manifest itself in time without our intervention or their immigration to our countries.
The only way that could not happen is if the state of having to share a country full of people like themselves makes it impossible for them to realize their potential for all time, and that this is true of the entire third world despite its highly varying circumstances. I don’t have to spell out what this implies about these people.
Attempts to “nation build” have been failures. Both through foreign aid and literal military takeover. I think they have failed because of the low IQs, but if I’m wrong they still failed and don’t seem like a good policy tool.
Immigrants from low IQ groups don’t appear to change in IQ even after several generations in the developed world. Those put through significant selection barriers before immigrating were already smart before immigrating.
As for domestic groups already here, it seems to me we have done an awful lot for groups like blacks and its unclear what levers you want to pull that you think would work after all the past ones failed. Current racial agitation seems to be based in part on the fact that there are no levers left besides that to pull.
By plausible I mean that I can imagine changing my mind based on new evidence and/or arguments, i.e., the argument could be true, I can’t rule it out.
::: Views on Race and IQ
asdf == Richard Lynn’s “IQ and the Wealth of Nations”
RAD == Ron Unz’s criticism of Richard Lynn’s book
I fully expected you to be unconvinced by Ron Unz’s views and mine.
I think that if one of my expectations could be disproven in a large statistically significant way, I could come around. I just think there have been a lot of opportunities for that to happen at this point and they haven’t panned out.
That’s part of why I don’t blame people in fifty years ago believing in racial genetic equality, because the evidence just wasn’t in yet. Most of the world was under communism or colonialism. There were a lot fewer minority groups to observe, and many of them did not have equal rights. There wasn’t as much data supporting racial performance back then.
Today, I would need to see something huge like a rapid improvement in the IQ scores (and/or equivalent measures) of a large unselected population with low IQ. For instance, if second, third, or fourth generation Mexicans were suddenly smarter, I would concede to Unz’s views. But they aren’t. How many generations does it take for Unz’s views to be correct?
Thanks for the cite to the unz article. This should be a well-funded research area. Alas, anyone who wants to be accepted in academia shies away from it.
I agree. The big emphasis on climate change is just his way of making sure the left will listen to him.
Using “state capacity” is the latest cool (and progressive-technocrat friendly!) jargon, but is misleading in terms of what he’s getting at, and indeed, he draws a distinction between merely strong states (possibly tyrannical or anti-capitalist) and “good strong states”.
When you are attacking Rome with war-elephants, you want them to be as strong as possible. When one of those elephants inevitably goes rogue, you will regret every bit of that strength. For example, states in the US have a lot of capacity to enforce laws that pretty much all libertarians hate, whatever adjective they want to put in front of their sub-sect.
So that ‘good’ is actually doing a lot of the ideological work here, as in, “I want the government to be effective and efficient at doing the good things I like, but not the bad things I don’t like.” Every government activity should have equal and positive marginal rates of transformation of resources into goodness.
So, the trouble is that someone else could also call themselves a “State Capacity Libertarian”, but with a very different notion of The Good, and end up arguing for very different policies.
I think Cowen’s proposition of “effective at immigration regulation” is a good example of where someone else willing to call themselves a State Capacity Libertarian, but with a different conceptions of what is Good, would disagree with him, and it wouldn’t be clear which way SCL as an idea system would point. However, I guess that Cowen reasonably expects that since it’s his term, it will be perceived as also implying his particular growth-centric philosophical position on The Good.
That’s probably for the best, because unless there is some single focal point and common agreement on a telos, there is really no hope of resolving disputes, settling on a rough consensus, and working together to improve anything. And that telos can’t by some watered-down or modified version of ‘social justice’ like the liberaltarians or Niskanen-types, because it has no way or preventing the slide into full-bore progressivism.
The classical libertarian telos of Liberty being a good in and of itself, and the state being a kind of evil devil figure, (that is, the Founding American tradition) unfortunately is quickly going extinct, in part because of the reality of the demographic transformation Cowen mentioned.
So “what happened and is happening” to libertarianism is that the Liberty and State-Antipathy have moved from being terminal values – ones that win in a conflict with rival values – to a merely instrumental values, subordinate to a substitute terminal value, and only smiled upon when they contribute to that other value.
So, a SC Libertarian is more someone who has “learned to stop worrying and love the state … when it’s doing good” and who loves Liberty conditionally, that is, if and when it contributes to increased welfare, but not otherwise, and especially not if “more liberty” came at the expense of growth. Old Libertarians loved Liberty unconditionally, ruat cælum, with a mother’s love, and as fiercely loyal as a dog to his master.
Indeed, conservatives and progressives have pretty much the same perspective and attitude about The State and Liberty, “Good when it helps the stuff we like, bad when it doesn’t.” What makes a Growthertarian a Libertarian is an adherence to the belief that Liberty and The Good are very often correlated and complementary, much more often than conservatives and progressives would assess.
So, I think what Cowen means by SC-Libertarianism is really “Government is Good when it contributes to Growth”, or G3-Libertarianism, because Growth Is Good and The Good is Growth.
‘Growth’ here intending to mean something like actual improvement in welfare or life quality for most people, and, I presume and hope, excluding ‘repugnant conclusion’-type outcomes.
When the government is trying to do (arguably) welfare-improving growth-boosting things like defending capitalism; preserving peace, order, and security; ensuring adequate infrastructure; encouraging innovations; pursuing good public health measures; buying military goods and services; or managing monetary policy, it should be really efficient at doing those things well, and not awful and terrible at them or like a bloated red-tape spider immobilized by its own web.
On the other hand, when the government is doing stuff that hurts wealth and growth, it should stop doing those things, get out of the way, and let freedom ring.
This sets out differently-flavored G3L prescriptions for various types of countries.
China has a lot of state capacity, and is doing well on the markets and growth front, but should stop using that capacity to crush religious groups.
African and South American countries lack enough low-corruption, good-government state capacity to enforce the good laws fairly and protect private property and make market activities lower-risk and worthwhile, so they should try to build that capacity up, and to the extend other countries provide help, it should be helping them get better at doing those things.
The US has a ton of potential capacity and a lot of human and social capital to build from, but has run itself into a political, legal, and bureaucratic ditch from which it can’t extract itself, and hence everything it does takes forever, costs a fortune, and often ends up not working very well.
G3L also gives libertarian wonks, scholars, and advocates something to do, that is, to carve a little further into their particular patch of mountain in a Mount Rushmore-scale Great Project, which is along the lines of the “How Our Institutions Go Bad And How To Make Them Better” Big Sky Research Program Cowen spelled out in a different post, and to try to nudge the government into being better, and to also nudge the elite’s general idea of what the government ought to be focusing on and what it ought to stop doing.
A classic Handle post: long, thoughtful and too cynical/pessimistic for my tastes. I don’t think “growth” has to be special-cased. Libertarians believe in economic freedom as Cowen makes clear in his first point:
Let’s not conflate growth with economic freedom. Growth is a signal and it can be an important metric but it does not have to be a “telos”, using your terminology.
It’s not ‘conflation’, as in combining two distinct things when the concept is one of causation with direction, that is, one leads to the other. SCL is about maximizing ‘growth’ from a perspective that gives strong weight to the theoretical logic and empirical evidence behind the argument that more economic freedom tends to be instrumentally productive of more growth, most of the time.
Now, it’s not my telos, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s Cowen’s, and if you haven’t done so yet, you can check out his philosophical argument for it in Stubborn Attachments.
But here’s the thing – any ‘ideology’ needs some telos, and today the problem is to find one that is simply enough to be a ‘rallying’ focal point, and useful to argue against and contain lots of the most dangerous craziness of the ‘fringe-left’ extreme progressives, but without triggering their allergic reactions to typical conservative goals.
To someone like Cowen, I’m guessing that he thinks the overall social impact of the culture war and identity group politics stuff as being relatively harmless or a battle not worth choosing, at least in comparison to the much more severe and destructive threat and clear and present danger to overall social welfare that the erosion of support for market capitalism constitutes. One has to do what one can to keep the sanctimonious crazies from killing the goose that lays the golden eggs and wrecking the engines of our prosperity.
There is a kind of parallel to the Three Languages of Politics in terms of the telos.
Progressivism: Social Justice in the form of Absolutist Egalitarianism.
Continental Conservatism: Fidelity to God, Tradition, Family, One’s People.
Classical Libertarianism: Minimal Coercion, maximum personal liberty and choice.
SCL / G3L: ‘Growth’
One advantage of picking ‘growth’ is that it forces the issue of the inherent and well-studied trade-offs behind the other goals to the front, which is something adherents of the other ideologies usually prefer to deny or ignore.
Cowen’s big goal is to get progressives to ignore capitalism, and he’s willing to feed a lot of things to the beast to do it…liberty, redistribution, IDpol, etc etc
The question is can that be done. Will it work. Or are the claims of progressivism total, and thus if you ascent to the others you can’t also keep capitalism sealed off in a bubble. After all, he has not offered a really firm ideological ground on which to fight progressivism, its more like he’s hoping it just ignores certain things if he lays on his back and begs.
OK, I see. Your (Handle’s) focus on growth comes implicitly from Cowen’s sixth point:
If you can forgive my lack of context surrounding Cowen’s argument for growth as a telos, let me take a different tack. Cowen’s sixth point on growth is not relevant to the key point of his manifesto: there exists a strain of libertarianism that is not antagonistic towards government (i.e. shared infrastructure and public institutions) by default.
Anarchist libertarians, those convinced that there is an inverse linear relationship between government scope and prosperity, reject and criticize Cowen’s view (Edgar links below to a good example by Jeff Diest) but this emphasizes Cowen’s distinction; he considers himself libertarian but he does not identify with the absolute antipathy of anarchist libertarians nor does he identify with neoliberals like Cass Sunstein or Bill Gates.
I’d prefer to stick to what the man said rather than tease out intent hidden between the lines like asdf tends to do. Cowen has many opinions and I don’t consider him a fellow traveller philosophically but I self-identify with his description of State Capacity Libertarians. Either we are misguided and politically homeless, or there is a sub-category of libertarianism (begging for a sticky name) that is important.
Your (Handle’s) criticism is relevant to the growth theme of “Stubborn Attachments” but it feels out of place and independent of the “State Capacity” thrust of Cowen’s post.
“there exists a strain of libertarianism that is not antagonistic towards government”
Actually, I think Cowen was (purposefully) overlooking another, distinct strain of libertarians who like the central state in certain circumstances, and a movement which has plenty of recent success, energy, and ‘flow’: the “14th Amendment Libertarians” of the libertarian legal community.
These are the libertarians who are “qualified, conditional federalists” only, and happy to see the central state (that is, federal judges) tell subordinate jurisdictions not to do bad things (like restrict liberty) via the doctrine of universal incorporation (unless explicitly established otherwise, every limit on federal power is also one on state power, and all lower jurisdictions too.)
Mentioning, let alone endorsing the activities and goals of, 14th Amendment Libertarianism (“14AL”) is fraught with problems such as potentially identifying with a particular side of heated political controversies, and I think he is desperately trying to avoid that at all costs, which is a wise strategic approach for someone in his position.
Also, anything based in legal or constitutional considerations is inherently parochial, being exclusively of the American context, and doesn’t have much relevance to a universal or global perspective and framework of analysis, with special and distinct application and prescription for all the different national situations out there.
Additionally, while Cowen briefly mentions “less savory alt right directions”, he may have gone in that direction himself and converged to similar conclusions, as it’s worth pointing out that in the final analysis a telos focused on growth and which sanctifies significant state power, capacity, and action when in furtherance of that goal (and, by implication, whatever limitations on democracy are necessary to achieve it), is not in principle or effect distinguishable from Moldbug’s ‘corporate landlord’ model solution for good government.
In Moldbug’s model, the ‘total social welfare’ (or however you would like to phrase the ultimate goal of human happiness, progress, development, ‘flourishing’, ‘good vibes’, or whatever) of an area is represented by the market value people are willing to pay to live there, which is a combination of the overall desirability of the place and its encouragement and enabling of highly productive economic activities, both of which are improved by better governance, and which perhaps, from this perspective on things, can be said to define what is ‘better’.
Corporations have normal incentives to maximize expected long term growth, having to compete for investment capital and trying to maximize rates of profit on that capital, and so “corporate government” would have the same growth focus, while tending over time and in the face of competition to drop any restrictions or regulations not conducive to growth, especially since the cost of enforcement is burdensome and, if not generative of more productivity, wasteful.
Indeed, since they share the same telos, it’s hard to see how what some ideal SCL regime would be doing that would be different from an ideal corporate government. The major difference is that the corporate government approach explicitly dumps democracy and embraces the discipline of market competition and prices, whereas an SCL regime idea seems to leave these possibilities open or tacit, and to the extent it doesn’t explicitly insist on them, opens itself up to the well-studied public choice failure modes.
We are a long way from government efficiency. We are stuck there and any hope to make it efficient is a multi-step from where we are. Finding efficiency in the mess we have reveals the path to more efficient organization. We are stuck making what we have work sightly better.
Jeff Diest’s response to the Cowen piece has been my favorite so far: https://mises.org/power-market/thoughts-tyler-cowens-state-capacity-libertarianism
I am still disappointed that there are no people who identify as libertarian willing to advocate for constitutional change to increase representation and democracy. The most important sorting of libertarians is between those who advocate for a Parliamentary democracies with proportional representation (like Denmark) versus first past the post, winner take all, less representative voting systems (like Singapore and the USA. Cowen and most “libertarians” favor strong, one party rule by individuals who are amenable to textbook economics policies (ie carbon taxes, unilateral “free” trade, etc)
Nick Gillespie, in his response to Cowen, makes some good points about how ideology no longer captures large bodies of adherents, coalitions are smaller and more fragile. As he says, this is a good thing. It is also encouraging to see his definition of libertarianism and its inclusion of pluralism. https://reason.com/2020/01/03/the-libertarian-movement-needs-a-kick-in-the-pants/
If cognitive ability really is doing the work attributed to state capacity, that would suggest SCLs or G3Ls or whatever should favor institutional actions (state or otherwise) likely to increase cognitive ability over time. There are a number of candidates here that don’t raise illiberalism concerns, e.g. reducing pollution and improving early childhood nutrition (maybe education too– AIUI there is some evidence that education actually raises IQ).
What if being a libertarian ultimately requires an illiberal selection of the population?
Randy Barnett on Twitter has a thread of thoughts. But I think he hits the nail on the head with this: “ I’ve been thinking of this in terms of “first best” ideal libertarian theory vs “second best” libertarianism for the world in which we live. That may or may not be the best way to frame this, but it suggests what I think needs to be discussed.”. At any rate, in the USA political system, libertarians are in the same position as independents. If libertarians thought in terms of how independent voters fare in this system, they might better understand their continuing general irrelevance better.
“Private coalitions can put together rules.” Also the Facebook Content Moderation Oversight Board would seem to be important as an alternative to a “FCC for the internet.”
There are multiple of issues here:
1) Tyler’s state capacity ideas seem closest done by Singapore, A City-State, which has the most competitive economy but the strongest City Hall/Home Owners Association on earth.
2) I still don’t understand how Yuval Levin thinks these local institutions coming back. He seems to long for the days of Father O’Malley but since 1960 Americans having moving away from religion in general. (And in reality US church going has always been exaggerated especially before 1920.) High level Utah and parts of Texas are the exception but we will have to see if they can continue.
3) I still hold Charles Murray was generally correct on issues of the Bell Curve, but he missed the solution was Singapore society in the long the run.
I guess I understand how Yuval Levin expects the local institutions to come back when a lot of the local elite can easily move away. In terms of historical difference of white & African-American unemployment rates, the highpoint of the difference was 1982 (So AFrican-American unemployment was ~20% and white was ~10% that year.) which was towards the beginning middle of the inner city gang wars of 1975 – 1995. One theory why this happened a generation after segregation was passed that the African-American middle/upper class families went Dr. Huxtable and moved to the suburbs which collapsed a lot of their local institutions. (FYI I believe this is happening slowly in the Rust Belt but unlike the burst of moving from 1975 – 1985 families moving, the Rust Belt is dealing with younger successful people moving away after 1983 so the collapse of local institutions was slower.)
And I did live in the 1970s in Maryland middle/working class suburban neighborhood that had a lot of talk when an African-American doctor moved in 1979. (I remember my 6th grade friend got $.50 a week to walk their kindergarten son to school in 1979/1980. Also this was in Prince George county so it is an up-scaled suburb today.)
Regarding average cognitive ability, and perhaps related to the null hypothesis, it may be worth noting that the Singapore education system spends far below the OECD average per pupil on education but vastly outperforms. How? For one thing, higher teacher quality. The Asia Society reports: “Singapore recruits teachers from the top 30 percent of each high school class, provides financial support for their initial training, gives teachers 100 hours per year of professional development, and offers a choice of three career paths—master teacher, content specialist, or principal (Asia Society, 2008; Ban Har, 2008).” Greater capacity at less cost sounds like a winner to me.
Arnold, your stance on climate seems to have hardened since 2016 (this and this are notably more cautious, despite an equal or if anything increased evidence base in the intervening years.)
Can you explain why? Specifically, why does your “fragility” theory for the deficit — i.e., the economy is more fragile than we think and the risks (somewhat lower growth vs. hyperinflation and collapse) is asymmetric — not apply equally or more so to the climate (somewhat lower growth vs. climate-induced collapse), simply because of your skepticism?
Agree. Seems to coincide with the increasing frequency of posts on race, gender, IQ/college campuses/general culture-war issues too.
1) The idea that climate change, even if true, is going to be solved by coordinate action (especially in the realm of reduced consumption/emissions) at the global scale is laughable. Therefore, it’s pointless to get worked up over climate change alarmism. If it happens, it’s going to happen no matter what we do (every reduction just means another coal plant in China).
2) It’s also clear since 2016 especially that climate alarmism is going to be a cover for radical leftism of all kinds (see Green New Deal) and hence increased credibility to alarmism has the most likely effect of increased economic and political abuse by leftists (while, per #1, accomplishing nothing).
Thus even if one believes in climate change, the political focus on it has roughly zero benefits and many potentially huge negative effects.
I have felt homeless in my views on climate change.
1. Temperatures have gone up and will almost certainly continue to go up, due to increased amounts of “greenhouse gases” (CO2, CH4, etc.) in the air, increases caused by people.
2. All the international conferences and political rhetoric are pretty much bullshit. There will be no decrease in CO2 production until non-CO2 producing energy becomes cheaper than CO2 producing energy. And there is justice in this: more expensive energy may inconvenience the affluent world but it is future-destroying to the rest of the world that wants to be affluent.
3. So we need research and development of every possibility, to see what works and what doesn’t (and, yes, that means nukes and “geo-engineering”, too).
So it was heartening to see good lefty Kevin Drum saying much the same thing in the cover story in the January/February Mother Jones.
“In a democracy, politicians specialize in instilling fear. I see the climate issue as an illustration of fear-installation rather than as an issue where our best hope is more state capacity.”—AK
Well, sure.
But, heavens to Murgatroy, does not “fear-mongering” better describe the US “national security” stance of the last 60 years?
Moreover, the US national security complex takes about $1.2 trillion a year from taxpayers (DoD, VA, black budget, pro-rated interest on the national debt). That’s $12 trillion in the next 10 years, and there is not the slightest chance of a military invasion of the US.
The climate crowd ain’t even close.
So you agree.
This is ‘Big government for me, but not for thee’ libertarianism.
I enjoy Tyler’s thoughts, but when reading that post I kept thinking of that famous line from Friedman’s response to Phil Donahue, “Just tell me where in the world you find these angels?”