With the virtue of hindsight, we can see what made Socialism so attractive to educated people back in the 19th century. It provided them with an illusion that they could solve all the problems and injustices of the world. Particularly in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, sensitive, educated minds could see that it didn’t need to be so crude and cruel — and dirty!
Fortunately social scientists Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong conducted a double-blind social science experiment throughout most of the 20th century to try it out. Experts agree that the social science experiment proved conclusively that socialism does not work. The Black Book of Communism says that about 100 million humans died in the experiment.
And if you include in the the socialist experiment the various national socialist states and the various “planning” states the butcher’s bill goes even higher.
Today, obviously, the educated class is in full cry after another delusion. It is the regulatory state. You can see why. The regulatory state creates millions of secure, well-paid jobs for educated gentry. Its latest enthusiasm is to phase out fossil fueled cars with regulatory ukases.
Our overlords now accept — without actually admitting anything — that socialism does not work. But they believe it absolutely essential that the market economy should be administered — or directed or regulated — by people like them: people that understand the danger of an unsupervised society.
At the apex of the New Thing is climate change. I want you to understand that climate change is a natural for the administrative, regulatory state, in particular for for an educated class that experiences itself as a global elite.
You should understand that climate change was invented by a Canadian, Maurice Strong. Starting out as a businessman he pushed the UN into the environmental game. Here’s how his UN profile puts it:
Maurice Strong played a unique and critical role in globalizing the environmental movement. He led the historic United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 1972.
Then
In June 1992, he led another landmark meeting: the UN Conference on Environment and Development – also known as the Earth Summit – it was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The conference addressed climate change and underscored the right to sustainable development, among other topics.
And in the middle, in 1988, the IPCC got started, with Jobs for Scientists.
And, of course, Maurice Strong was on the board of the World Economic Forum.
Really, getting the UN into climate change was brilliant. If you believe in world government then you need something for world government to do. And if you believe, as I do, that all government is based upon a fight against the enemy — or at least fighting an existential peril — then a looming climate crisis is exactly what you would select if you believe that the world needed global governance, and the global government needed something to govern.
Let us suppose that climate change really is a problem and that, because of human CO2 pollution, the temperature of the Earth is climbing and may result in irreversible harm to the planet and the life upon the planet.
There are two approaches to the problem. One is a top down regulatory and administrative regime to mandate changes in everything from electricity generation to transportation. The other is to leave it up to the market economy, on the assumption that, if something is going wrong, the market will come up with a solution much better and more effective than top-down ukase. And, without a doubt, it would be a solution that adapts to the changing environment.
Put it this way. There is nothing more important for humans on this planet than food. But is food production organized in a top-down global administrative program? Er, no. Stalin and Mao tried that and it didn’t turn out too well. Of course, just about every government on the planet has an agricultural program that mucks around with farmers and food production and subsidies and such. And in the middle is Big Ag. Do those agricultural programs really make a difference? Well, you be the judge.
Now, our global educated class knows that it knows better than you and I what to do about climate change. And the three things that it has glommed onto are solar panels, wind farms and electric vehicles (EVs).
I happen to know something about electric generation, and the one thing to understand about electric generation is that electric generation must exactly equal electric consumption every second. So the most valuable and high-priced generation technologies are those that can be easily turned on and off. Like gas turbine generators. In the middle are “baseload” plants like coal and nuclear that can’t be quickly turned on and off. The least valuable technologies are those that cannot be depended upon too be available whenever you want them. Like solar and wind farms. Oh yeah. Batteries. Let’s just say that all the stuff you hear about the time to recharge EVs and the weight of EVs suggests that batteries aren’t yet ready for prime time.
Let’s think of gasoline cars as EVs. You go into a gas-recharging station and you get a full charge in two minutes. Only then you waste a further minute going into the convenience store to get a receipt.
Jeffrey A Tucker has a definitive piece on EVs.
I’m not knocking some uses for EVs. If you think of them as enclosed and souped up golf carts, you get the idea.
And don’t forget the virtue-signalling benefit of swanking through your gentry neighborhood in a brand new Tesla.
So I say that if climate change is a problem, then the answer is market adaptation, not top-down planning.
And if, thanks to our beloved mainstream media, we discover pockets of people actually dying from climate change, well, with our modern technology we have the means to send the military in to save them.
But I tell you, paraphrasing Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Government has six ways from Sunday in which it screws up everything it gets its hands on. Including climate. And that’s because just about everything that humans do is too complicated to be done, military style, in a top-down administrative system.
And let us never forget that the one thing that government does well — war — is staggeringly wasteful of resources and humans. And pollutes the environment six ways from Sunday.