Green Hell

I'm not an environmentalist. That to many must sound awful. It is like being in favour of cancer. Who could be against the environment? Of course, I'm not against the environment. I like clean air and water, forests, lakes, mountains and wildlife. What I am against is scaremongering. I am against unattainable utopian goals and policies that are counterproductive and fascist. I am not an environmentalist because I do not want to be associated with this growing strain of fascist and sometimes marxist movements that want to destroy either our liberty, our prosperity or even our lives.

First let us tackle the scaremongering. When I was growing up, my mandatory classes in environmental "science" tought me that by 2020 (next year!) we will have run out of oil and other fossil fuels by 2050. I was too young to know then that this was a rehash of flawed thinking that had been going on for a long time. The US Bureau of Mines predicted that we would be out of oil in 10 years in 1914. The dept of the Interior made similar predictions in 1939 and 1950. William Stanley Jevons in The Coal Question points out, in the 1860s, that unless Great Britain rationed its consumption of coal, the resource will run out in a few decades and the economy ruined. Indeed such totally wrong predictions about the environment and sustainability go back a long time. Malthus in the 18th century is usually the archetype for this sort of Chicken Little warning with his thesis that the world was going to starve due to overpopulation not quite panning out.

The green warriors were quick to pivot though. The problem shifted over the years from fossil fuel depletion to ozone layer depletion and catastrophic ocean rise. When Waterworld came out in the 90s people really believed that we were all going to be underwater. The film itself puts the impossible event of all land on earth being submerged to some time in this century. Now that ozone layer depletion and global warming seems to be reversing, the eco warriors have pivoted again to climate change, extreme weather events and plastic.

This is a moving target which is getting increasingly taken seriously. At this point, eco warriors like to deploy the label "climate change denier" to anyone who strays from the choir sheet. It's a catchy derision (sounds like holocaust denier), but I am not denying climate change. The climate has always changed. Nobody ever said it was mean to be stable. The real debate points, which the eco warriors tend to avoid are: what is causing it? is is dangerous? and what can we do about it? In the past, periods of warming have been good for humans, as they have coincided with better harvests. We know more about the past climate changes from sedimentary records than we can accurately predict about the future. The Medieval Warm Period was 300 years of relative bounty, followed by 100 harder years during The Little Ice Age (1450 to 1550). Now current warming might be more pronounced than back then, but the extent and harmfulness of these changes is hardly settled science. Now that the temperature is leveling off, the eco warriors are quickly changing the subject to extreme weather and plastic pollution.

The truth it is not about carbon. It is about values. The eco warriors, or the “anti-human league” as Alex Epstein calls them, tell us that we have to reduce our CO2 emissions before we all die. However these same people but will not endorse nuclear energy, which is the only source that can actually replace fossil fuels for electric power generation without drastically curtailing our consumption. The reason they will not endorse nuclear is that their main value is Gaia, an unspoiled mother earth utopia that never existed were all species are in balance living in natural habitats. In this Gaia, humans, to the extent that they exist at all live like primitive hunter-gatherers. I don't like pollution either, but I value human life over the Garden of Eden. The goal cannot be and should not be zero pollution. It is immoral to get rid of diesel tractors which will result in the death of millions to starvation. It would be a disaster to human life to get rid of our factories and yes it would be a disaster to get rid of plastic. Now sure, we can try and balance the cost versus benefit, but the current debate seems to be between ultra green monks who admonish guilt-stricken sinners who like warm clothes or want to read at night.

The environmentalist movement is actually a cover for fascist and marxist ideologies. This is exemplified by the asinine Green New Deal put forward by AOC. You can see the fascism when the anti-human league calls for more and more controls on industry, condemnation of capitalist material excesses and zero-tolerance for debate. The environmental marxists, on the other hand, want to destroy all industry and progress and live in regimented communes that supposedly live in harmony with nature. Both strands of collectivism ultimately turn totalitarian and if ever given a chance would result in predictable tyranny and misery, and ironically enough, a much worse environment.

That is the last reason why I am not an environmentalist. It is because I care for the environment. Environmental policies, like biofuel subsidies often backfire. But apart from this, the truth is that the environment has improved tremendously over the years as we have become more prosperous. The truth is that prosperity allows us to spend less time and energy on worrying about basic necessities and more on things like art, entertainment and the environment. This is why the worst man-made environmental disasters always happen in socialist countries. There are real environmental problems to be solved, and there good non-perfect solutions like privatisation, economic and technological progress. However, if being an environmentalist means I have to support asinine and counter-productive government solutions, count me out.


Catania, February 25th, 2019

TLDR: Beware of reds in green coats

The Trump Card

To many, the world has stopped making sense. People "out there" have lost their minds. Brand new political parties are winning big elections, Britain voted leave and of course, Donald J. Trump.

To me, this all makes perfect sense. While I did not think Trump was going to win, I did believe he had a much better chance than many were expecting. What did I know that so many missed?

Indeed, why did trump win? What will happen in 2020? It wasn't the Russians. Yes, I'm sure they try and influence elections where they can and I'm sure they try and sow instability in their rivals' turf. But to say they were able to swing the whole election with some social media bots is asinine. Advertisement is not hypnotism and we don't need such an outlandish explanation to explain why Hillary's campaign and candidature were so lacklustre and why Trump's message had legs when there is a much better explanation staring us in the face.

The real reason Trump won is the same reason Bernie almost got the Democratic nomination. It's the same reason why Jeb and the rest of the establishment tanked. Of all people, Hillary really should have known: it's the economy, stupid.

Living in Obama's recovery USA, I could see a lot of anecdotal evidence of people struggling. College grads working multiple bar jobs and moving back in with their parents and Uber drivers explaining how they used to be retired. Work trips to Ohio and Michigan really opened my eyes to a recovery that wasn't

There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. Government economic data is thoroughly biased as evidenced by the changes to the formulae for inflation, GPD and unemployment that always coax out better numbers than the older formulae. Hedonic substitutions then really allow the bureaucrats to cheer-lead the economy. Shadowstats, economists or the Austrian school and contrarian thinkers had it right: the Fed's unprecedented inflationary policy had brought the good times back to Wall street, but on Main street, unemployment was still north of 10% and and inflation was a lot hotter than 2% (making real GDP negative).

One other person saw all of this: Donald. He called the stock market a "big fat ugly bubble". He said unemployment was more than 20%. He said America was no longer great. Hillary, on the other hand, stood on Obama's shoulders, who said that Trump was "pedaling fiction". But the rust belt knew what reality they were living. They voted against four more years and for something different. Anything different.

Almost as soon as he had won, Trump changed his tune and declared victory. The big fat ugly bubble was now a bull market. The worst economy in history was now the best economy in history. Excitement about tax cuts and deregulation changed sentiment and the stock market reached record highs while unemployment reached new lows. However, the underlying economy was still the same. Nothing of substance has changed. The deficits are bigger, people are still struggling, waiting for Trump's America to arrive. It's not coming. Trump's irrational cheer-leading leads me to my next prediction: Trump is toast.

Trump will be a one-term president. Trump's 2020 slogan of "Keep America great" will be another four more years the electorate won't want. As the recession worsens and the data becomes undeniable, the voters will be ready to bring in anyone, as long as they are everything that Trump is not. America is going to lurch hard to the left in 2020. Of course, that won't work either.

Similarly, and for similar reasons, the rest of the west will lurch left and right, sliding ever farther from the centre and down the slope towards totalitarianism. In some places it will be universal socialism and in others, nationalist socialism.

Our only hope is to recognise and refute this trajectory. The only answer that works is real free market capitalism. Not the crony, over-regulated special interest system we have today, but the true free markets that made us rich in the first place. Getting there will not be easy. After all, we need a recession. We might even need a depression. The real economy has been so screwed up for so long by so much bad macro policy and regulation that the transition must now be long and arduous. So much debt now has to be written down. So many people expecting a social safety net will have to be let down. So many malinvestments have to be liquidated and re-allocated. If that sounds grim, I assure you it could and might be worse. After all, 2035 might start to look a lot like 1935.

San Jose, January 24th 2019

TLDR: Economic issues are the root cause of the west's political instability

The Dismal Science?

The march of progress in my lifetime has been astonishing. The fact that I and almost everyone else can walk around with an incredibly fast and compact computer that can access most of human knowledge in my pocket was beyond our imagination even as late as the 80s when I was born.

We have seen incredible advancements in all the hard sciences. I can appreciate this mostly in my own field, computer science, with which I am most familiar. But there is one field where we have not advanced. Worse still, we have regressed and have all but lost many important advancements of the 19th and 20th centuries and gone back into erroneous pseudo-science. This is the sorry state of economics today.

A bold statement from a non-economist to be sure. Although my field is computer science, I have more than a passing interest in economics. Having consumed dozens of books and other content on the subject over a decade, my confidence was buoyed when a Harvard economics professor admitted that my grasp of the subject went far beyond the layman's. But I am not here to commit the logical fallacy of arguing from (non) authority. Let my arguments stand on their own merits. I look forward to their refutation.

So I am not an economist, nor do I desire to become one. Yes, I could become a "proper" economist and apply to some revered institution. But it is those institutions that are the problem I am writing about here. Economics as a science has regressed, and the professors are to blame. What good would it do to get their recognition, when they are in error?

If this sounds crazy, then good. The suggestion that the established academic consensus on an entire subject is largely mistaken is a wild one that should be taken in with wild skepticism. But this would hardly be the first time that the academic consensus was wrong, and thinkers and commentators on the fringe were proven right in the end. There are today, two main schools of thought in the subject: the Keynesian school and the Austrian school. The former dominates academia, government and the mainstream profession. The latter is a small minority who have been able to further the subject.

Indeed, the Austrian school, through proper understanding of the business cycle, malinvestments caused by cheap credit and the damage done by forgetting to consider both the seen and the unseen effects of government intervention, was able to predict the 2008 crisis, and is predicting the next crisis which has started to unfold now. The Keynesian school, championed by professional morons like Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke, was blindsided in 2008 and actually think that the problems were solved and no repeat crisis is on the horizon. But track record aside, the Keynesian school can be shown to be wrong by logical praxeological (human action) analysis.

Obsessed with complex mathematical models that prove results that are not reproducible in the real world, the academic mainstream have been unable to condemn, and worse, have often championed economic ignorance and nonsense that had been settled by the science in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is no wonder then that today economic ignorance is rife and worsening. People obsess about income distribution and imagine wealth a fixed pie. People think that inflation comes from employment. They think that the minimum wage raises living standards. They think that tariffs are paid by foreigners or that they help domestic industry. Mercantilist views are widespread and Malthus' thesis is alive and well. Krugman himself shows off his ignorance when he writes that a catastrophic alien invasion would be a boon to the economy as do the central bankers and politicians who think that consumption is key and demand somehow drives everything.

And this ignorance, trickling down from the professors and policymakers has a real impact. We are witnessing an increase in barriers to trade, protectionism, nationalisation of industry as well as never-normalised interest rates.

Economics has been derided as the dismal science, but it is only in a dismal state. When truly understood, economics is not heartless. It isn't about money. It is about humans and how they behave. Unfortunately, the coming crisis will not be one of conviction on behalf of the professors. Capitalism looks likely to get the blame again, and we look likely to double-down on the terrible ideas of these clueless socialists. Maybe when that fails even worse, we will finally be ready to listen to the Austrians.



Harrogate, December 23rd 2018

Swinsty resevoir

TLDR: Economics professors give economics a bad name