Holman W. Jenkins Jr.:

Congrats are due for the term “climate denialist,” which in 2016 migrated from Paul Krugman’s column to the news pages of the New York Times.

On Dec. 7, the term ascended to a place of ultimate honor when it figured in the headline, “Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A.”

Unfortunately, never to be explained is precisely which climate propositions one must deny in order to qualify as a denialist. In zinging Mr. Pruitt, currently Oklahoma’s attorney general, the Times rests its unspoken case on a quote from an article this year in National Review, in which he and a coauthor wrote: “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”

The Rockefeller family’s charitable attachment to the climate cause is understandable, though. Their money might instead be used to bring clean water to poor villages, immunize kids against disease, or improve education. But such programs can be evaluated and found wanting due to fraud or incompetence, whereas climate change is a cause to which money can safely be devoted to no effect whatsoever without fear of criticism.

Twenty years before his successor became Mr. Trump’s nominee to be secretary of state, Exxon’s then-CEO Lee Raymond gave a much vilified speech in China—a much misrepresented speech, too.

He did not say humans were not influencing climate, but the degree was highly uncertain, and future warming was not a “rock-solid certainty,” he said.

He could not have known he was speaking near the peak of an observed warming trend, and that relatively little or no warming would be recorded over the next 20 years.

He said poor countries would and should choose economic growth over suppressing fossil fuel use. They did, and some one billion fewer people today are living in extreme poverty (as defined by the World Bank).

He said fossil energy would continue to fuel economic prosperity, though consumption growth would moderate with increased efficiency, and as poor countries devoted a share of their increasing wealth to environmental improvement. He was right.

He predicted that technology would open up new reserves to fuel the global economy, though he didn’t mention and perhaps didn’t know about fracking.

All in all, it was a performance, in many fewer words, far more cogent than the Rockefeller pieces, notable mainly for their childishness about both climate science and climate politics.

Donald Trump, our new president-elect, has been tagged for indiscriminately referring to climate change as a hoax. Here’s what he actually said at a campaign rally in South Carolina one year ago about climate advocacy: “It’s a money-making industry, OK? It’s a hoax, a lot of it.”

This statement, with its clearly framed qualifications, is true and accurate in every detail. It’s a statement of basic truth that can be embraced, and increasingly should be, by exactly those people most concerned about man-made climate change.

Yet it won’t be, for reasons demonstrated by the New York Times’ adoption of the term climate denialist, whose deliberately non-discriminating function we now take care to state precisely: It enables a kind of journalism that is unable—incapacitates itself—to stumble on truths that would be inconvenient to climate religion.

 

Jeffrey Tucker tackles what Best of the Web Today fans would categorize as one of the “Longest Books Ever Written”:

No presidency in my lifetime was greeted with such enthusiasm and unhinged hope as that of Barack Obama. At the start of his first term, a cult-like following had already developed among the intellectual and media elite. It was the dawn of a new age, marked by exuberant anticipation of justice, fairness, equality, peace, and sea-to-shining-sea happiness, all of it predicted as a certainty once you consider the sheer intelligence, erudition, and good intentions of the great man. …

Now two months following the greatest political upheaval most of us will ever witness, we are seeing the dawning of a new reality: Obama failed. The supposed successes such as the Affordable Care Act have become a handful of dust, and we are left with a huge amount of executive orders and signed legislation that seem destined for repeal.

Eight years in office, and there’s not much to show for it. Economic growth never did take off. Hope and change ended in frustration and fear. The last month of the Obama years has been spent in a frenzy to do something, anything, important to secure his place in history: releasing prisoners, imposing new regulations, putting on the final spin.

What was the source of the failure? It was the same at the beginning that it was at the end. Despite his intelligence, erudition, earnestness, and public-relations genius, and the mastery of all the Hollywood-style theatrics of the presidency, Obama’s central problem was his failure to address the driving concern of all of American life: the economic quality of our own lives.

In other words, despite his hope and charm, his highly credentialed brain trust, his prestige cabinet, and all the enthusiasm of his followers, he did not end persistent economic stagnation. The movie has ended. We leave the theater with an empty popcorn-bag, a watery soda, and once again deal with the real world instead of the fantasy we watched on the screen.

Now, you can chalk this up to many factors but let’s just suppose that Obama and his team truly did have the best intentions going into this. What was the missing piece? He never understood economics and he had very little appreciation for the power of freedom to create wealth and prosperity.

The Greenbergs, not intending to make the same point, describe the problem:

His legacy regrettably includes the more than 1,000 Democrats who lost their elections during his two terms. Republicans now have total control in half of America’s states.

Why such political carnage?

Faced with the economy’s potential collapse as he took office, Mr. Obama devoted his presidency to the economic recovery, starting with restoring the financial sector. But he never made wage stagnation and growing inequality central to his economic mission, even though most Americans struggled financially for the whole of his term.

Which is to say that his failed economics agenda drove the party into the ground.

At the same time, Mr. Obama declined to really spend time and capital explaining his initiatives in an effective way. He believed that positive changes on the ground, especially from economic policies and the Affordable Care Act, would succeed, vindicating his judgment and marginalizing his opponents.

He truly did believe it would work, whereas anyone with basic economics understanding could foresee that the ACA would fail. Anyone familiar with the history of socialism would know failure was baked into the entire command-and-control apparatus.

Absent a president educating the public about his plans, for voters, the economic recovery effort morphed into bailouts — bank bailouts, auto bailouts, insurance bailouts. By his second year in office, he spotlighted the creation of new jobs and urged Democrats to defend our “progress.”

When President Obama began focusing on those “left behind” by the recovery, he called for building “ladders of opportunity.” That communicated that the president believed the country’s main challenges were unrealized opportunity for a newly ascendant, multicultural America, rather than the continuing economic struggle experienced by a majority of Americans.

Which is to say that he took wealth creation for granted, as if it were a machine that would run on its own without necessary fuel. His administration saw its job as the one the media and academic elite cheered on: achieving cosmetic gains for the gauzy causes of social justice, cultural inclusion, and progressive government management. To be sure, there are policy changes that could have been pursued on this front – such as ending the drug war and penal reform – but these were both too little and too late. …

He took office in 2009 in the midst of a financial meltdown. He had to deal with a fantastic mess of bailouts and monetary interventions that he could not begin to understand. He continued his predecessor’s policies, agreeing with Bush’s zero-tolerance policy toward an economic downturn, however brief it might have been. He packed his economic team with technocrats and bailout masters and never looked back.

To some extent, this was all understandable. The mainstream of the economics profession has long rendered the problem of generating prosperity as a matter of engineering. Scientific management of macroeconomic aggregates could manipulate outcomes, provided the right experts were in charge and given enough resources and power. Lacking independent convictions on the topic, Obama outsourced his knowledge to these mainstream conventions with all their pomp and conceit. They failed him and the rest of us completely.

Eight years later, in an April 2016 interview in the same venue, Obama seems just as lost on the topic. “I can probably tick off three or four common-sense things we could have done where we’d be growing a percentage or two faster each year,” Obama said. “We could have brought down the unemployment rate lower, faster. We could have been lifting wages even faster than we did. And those things keep me up at night sometimes.”

To this day, he still has no ear for the topic. Precisely how might he have brought down unemployment? How was he going to lift wages? There is no control room in Washington, D.C., that you can enter and turn some dial to lower unemployment and boost wages. If there were, he surely would have done that. The relation between cause and effect in economics continues to elude him.

In another interview in 2016, faced with failure in health care and jobs, his frustration on the topic yielded this bit of honesty. “One of the things that I’ve consistently tried to remind myself during the course of my presidency is that the economy is not an abstraction. It’s not something that you can just redesign and break up and put back together again without consequences.”

It’s amazing that he would have to “remind” himself that no one can redesign an economy. Still, it’s good that he figured out that much. Would that he had followed up further and earlier on the implications of that statement. He would then know that the government cannot create outcomes; it can only hinder them. …

Despite his vast knowledge on seemingly everything, and endless amounts of charm to sell himself to the public, he missed the one crucial thing. He never understood wealth is not a given; it must be created through enterprise and innovation, trade and experimentation, by real people who need the freedom to try, unencumbered by a regulatory and confiscatory state. This doesn’t happen just because there is a nice and popular guy in the White House. It happens because the institutions are right.

That most simple lesson eluded him. Had it not, he might have turned failure to success. Instead of imposing vast new regulations, passing the worst health care reform in American history, saddling industry with endless burdens, he might have gone the other direction.

Obama wisely said at the DNC convention that “we don’t look to be ruled.” “America has never been about what one person says he’ll do for us,” he said. “It’s always been about what can be achieved by us, together, through the hard, slow, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately enduring work of self-government.”

It was supposed to be an attack on Trump. It might also be an attack on how his own administration handled the economy. Would that he have seen that this is not just true in politics; it’s the core principle of economics too.

Remember the president whose campaign mantra was “It’s the economy, stupid”?

One of my posts yesterday prompted a Twitter response (from, of course, the People’s Republic of Madison) that claimed I didn’t understand socialism or democratic socialism (which is an oxymoron).

Thomas Sowell, who is retiring after decades of column-writing, used the word “uninformed” over my choice of “ignorant” when he wrote back in May:

Socialism sounds great. It has always sounded great. And it will probably always continue to sound great. It is only when you go beyond rhetoric, and start looking at hard facts, that socialism turns out to be a big disappointment, if not a disaster.

While throngs of young people are cheering loudly for avowed socialist Bernie Sanders, socialism has turned oil-rich Venezuela into a place where there are shortages of everything from toilet paper to beer, where electricity keeps shutting down, and where there are long lines of people hoping to get food, people complaining that they cannot feed their families.

With national income going down, and prices going up under triple-digit inflation in Venezuela, these complaints are by no means frivolous. But it is doubtful if the young people cheering for Bernie Sanders have even heard of such things, whether in Venezuela or in other countries around the world that have turned their economies over to politicians and bureaucrats to run.

The anti-capitalist policies in Venezuela have worked so well that the number of companies in Venezuela is now a fraction of what it once was. That should certainly reduce capitalist “exploitation,” shouldn’t it?

But people who attribute income inequality to capitalists exploiting workers, as Karl Marx claimed, never seem to get around to testing that belief against facts — such as the fact that none of the Marxist regimes around the world has ever had as high a standard of living for working people as there is in many capitalist countries.

Facts are seldom allowed to contaminate the beautiful vision of the left. What matters to the true believers are the ringing slogans, endlessly repeated.

When Senator Sanders cries, “The system is rigged!” no one asks, “Just what specifically does that mean?” or “What facts do you have to back that up?”

In 2015, the 400 richest people in the world had net losses of $19 billion. If they had rigged the system, surely they could have rigged it better than that.

But the very idea of subjecting their pet notions to the test of hard facts will probably not even occur to those who are cheering for socialism and for other bright ideas of the political left.

How many of the people who are demanding an increase in the minimum wage have ever bothered to check what actually happens when higher minimum wages are imposed? More often they just assume what is assumed by like-minded peers — sometimes known as “everybody,” with their assumptions being what “everybody knows.”

Back in 1948, when inflation had rendered meaningless the minimum wage established a decade earlier, the unemployment rate among 16-17-year-old black males was under 10 percent. But after the minimum wage was raised repeatedly to keep up with inflation, the unemployment rate for black males that age was never under 30 percent for more than 20 consecutive years, from 1971 through 1994. In many of those years, the unemployment rate for black youngsters that age exceeded 40 percent and, for a couple of years, it exceeded 50 percent.

The damage is even greater than these statistics might suggest. Most low-wage jobs are entry-level jobs that young people move up out of, after acquiring work experience and a track record that makes them eligible for better jobs. But you can’t move up the ladder if you don’t get on the ladder.

The great promise of socialism is something for nothing. It is one of the signs of today’s dumbed-down education that so many college students seem to think that the cost of their education should — and will — be paid by raising taxes on “the rich.”

Here again, just a little check of the facts would reveal that higher tax rates on upper-income earners do not automatically translate into more tax revenue coming in to the government. Often high tax rates have led to less revenue than lower tax rates.

In a globalized economy, high tax rates may just lead investors to invest in other countries with lower tax rates. That means that jobs created by those investments will be overseas.

None of this is rocket science. But you do have to stop and think — and that is what too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach their students to do.