One reason I’m so bullish on Australia is that the nation has a privatized Social Security system called “Superannuation,” with workers setting aside 9 percent of their income in personal retirement accounts (rising to 12 percent by 2020).
Established almost 30 years ago, and made virtually universal about 20 years ago, this system is far superior to the actuarially bankrupt Social Security system in the United States.
Probably the most sobering comparison is to look at a chart of how much private wealth has been created in Superannuation accounts and then look at a chart of the debt that we face for Social Security.
To be blunt, the Aussies are kicking our butts. Their system gets stronger every day and our system generates more red ink every day.
And their system is earning praise from unexpected places. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, led by a former Clinton Administration official, is not a right-wing bastion. So it’s noteworthy when it publishes a study praising Superannuation.
Australia’s retirement income system is regarded by some as among the best in the world. It has achieved high individual saving rates and broad coverage at reasonably low cost to the government.
Since I wrote my dissertation on Australia’s system, I can say with confidence that the author is not exaggerating. It’s a very good role model, for reasons I’ve previously discussed.
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I seem to be writing a lot of tributes to the “old guys” these days.
Last November, it was the first newspaper publisher to ever hire me.
Earlier this month, it was my friend Frank Bush.
This week, it’s Dick Brockman, the 31-year publisher of The Platteville Journal. Who, as a good newspaperman would, died in time to get in this week’s newspaper. (Media types appreciate that kind of irony and black humor.)
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The number one single today in 1960:
The number one single today in 1970:
The number one album today in 1987 was U2’s “The Joshua Tree”:
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I have known Joe Wineke as a particularly odious Democrat, a former state senator and head of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. During a political issue in which Wineke was on the wrong side, someone commented that “Wineke” was pronounced “WHINE-icky.”
Then I heard from Wineke’s successor as head of the state Democratic Party, and Wineke sounded statesman-like in comparison.
I’m not sure what happened to Wineke, because based on what he wrote for the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, he’s starting to make sense:
By any definition, Wisconsin is in economic trouble. Recent reports rate the state 44th in job creation and, according to CNBC, 46th in the quality of our workforce. Even worse, for the past 30 years, we have ranked 48th in personal income growth. We are not creating enough jobs, our workforce is not diverse enough and our income lags well behind the rest of the country. If something does not change and change soon, Wisconsin could be last in the nation in job creation.
It is imperative that we change the way we do business. We need to think big and de-politicize the process while doing so.
State government likes to talk about job creation, but consistently thinks small. Both political parties waste time blaming each other. Republicans think we can fix everything by cutting taxes and weakening the regulatory climate. Democrats play the “soak the rich” card at any available opportunity and often reject anything that smacks of business help. Neither plan does much to create well-paying jobs.
Wisconsin should look at four areas that will create greater economic opportunity for our state. We need to:
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Make major investments in business capital.
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Change our tax code.
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Fix our transportation system.
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Provide major investments in education.
The detail of Wineke’s bullet points:
Start with business capital. It is no secret that businesses (especially small and start-up business) are having a very difficult time getting private-sector funding. Recently, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the State of Wisconsin Investment Board came up with a plan to provide up to $30 million in investment capital. A good start, but the amount of funding is so small that it will only help on the edges. Wisconsin needs to create a large business and venture capital fund, place it out of the hands of politicians and fund the program through bonding.
This is at least worth pursuing, although how you “place it out of the hands of politicians” is an excellent question. (In fact, Wineke’s desire to “depoliticize the process” seems naïve, though well-intentioned.) There’s also a policy question of whether you really want government involved in financing business, although that is already the case with such organizations as the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Second, we need to look at taxes. Wisconsin should follow the four basic principles of sound tax policy: simplicity, transparency, economic neutrality and stability. Start by eliminating the tax on tangible personal property. It is poorly administered, is complex, treats businesses worse than other property owners and is very unstable. Currently this tax raises around $260 million per year and is entirely placed on the business community.
We should also rewrite our sales tax code. We currently exempt more from the sales tax than we collect, creating unfair disparities. For example, internet sales are tax exempt in Wisconsin. Customers on Main Street pay. It is grossly unfair and puts our merchants at a disadvantage. But, once again it will require our elected officials to think outside the box.
There are points to be made on both sides of the Internet sales tax, but revising the sales tax while keeping the revisions revenue-neutral is worth considering. Tax revenues should increase because of increasing economic activity, not because of increasing taxes. As long as Wineke correctly wants to get rid of the personal property tax, he should also favor dumping the corporate income tax, which, like the personal property tax, is not paid by businesses, but is paid by businesses’ customers.
Wineke’s focus on taxes ignores the fact that, while taxes are the most important component of a good, or bad, business climate, it’s not the only component. I’d love to see a Democrat take on the job-killers at the Department of Natural Resources and the other regulatory agencies that make doing business a struggle in this state.
Wisconsin business moves by highways. It costs millions of dollars to replace or add a mile of road. Our transportation funding system is a relic from 50 years ago. It is dominated by a large gas tax and a registration fee that is regressive. The United States has reduced oil consumption by nearly 15% in the past two years, reducing available tax revenue. This trend will continue. We must have the courage to find new ways to fund transportation. The most logical way is to create an assessment on vehicle miles traveled (VMT). A VMT assessment is fair.
Here’s where our paths diverge. My preferred way to fund transportation is to fund vehicular transportation, and not mass transit, bike paths or the other non-vehicular forms of transportation that suck money out of the transportation fund while having nothing to do with moving state businesses’ products from plant to seller. Apparently Wineke is OK with the state’s knowing how much you drive; I am not.
Fourth, we need to get back to funding education properly. In recent years, education has become a “whipping post” for too many. Instead of cutting income taxes by two dollars a week, put that money into K-12 education, technical colleges and our University System. We also need to refocus our technical colleges away from being the portal to enter four-year campuses and get them back to teaching job skills.
When you consider that the number one area of state spending is on education, it’s unclear what “funding education properly” is, or what the result of “funding education properly is.” This state’s schools are, bluntly, overrated, despite the fact that few states’ taxpayers have been burdened by the taxes Wisconsinites pay for our supposedly great schools. Schools need to earn more money by doing better, not merely given what the education establishment defines as “funding education properly.”
The other thing about school funding is that there remains no evidence that school quality leads to economic growth on the macro (that is, statewide) level. As I’ve pointed out before, when a person’s education improves, that person’s economic opportunity improves, including leaving Wisconsin for greener pastures. We’ve had better schools than most other states for the entire 30 years our state has ranked 48th in personal income growth.
I disagree with a lot of what Wineke wrote, but I give him credit for not singing out of the Democratic songbook. (Using a bible metaphor seems oxymoronic.) The state’s business climate should be a nonpartisan issue. If you’re going to create more jobs, you have to improve the business climate, since, even in this overgoverned state, business still employs the majority of employed Wisconsinites.
Assuming that jobs are an issue in the 2014 elections, Wisconsinites should welcome Democratic candidates who come up with a superior approach to the approach of the late 2000s Legislature, which, under Democratic control, took a poor business climate and made it worse. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Barrett didn’t come up with a better approach, which is why he remains the mayor of Milwaukee and why Democrats are the minority party in the Legislature.
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The number one British single today in 1955:
The number one British single today in 1959:
The number one single today in 1961:
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Pollster Scott Rasmussen:
Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comment that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent on the government” and “believe they are victims” isn’t the only reason he lost the presidential campaign. But the candidate himself acknowledged after the election that the comments were “very harmful.”
He added, “What I said is not what I believe.”
But many Republicans still believe it, and the “makers vs. takers” theme has a deep hold on the party. In private conversations, many in the GOP are whispering that Romney was right and that his only mistake was saying it out loud.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say something like, “Well, the half who favor government programs is the half who don’t pay any taxes.”
This is ridiculous — on many levels.
First, the overwhelming majority of those who don’t pay federal income taxes pay a whole variety of other taxes, including state and local taxes, payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, sin taxes and more. They don’t feel excluded from sharing the tax burden just because they don’t pay one particular tax.
It’s also worth noting that these aren’t the people pushing for higher taxes. At Rasmussen Reports, our most recent polling shows that people who make $100,000 or more each year are more supportive of higher taxes than those who make less.
Second, the 47 percent who don’t pay federal income taxes include large chunks of the Republican base. Many senior citizens fall into this category because their primary income is from Social Security. They don’t consider themselves “takers.” They paid money into a Social Security system throughout their working lives and now simply expect the government to honor the promises it made.
Third, low-income Americans aren’t looking for a handout. Among those who are living in poverty, 81 percent agree that work is the best solution to poverty. Most would rather replace welfare programs with a guaranteed minimum-wage job. Sharing the mainstream view, 69 percent of the poor believe that too many Americans are dependent upon the government. …
If they want to seriously compete for middle-class votes, Republicans need to get over the makers vs. takers mentality. We live in a time when just 35 percent believe the economy is fair to the middle class. Only 41 percent believe it is fair to those who are willing to work hard. Those problems are not created by the poor.
GOP candidates would be well advised to shift their focus from attacking the poor to going after those who are really dependent upon government — the Political Class, the crony capitalists, the megabanks and other recipients of corporate welfare.
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The number one British single today in 1964 was written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but not performed by the Beatles:
The number one British single today in 1969:
The number one single today in 1977:
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Now that the second of the two Boston Marathon bombers has been captured …
… it’s time to evaluate.
That begins with law enforcement and intelligence, from Steve Spingola:
As far as the lock down, call it 20/20 hindsight, but the tactic itself may have actually helped the suspect elude capture, as thousands of eyes remained inside. Ironically, once the “stay sheltered” ban was lifted, a set of eyes observed something suspicious. Plus, this tactic sends a message to other wannabe Jihadists that they can shutter an entire metro area with a few pressure cookers.
Certainly, the boots to the ground teams on the street did an outstanding job. However, I think this case merits a thorough, top-to-bottom policy review. Once again, all the intelligence fusion centers, NSA electronic listening, etc. failed to provide the intelligence needed to prevent the attack. The shoe bomber hopped aboard an airliner undetected; the underwear bomber successfully took a commercial flight, even though he was on the no-fly list (due to his name being misspelled by one letter); while a bombing in Time Square was prevented by a faulty detention device and a vender who had spotted a suspicious SUV. In each of these instances, surveillance—as a method to prevent terror attacks—failed miserably.
So much for sacrificing liberty for security—a doctrine Benjamin Franklin warned against.
Sure, after the fact, video surveillance has proved valuable; although it appears private video footage broke the Boston case open. Moreover, during this investigation Americans learned that suspect #1 traveled overseas for six months, posted strange things on social media, and was red flagged by a foreign government (probably Russia), which asked the FBI to check into his activities. One would have thought suspect #1 would have been one of a hundred individuals fusion center operatives would have kept close tabs on.
So, the question needs to be asked: was the $500 billion our nation has spent since 9/11 to employ over 800,000 people and create a vast electronic intelligence apparatus worth the expense? …
What can the government do to prevent terrorism? Discontinue the surveillance of large swaths of the American populace, 99.999 percent of whom will never commit an act of terror, and, instead, focus our resources on those with a motive. Think about it: how do the surveillance cameras mounted atop traffic control signals on 124th and Burleigh prevent acts of terrorism? Wasting taxpayer dollars to conduct surveillance of Americans diverts resources from the real problem: extremist groups and foreign nationals overstaying student visas that pose a real threat to this nation’s security.
As far as the media, they continue to report that this was the first terror attack since 9/11, which is simply Obama administration propaganda. Ft. Hood was a terrorist attack. As was the case in Boston, Hassan was radicalized from within and took his orders from afar. Classifying Ft. Hood as “work place violence” is akin to claiming that Kim Kardashian’s pregnancy is an immaculate conception.
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza evaluates the media:
The events in Boston over the last four days have riveted the nation — and put journalism, the profession that I love, under the microscope. I’ve been thinking about what lessons I can learn as a political reporter from everything that has happened over these last 96 hours. …
1. Better safe than sorry. For all of the things that reporters got right this week, the after-action report will focus on what we got wrong. The reporting that a suspect had been taken into custody on Wednesday became a story of its own, a development that no serious journalist wants to see.
The reality of a news environment driven by Twitter (more on that below), cable television and constantly updating news on the web is that the desire to be first has become all-encompassing. Everyone, of course, still wants to get it right but in the race to be first judgment about being right can get skewed. …
2. Twitter is a reporter’s best friend…until it’s not. I am a big believer in the power of Twitter. I use it daily. I think it has revolutionized journalism (and news consumption generally) in ways we are just now beginning to grapple with and understand. And, as expected, Twitter was the de facto news source for many people — including most journalists not in Boston — this week.
That was a good thing — at times. Twitter helped me understand where the bombs had gone off, sent me to reporters on the ground in Watertown Thursday night and provided images of an empty Boston and the SWAT teams searching for the suspects.
It was a bad thing too. The immediacy of Twitter means that one moment of bad judgment by someone with lots of followers (or even someone without lots of followers) can distort coverage for minutes or hours. …
So, trust but verify.
3. Primary sources matter…: Because of the general dearth of experts on any subject — the Boston bombings included — it’s important to identify the people who really are authoritative sources and give them priority.
So, what the FBI and the Boston police department say (or don’t) matters more than what some random person on Twitter — even one affiliated with a news organization — says or what an anonymous source might tell a reporter on TV. …
4. …and so do good reporters: People who follow me on Twitter know that i have spent much of the week praising NBC’s Pete Williams who has been the star that has emerged from this dismal chain of events.
Pete stood out by reporting only what he KNEW to be true and making clear that there was plenty he didn’t know. Ditto the Post’s Sari Horwitz and Doug Frantz. (One of the bad tendencies of journalists is an unwillingness to acknowledge what we don’t know. The truth is NO ONE expects us to know everything about every topic.)
Good reporters are the ones who take in all of the incoming — from Twitter, from their own sources, from colleagues — and filter out what doesn’t matter or can’t be proven. “The essence of journalism is the process of selection,” Williams noted in a National Journal profile. He couldn’t be more right. Judgment — knowing what is and isn’t news — is the single most important trait distinguishing good reporters from the rest of the pack.
By the way: Never love your job, because your job does not love you.
Speaking of the media, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times’ biggest waste of space not named Paul Krugman, should learn that sometimes he should stop at his column’s first half-sentence …
Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation …
… instead of proving his own point with several hundred words of irrelevancies, illogic (a carbon tax has exactly what to do with Chechen terrorists?) and plain stupid ideas (see “carbon tax”).
Jonah Goldberg makes infinitely more sense:
… we now live in a climate where there’s a ghoulish appetite to transform every act of terror and murder into a useful plot point in a political narrative. This is a bipartisan phenomenon, and while I think you could make the case that the Left is worse (in fact, I will in just a minute), it’s silly to deny that we don’t do the same thing.
Moreover, given where we are as a country, it is unavoidable. This sort of thing is too seductive. The Left desperately wants every terrorist attack to be conducted by Rush Limbaugh’s biggest fan, so it’s impossible not to cheer when the Left is disappointed. And given the outrageous double standards that the Left — and the elite “responsible” media — use to demonize the Right, the urge to throw it back their face is irresistible. …
The Left likes to claim that conservatives want these terrorist incidents to turn out to be al-Qaeda attacks in order to justify an often-bigoted “war on terror” narrative, which in turn fuels the military-industrial complex, imperialism, and meat-eating, or something like that. And at the margins there is some of that on the right. Some folks are eager, for one reason or another, to see the Muslim world as a monolithic threat, more powerful and sophisticated than it is.
But here’s the thing. Al-Qaeda exists. The Muslim Brotherhood exists. Islamist terrorism exists. We know this because these people keep trying to kill us — often successfully. Moreover, they clarify things by admitting it. They say things like, “Hey, you guys! We the Islamist terrorists are trying to kill you! We will remind you about this every 15 minutes until you are dead, converts, or slaves.”
I’m paraphrasing, but you get the point. These are not literary interpretations or academic exaggerations of the sort that cause people to think that football is a crypto-fascist metaphor of nuclear war. …
Islamic terrorism is not some subtext, discernible with the sort of magic decoder ring that they give out in English departments. It’s the text, found in weekly, if not daily, headlines. So sure, sometimes people on the right might exaggerate the threat from Islamist terrorism, but it is a wholly understandable exaggeration. You can only exaggerate the truth, you cannot exaggerate a lie. An exaggerated lie is simply an even bigger lie. …
The reason why most Muslim or developing-world terrorists are treated as representative of something larger is that, wait for it, they are representative of something larger. And to the extent white non-Muslim terrorists are usually cast as lone wolves, the reason is: That is what they are.
And, as far as I can tell, those white guys that are part of larger conspiracies, ideologies, and religions are pretty much always associated with them. In fact, there’s far more evidence that lone wolves who don’t have such associations are routinely cast by the media — and certainly by people like [Slate’s David] Sirota — as if they do. Jared Loughner was a deranged isolated individual. That didn’t stop the Left from immediately associating him with the tea parties, Sarah Palin, etc. (By the way, have they found Sarah Palin’s Facebook map of Chechnya yet?) Timothy McVeigh is still treated as a leader of the militia movement, even though he didn’t belong to any militia movement. And President Clinton was perfectly happy to associate mainstream conservatives with McVeigh.
This is an old and truly disgusting game for Democrats. FDR played it relentlessly. Going so far as to claim — in a State of the Union message! — that anyone who wanted to restore the “normalcy” — i.e. peace, prosperity, and liberty — of the 1920s under Republicans was in fact seeking to install the very fascism we were fighting abroad. Lyndon Johnson and the mainstream media did everything but declare Barry Goldwater a Nazi on national television. Oh wait, they pretty much did that too.
In many ways this is a replay of the smug anti-American asininity of the Left during the Cold War. The idea that the Soviet Union was a threat was often treated as a paranoid delusion, while the “real” threat from the domestic American right was a grave danger. Hitler was dead. Germany and Japan were U.S. allies. But Communism, which was killing and enslaving hundreds of millions before our eyes, just wasn’t something to get worked up about — at least not compared with the super-scary John Birch Society.
Proving the maxim about stopped clocks being right once (digital) or twice (analog) a day, the Daily Caller reports:
On HBO’s “Real Time” on Friday night, host Bill Maher entertained CSU-San Bernardino professor Brian Levin, director of the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism, who maintained that despite the events in recent days, religious extremism isn’t only a product of Islam.
But Maher took issue with that claim, calling it “liberal bullshit” and said there was no comparison.
“You know what, yeah, yeah,” Maher said. “You know what — that’s liberal bullshit right there … they’re not as dangerous. I mean there’s only one faith, for example, that kills you or wants to kill you if you draw a bad cartoon of the prophet. There’s only one faith that kills you or wants to kill you if you renounce the faith. An ex-Muslim is a very dangerous thing. Talk to Salman Rushdie after the show about Christian versus Islam. So you know, I’m just saying let’s keep it real.” …
“I am not an Islamophobe,” Maher replied. “I am a truth lover. All religious are not alike. As many people have pointed out — ‘The Book of Mormon,’ did you see the show? … OK, can you imagine if they did ‘The Book of Islam?’ Could they do that? There’s only one religion that threatens violence and carries it out for things like that. Could they do “The Book of Islam” on Broadway? …
“Now, obviously, most Muslim people are not terrorists. But ask most Muslim people in the world, if you insult the prophet, do you have what’s coming to you? It’s more than just a fringe element.”
Slate reports:
Then, shortly after 11:30 this morning, Ruslan Tsarni, an uncle of the two suspects, stepped out of his house in Maryland and delivered an extraordinary message about character, shame, and collective responsibility. …
Tsarni said he was coming out to express condolences to the families of the victims in Boston. He spoke with anguish and specificity about each of the dead. He had nothing to do with the bombings, yet he felt an awful connection to them. He couldn’t imagine, he said, that “the children of my brother would be associated with them.”
Association is a hard thing. The suspects are Tsarni’s nephews. He’s related to them, but he’s also separate from them. “We have not been in touch with that family for a number of years,” he said. …A reporter asked what might have provoked the violence. “Being losers,” Tsarni shot back. “Hatred to those who were able to settle themselves” in this country. Then Tsarni raised his voice to make a point: “Anything else to do with religion, with Islam—it’s a fraud. It’s a fake.” He went on: “We are Muslims. We are Chechens.” But that didn’t explain his nephews’ violence, he said. “Somebody radicalized them.”
Tsarni tried to explain that his birth family had drifted apart. Speaking of his brother, the father of the two suspects, Tsarni said, “My family has nothing to do with that family.” In fact, he continued, “This family [has] had nothing to do with them for a long, long time.” When a reporter asked why, he refused to say more than, “I just wanted my family [to] be away from them.”
The press wouldn’t let go. “Are you ashamed by what has unfolded?” a reporter asked. “Of course we are ashamed!” Tsarni exclaimed. “They are [the] children of my brother.” But even his brother, he cautioned, “has little influence” on the two young men.
A reporter asked Tsarni how he felt about the United States. Tsarni, his voice rising, declared it the “ideal” country, a microcosm of the “entire world.” He went on: “I respect this country. I love this country—this country which gives a chance to everybody else to be treated as a human being.”
A reporter asked whether the young men had ever been caught up in the fighting in Chechnya. Tsarni spat back, “No! They’ve never been in Chechnya. This has nothing to do with Chechnya. Chechens are different. Chechens are peaceful people.” The young men weren’t even born there, he said. One was born in Dagestan, the other in Kyrgyzstan.
Muslims, Chechens, immigrants, the family, even the parents—it wasn’t fair to hold any of these people responsible. And yet Tsarni couldn’t escape the feeling of collective disgrace. “He put a shame on our family,” he told the reporters. “He put a shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity.”
In the end, Tsarni raised his hands and asked to say one more thing: “Those who suffered, we’re sharing with them, with their grief—and ready just to meet with them, and ready just to bend in front of them, to kneel in front of them, seeking their forgiveness. … In the name of the family, that’s what I say.”
Finally, Iowahawk sums up the week by channeling his inner Billy Joel.
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Back in my business magazine days, at the behest of higher management I created a section of the magazine I called “Green Business.”
As you can imagine from the title it had to do with environment-related businesses or green-related business issues. I insisted, however, that the section be about more than jumping on the green fad, that it show how businesses could make more money (as in higher revenues or lower expenses) through “green” things.
Perhaps “green” isn’t a fad, except that the environmental movement keeps damaging its own credibility with hysterical end-of-the-world predictions, such as those chronicled by FreedomWorks around the first Earth Day in 1970:
- “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald
- “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
- “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Timeseditorial
- “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
- “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich
- “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
- “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
- “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
- “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
- “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich
- “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
- “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
- “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt
Making a profit is the first responsibility of a business, after all, and maximizing profits for the owners is the fiduciary responsibility of a business’ management. If a business can make more money by, for instance, energy efficiency or figuring out how to use less water during a product’s manufacturing process, that’s sustainability.
So here on Vladimir Lenin’s birthday — I mean Earth Day — the Property and Environment Research Center shows which green is more important:
Extrapolate global average GDP per capita into the future and it shows a rapid rise to the end of this century, when the average person on the planet would have an income at least twice as high as the typical American has today. If this were to happen, an economist would likely say that it’s a good thing, while an ecologist would likely say that it’s a bad thing because growth means using more resources. Therein lies a gap to be bridged between the two disciplines.
The environmental movement has always based its message on pessimism. Population growth was unstoppable; oil was running out; pesticides were causing a cancer epidemic; deserts were expanding; rainforests were shrinking; acid rain was killing trees; sperm counts were falling; and species extinction was rampant. For the green movement, generally, good news is no news. Many environmentalists are embarrassed even to admit that some trends are going in the right direction.
Why? The underlying assumption is that pessimism is what drives change. But great innovators from Archimedes to Steve Jobs generally lived in the richest parts of the world in their day. Driven by ambition, not desperation, they changed the world for optimistic reasons.
Pessimism should no longer be a prerequisite for being an environmentalist. It can be counterproductive because it is a counsel of despair. People do not respond well to being told disaster is unavoidable. Instead, the environmental movement should try optimism.
There is a wonderful chance that the current century is going to be a golden age for nature. Not everything is going to go right, but it is possible that by the end of the century we will have more forests, more wildlife, and cleaner air. …
The “forest transition”—the point at which a country stops losing forest and starts regaining it—is happening all over the world: Forest cover is increasing in Bangladesh, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, France, Gambia, Hungary, Ireland, Morocco, New Zealand, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Rwanda, Scotland, South Korea, Switzerland, the United States, and Vietnam. …
Why are environmental trends mainly positive? In short, the gains are due to “land sparing,” in which technological innovation allows humans to produce more from less land, leaving more land for forests and wildlife. The list of land sparing technologies is long: Tractors, unlike mules and horses, do not need to feed on hay. Advances in fertilizers and irrigation, as well as better storage, transport, and pest control, help boost yields. New genetic varieties of crops and livestock allow people to get more from less. Chickens now grow three times as fast in they did in the 1950s. The yield boosts from genetically modified crops is now saving from the plow an area equivalent to 24 percent of Brazil’s arable land.
What is really making a positive dent in the environmental arena is the unintended effects of technology rather than nature reserves or exhortations to love nature. Policy analyst Indur Goklany calculated that if we tried to support today’s population using the methods of the 1950s, we would need to farm 82 percent of all land, instead of the 38 percent we do now. The economist Julian Simon once pointed out that with cheap light, an urban, multi-story hydroponic warehouse the size of Delaware could feed the world, leaving the rest for wilderness.
It is not just food. In fiber and fuel too, we replace natural sources with synthetic, reducing the ecological footprint. Construction uses less and lighter materials. Even CO2 emissions enrich crop yields. …
Catastrophic climate change might undo us. Yet moderate climate change will only help with land sparing. Moreover, the empirical data increasingly support the probability that climate change will be mild and slow for many decades. One should be more concerned about the effects of climate change policies, which are horribly land-hungry and harsh toward nature. This includes biofuels, wind power, hydroelectric power, and the refusal to back fossil fuels for the rural poor, which results in the continued exploitation of forests for fuel. In other words, when it comes to climate change, the cure might be worse than the disease.
Organic farming is another example of ecologically good intentions that would pave the road to environmental hell. Organic farming is nice enough as a local fad, but if it were pursued on a global scale it would require a doubling of the amount of land devoted to agriculture, because organic yields are necessarily much lower than those using synthetic fertilizer. In effect, organic farmers have to grow their own fertilizer as “green manure” or dung from livestock, which takes up far more land than making fertilizer in a factory. If the world were to go organic, it would require a renewed and massive assault on forests, wetlands, and nature reserves to feed the global population.
Paradoxically, economics has done more for nature than ecology has. Yet, as discussed at PERC’s recent forum, there is still much that both fields can learn from the other. Economics could learn something from Charles Darwin and ecology could evolve from revisiting Adam Smith. Indeed, Charles Darwin read Smith, so there is an ancestral connection between the two fields: they both stress the emergence of phenomena rather than their direction from above. And, there is much activity in evolutionary biology and ecology that is parallel to what is occurring in economics and vice versa.
How does that work? Watchdog.org:
On April 22, in cities across America, some environmental activists will celebrate Earth Day, claiming only increased government control can protect the environment. Those celebrations will expose a couple ironies.
First, many activists will arrive in a Toyota Prius, which has become the symbol of environmental consciousness. Ironically, however, the Prius is not a triumph of political planning but of the free market. In the 1990s, while California was requiring “zero-emission” vehicles, leaders at Toyota and Honda saw an opportunity to sell cars to people who want to spend less on gasoline, drive a car that emits less carbon dioxide, or both. Thus was born the hybrid vehicle. Even though it did not meet California’s regulation, it sold well, causing Golden State politicians to change the law.
Jumping on the bandwagon, politicians began to give preferences to hybrids. Politicians did not lead, but followed the innovation of the free market. Most Prius drivers, however, don’t know that history and some will spend Earth Day opposing the free-market policies that created the car they are so proud of. …
Across the country, the parts of the nation that most consistently support free-market candidates are those surrounded by stunning natural beauty. The most vocal environmental activists — who are quick to lecture others about caring for nature — tend to live in cities, where nature has been thoroughly controlled, constrained and paved. …
Environmentalism has become trendy and a way to show you are a good person, rather than actually helping the environment. Environmental activists and politicians choose government-mandated approaches not because they help the environment, but because the policies make them feel good about themselves and make them look good to others. …
In fact, a strong concern for the environment is part of believing in personal responsibility and the free market. Conservatives believe people have freedom, but must take responsibility for the impact they cause. If you commit a crime, you don’t get to blame society. A reason conservatives live near nature is that we love to hike, hunt, fish and marvel at the awe-inspiring natural beauty with which our nation is so blessed.
Finally, the free market is the greatest system for allocating scarce resources and doing more with less, both of which are at the heart of a true environmental ethic.
Rather than forcing behavior change, conservatives promote technological solutions that respect the freedom of individuals while reducing environmental impact. Rather than falling for the latest trendy environmental policy, conservatives demand that the government measure success or failure.
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Today in 1964, the president of Britain’s National Federation of Hairdressers offered free haircuts to members of the next number one act in the British charts, adding, “The Rolling Stones are the worst; one of them looks as if he’s got a feather duster on his head.”
One assumes he was referring to Keith Richards, who is still working (and, to some surprise, still alive) 49 years later.
The number one British single today in 1965:
The number one British album today in 1972 was Deep Purple’s “Machine Head”:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 