SomeMusings.com

As you might know, in my last post I explained why I think that pro-regulation, anti-speculation environmentalists are either stupid or evil. I used Keith Olbermann as an example but mostly because his last name sounds like the breed of a noble dog that I never got to have as a child.

Now, environmentalists, let me be quite clear. I strongly suspect that most of you are not evil. 39 times out of 40, you’re probably just stupid. And, when I say “stupid,” know that I am comparing you to someone that has reasoned their way to a consistent political philosophy. To be fair, it’s not even that surprising. That much thinking requires a lot of time and energy, and there is very little to show for it outside of a personal satisfaction. It would be downright puzzling if the majority of Americans honestly and objectively invested their time and energy in such intellectual, philosophical pursuits.

Or, in less words, I don’t think of you as any more stupid than the average American.

Which doesn’t say much, but it does say exactly as much as I mean for it to say. It’s not that big of a deal though. If you didn’t have the power to vote, your stupidity wouldn’t even be worth pointing out.

But you do. So it is.

But, maybe I’m speaking too soon. In the comments, Ryan asked an excellent question that may save environmentalists from the label of “evil.” He wonders if I am committing a slippery slope fallacy by saying that wanting to regulate businesses is morally equivalent to wanting to shoot dissidents.

To cover all the bases, a slippery slope is an argument that says “If A, then D” without provingthat there is a logical connection between A and D.

For instance, the argument “if America would not have fought in WWII, then we would all be speaking German right now” makes no effort to prove that Hitler’s Germany ever would

1. would have been able to fight effectively across the Atlantic (didn’t they fail at fighting across the English Channel?)
2. have been economically stable enough to survive (why couldn’t we have beaten them USSR style?)
3. would have gone to the effort of teaching their newly captured colonies German (did they make such a move in Vichy, France?)

Without making any points about America’s involvement in WWII, we can clinically say that “you’d be speaking German right now” is a slippery slope.

I don’t think that the original point that I made fits that definition.

I believe that we have to be completely realistic. The government is an organization that gets to set arbitrary rules. If you disobey them, they will take away your freedom and confine you to live the rest of your life in a white-washed closet with this man.

One could make the point, I suppose, that threatening to use violence and using violence are not morally equivalent. The federal government, after all, makes regulations that affect over 300 million people, and only 1 in 100 of which are currently incarcerated. The feds has (perhaps not unjustly) used violence to imprison millions of Americans, but hundreds of millions more have never felt that violence. Does that mean that they have not been violently ordered around?

Well, if a thug were to mug you at gunpoint tomorrow, would you call that a violent theft? Technically no violence was involved (only the threat of violence), but, in my view, threatening to use violence is just as coercive and, unless used in retaliation for some other evil, just as evil as using violence itself.

So, even if a business man obeys an environmental regulations, he does so not out of self-interests or noble sacrifice but because of a fear of violence. He doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life bunking with this guy.

Can you blame him?

And is it wrong to call such a coercive act violence?

For the record, I think that it’s absolutely essential to, at times, throw morality aside and look at the reality of one’s ideals.

From what I’ve read, I am extremely pessimistic about government regulations doing anything efficient or meaningful to save the environment.

Take a look at Germany. In 2004, after massive subsidies for solar panels, they managed to fuck up the production of solar panels for at least half a decade. Bureaucrats are, plain and simple, bad at distributing resources. Is that any sort of surprise?

Here’s an even bigger example. The Environmental Protection Agency and the US Department of Energy (those are the agencies in charge of protecting the environment and being the Department of Energy, respectively) have identified underutilized technologies that, if installed into US power plants, would lower our nation’s CO2 emissions by twenty percent!

Why aren’t power companies installing these energy saving devices? Why has the efficiency of American power plants stagnated since the late 1950’s?

If you guessed regulations, then pat yourself on the back. Because utility companies are not allowed to profit from lower operating costs, they have no incentive to increase efficiency. In fact, rather paradoxically, installing newer equipment makes them subject to more stringent regulations, meaning that the companies best serve their self-interests letting their plants stagnate in obsolete equipment.

Don’t take my word for it, click this link and read it for yourself.

Is it any surprise that putting a gun up to a person’s head is a terrible way to improve society?

Environmentalists, assuming that any of you made it this far, that my reasoning is sound, and that you followed it, you can no longer claim to be stupid. If you continue to support government regulations to achieve your goals, then I get to call you an evil bigot.