Comments on: A Necessary Evil

By: Sailor Barsoom

Sailor Barsoom — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:39:37 +0000

{hugs}

By: Bandoblue

Bandoblue — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 04:42:32 +0000

I hang out in those circles too, Sailor, and I share your pain.

By: StormDaughter

StormDaughter — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:50:29 +0000

My sister is a masters student at MIT and she numbers among those researchers you have carte blanche called liars.
She genuinely cares about researching better ways to produce energy to help the environment, and as a ‘green movement’ critic myself I can attest that she has never worked on anything that was not simply stating the facts. Those ‘lies’ you are exposed to are the bastardization of the studies that politicians use to further their agenda’s which is by no means indicative that there are no environmental issues; all it proves is that the politicians are being idiotic and/or counter productive about solving the problem.

I can give you numerous examples, such as the blatant favoritism, unwarranted, to the corn industry http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-ethanol-scam-20110323 but that is besides the point here. Its not the actual subject that is the problem, its the way facts are distorted to obfuscate the truth in order to further one agenda or another, regardless of its validity.

By: Sailor Barsoom

Sailor Barsoom — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 20:11:47 +0000

Well, there you go. Anybody wanting to stand in the way of The Market, in way, shape, or form, is either a liar or a fool. Probably both. If environmental concerns are real, the philosophy is imperfect, and since THAT isn’t possible, the scientists are all conspiring.

By: jdgalt

jdgalt — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:17:13 +0000

I could not disagree more. The modern environmental movement consists of: (1) rich bad guys who want you and me to believe they’re “saving the planet” when they block development near their homes in order to enrich themselves and keep those places race-segregated; (2) alleged scientists who lie because their funding and careers depend on the goodwill of the EPA and its allies; (3) “watermelons” who would rather be the bosses of Ecotopia than allow our comfortable, cheap-energy world to continue (and if it doesn’t, they’re the only reason why); and (4) dupes.

The truth, of course, is that the earth has never been in any danger, and that expanding wealth helps, not hurts (look at the relative levels of pollution in some rich and poor countries if you doubt this). Read the works of Julian Simon, especially “The Ultimate Resource”. Then send the green plague packing!

By: Sailor Barsoom

Sailor Barsoom — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 03:17:09 +0000

I’ll tell you where I find my libertarians: space boards. Every time I go on some discussion board dedicated to the future of human activity in space, I find a bunch of people saying things like “NASA spends billions of taxpayer dollars every year to keep the rest of us out of space!” When asked why NASA would want to do that, they throw out a lot of pre-packaged verbiage that boils down to “because NASA is government and government is EVIL!!” I ask what NASA should be doing instead of what they are doing, and the only answer they have is “get out of the way and let private enterprise take over” because private enterprise is always better at everything all the time without exception ever. EVER!!

It isn’t Dennis Kucinich and Rachel Maddow leading me to these people; they present themselves just fine. And they commonly identify themselves as “Libertarians” or “Libertarian-leaning Republicans.”

Maybe these strange people aren’t out in much of the rest of the world in any kind of force and it’s only space cadets like me who have to put up with them (though they DO exist elsewhere, maybe they only make noise instead of predominate though sheer numbers).

By: Maggie McNeill

Maggie McNeill — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 02:59:16 +0000

LOL! Nice alliteration!

By: John Harold

John Harold — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 02:55:23 +0000

Wow! A true libertine libertarian librarian. Take a bow for a well done tome MM

By: Bandoblue

Bandoblue — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 21:14:30 +0000

I do skim articles in Reason from time to time, but I find it really, really lacking on environmental issues–click “environment” on the “Topics” list on their Website and you’ll find a lot of shallow ideological hand-waving, little of substance.

I have read a number of much more serious libertarian attempts to wrestle with externalities. Most invoke Ronald Coase’s work as an argument that Pigovian taxation is unnecessary. But most of these “Coasian” models seem to me to have basic issues of scale– they barely work even for a very simplified scenario (like a single point polluter of a river and a single point river user–say, an Indian tribe with fishing rights). Against a real world problem like carbon emissions they just fall apart.

Thoughtful libertarians, like this fellow, seem to concede that this is a significant issue for them:

http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/12/28/a-third-kind-of-green-libertarians-should-care-about/

I have yet to read a really good solution to these issues within the libertarian framework, hence my appeal for tips.

By: Maggie McNeill

Maggie McNeill — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:02:55 +0000

"True Believers" can adopt libertarian philosophy as their Bible as well as they can adopt anything else. But that doesn't make them libertarian thinkers any more than it makes the typical Bible-beater a Jesuit. Nor is this a "No True Scotsman" dodge; there are plenty of real libertarians writing on the web, but if you rely on the media or self-avowed "liberals" to point them out to you, you'll be waiting a long time. The Agitator and Reason magazine are excellent places to start if you want to understand what genuine libertarian thought is like.