Was the New Deal a Raw Deal? Debate [updated]

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal is a popular touchstone in these Depressionary days. It’s evoked by everyone from Barack Obama (“Green New Deal!”) to Robert Higgs (“No New Deal!”), from Paul Krugman to Peter Schiff.

Roosevelt’s New Deal rescued America from the Great Depression OR Roosevelt’s New Deal prolonged America’s Depression, and caused even further economic woes. Both these propositions can’t be true. Whichever side of this historic debate you’re on, however, it’s agreed by all sides that the economic predicament of today can find lessons in that Great Disaster of yesteryear:

• Do we spend dramatically to stimulate ever bigger bubbles?
• And if so, how much?
• Or do we cut our coats according to our rapidly-shrinking cloth, and learn to do more with less?
• And to save more of what we have left over?

Different lessons based largely on different readings of the success or otherwise of FDR’s New Deal – so a debate on the effectiveness or otherwise of the New Deal could not be timelier.

Head therefore to Public Square, where Jeff Madrick (author of The Case for Big Government) and Robert Murphy (author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal) go head to head to answer the question Was the New Deal a Raw Deal?

(You can see an index for each salvo in the debate on each page. And you can see some perceptive comments on the debate over at the Mises Blog, and you can join it at the Public Square Forum.)

RELATED READING:

• 'Great Myths of the Great Depression' - Lawrence Reed [sixteen-pages in PDF]
• 'Saving the Depression: A New Look at World War II' - Mark Skousen [online article]
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"The problem isn't that none of the Green New Deal's goals can be achieved. The problem is that only HALF of these goals can be achieved..." Bonus #QotD

Today's Bonus Quote of the Day comes from Robert Tracinski's latest newsletter, on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's modern-day Morgenthau Plan, aka her so-called "Green New Deal":

The problem isn’t that none of the Green New Deal’s goals can be achieved. The problem is that only half of these goals can be achieved. We can’t build high-speed rail everywhere, but we can abolish air travel. We can’t power the whole economy on “renewable energy,” but we can shut down existing power plants. We can’t give everyone a “family-sustaining wage,” but we can definitely kill cows and tell our kids there’s no more milk to drink. We can’t provide economic security for people who don’t want to work, but we can flood the country with billion-dollar bank notes that won’t buy anything. It is very hard to create, but very easy to destroy.

          

Alternative energy schemes costing Spanish taxes, jobs

So much for the  so called “Green New Deal” – it’s as flawed as the first New Deal.  So much for so called renewable energy: -- as I’ve said before, its defining characteristic is that it is “energy produced by means that would be uneconomic without such tax breaks and subsidies.”

Latest evidence for the prosecution: Spanish taxpayers’ forced “investment” in ‘renewable energy' has destroyed more jobs than it created, while subsidising them at absurdly high costs.  Read ‘Spain Tilts At Windmills And Pays Price.’  Here’s an excerpt [hat tip Jeff Perren]:

    Spanish professor [Gabriel Calzada] is puzzled. Why,  wonders [the economics professor at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos], is the U.S. president recommending that America emulate the Spanish model for creating "green jobs" in "alternative energy" even though Spain's unemployment rate is 18.1% — more than double the European Union average — partly because of spending on such jobs. . .
    Calzada says Spain's torrential spending — no other nation has so aggressively supported production of electricity from renewable sources — on wind farms and other forms of alternative energy has indeed created jobs.
    But Calzada's report concludes that they often are temporary and have received $752,000 to $800,000 each in subsidies. Wind industry jobs cost even more, $1.4 million each. And each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation . . .  Calzada says the creation of jobs in alternative energy has subtracted about 110,000 jobs from elsewhere in Spain's economy.

Sounds so insane it’s no wonder local Greens like the idea.  Featherbedding for featherheads.  As Tom Woods says, throwing the Broken Window Fallacy at the whole Green New Deal crap:

I won't ask if they think [people] are this stupid, since they obviously do. Leaving aside the question of whether carbon needs to be capped, since that has nothing to do with whether doing so "creates jobs" on net, is there a non-drone, non-bought-and-paid-for human being on this earth who thinks throwing obstacles in the path of production "creates jobs" in a non-trivial sense? Couldn't I, with equal justification, say that forcing every business to destroy its roof and then build a new one out of clay, or chopping off every third worker's right hand, would create an analogous series of jobs?

Moral of the story?  There are at least two.  First, the problem with job creation at this time and any time is not about creating jobs at any cost but, as George Reisman tells Paul Krugman, it’s about creating productive jobs at prices employers can afford.

And second, there’s only two kinds of energy production: energy that costs more to produce than it delivers, and energy that doesn’t. Guess which kind “renewable energy” is.

NB: You can download Calzada’s report here: Study of the effects on employment of public aid to renewable energy sources.

If you want to see what a Green New Deal would look like, look around ...

Alex Epstein appeared on America's 'National Report' to argue 'If you want to see what a Green New Deal would look like, just look around ... "

And in the first segment of this week’s Power Hour podcast, he discusses six "filters" he uses to screen out most commentary and claims about COVID-19, to find just the best expert analyses:

The six filters are: 

1. Do they assume freedom of action means recklessness?
2. Do they assume lockdown means optimal virus prevention?
3. Do they advocate universal measures for the highly vulnerable and low-vulnerability alike?
4. Do they equate diagnosed infections with actual infections? (This is a tactic used to hyper-inflate death rates.)
5. Do they devalue freedom and quality of life?
6. Do they treat the goal as eradication instead of management? 

Unfortunately [says Alex], I believe that the policies and studies being used by governments at all levels are committing most of the above mistakes.
    One of the most promising experts I’ve found on this issue is Dr. David Katz of Yale.     While he and I diverge on broad political philosophy I’ve found him to be very precise in his analysis of the real risks of COVID-19 to different demographics—and very wise in his advocacy of selective universal isolation practices and policies vs. the universal isolation practices and policies advocated by political leaders of both parties. 

Here is Dr. Katz’s page on COVID-19 and here is one of my favourite articles by him.

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Richard Ebeling surveys the cultural and political wreckage in the aftermath of Trump. Friends of liberty must gird themselves, he says in this guest post, for an intellectual and ideological battle the likes of which very few of us have experienced outside of a totalitarian state and its campaign of mind-controlling propaganda. The rise (and plummet) of Trumpism has helped make it possible...

Trump’s Fall and the Rise of the Tribal Collectivists

by Richard Ebeling

It has often been said that religious wars are the most unforgiving because one or both protagonists are absolutely, if not fanatically, certain that “the” truth is on their side. This is threatening to become the situation in America today with the ideological dogmatism seen in the mindset and extremism of the identity politics warriors and cancel culture crusaders, and their allies in the political party that has swept into controlling power in Washington, D.C. as a result of the recent presidential and congressional elections.

We see that not only to the victor goes the spoils, but a vengefulness of taking advantage of the victory to seemingly condemn and exorcise all and everything viewed as part of the defeated “deplorables.” Not that Donald Trump and many in the Republican Party had not brought this down on themselves. In his manner and message from the time he began running for the office of the presidency, Trump aroused anger, shock, and contempt in many who listened to his words and watched his deeds.

Trump’s Arrogance and Ego

He told the media that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York City and his supporters would still vote for him. At a campaign rally in 2016, he encouraged his followers to physically rough someone up in the crowd, and assured any who might act on his words that he’d cover their legal expenses. His arrogance had no bounds. When asked during the 2016 campaign why he seemed to have so few policy advisors around him, he replied that he did not need them since he was the smartest person he had ever met.

The man who ghost-wrote Trump’s book The Art of the Deal said that in the 18 months during which he followed Trump around at his home or his places of business, one thing seemed to be always absent among the furnishings: books of any type. Why bother reading anything when you already know everything that is worth knowing? Even though he seemed to have put hardly any actual word on paper himself while his book was being (co)written, “Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book,” said the ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz. Reality was what Trump wanted it to be. 

Trump the Carnival Hawker and Huckster

If I be accused of Monday morning quarterbacking now when Trump is down and out, and that it is easy to put his “imperfections” on display, I beg the readers’ indulgence and permit me to briefly quote what I wrote about him in early 2017, when his administration was just beginning:

“He [Trump] reminds me of the carnival sideshow hawkers enticing us into their attractions by promising wonderous things through exaggeration, deception, distortion, and prurient promises, and for the admission price of only . . .

“Trump is sort of a P.T. Barnum brought back to life. Someone who knows how to play to people’s desires, fears, erotic fantasies, and greed for getting something that is outside of the normal range of everyday life, and only for a few pennies. Hurry in, the show is about to begin in the inside . . .
    “Trump preys on his potential supporter-victims by drawing upon almost every economic fallacy in the book. You lost your job? It’s because some manipulative foreign supplier stole away your American employer’s customers through a selling swindle of offering his version of the product at a lower price. Don’t worry, Trump is now in charge and he will create jobs by keeping the foreign goods out and by talking to the bad American businessmen who want to produce something, somewhere else. And if they don’t respond favorably to Trump’s words, he has a big stick of special import taxes just for them if they try to import back into America what they have produced outside the country at a lower cost. . . The con man and the huckster are masters at fooling people into believing that they can have something for nothing, or if not for nothing, then at half the usual price.”

 

The Anger and Outrage of Trump’s Opponents

If I be also accused of being blind to the conniving ambitions of the Democratic Party and the “progressive” movement, I also said:

“[Trump’s noisiest] opponents are primarily disgruntled Democrats, sore-loser lefties, and political trough-eaters who bet on the wrong political horse in the presidential race. It is especially hard on all of them, because they were all certain that Hillary Clinton was going to win and keep the horn-of-plenty of plunder coming their way.
    “They want Trump gone because he offends the aesthetic niceties that form the veneer of altruistic kindness and concern for humanity beneath which they hide their plunder-lusting, while they pick taxpayers’ pockets and arrogantly tell those they have looted that it is all for their own good and the rest of mankind because they are too stupidly uninformed to know how to spend their own money or manage their own lives.
    “Their anger and fears do not come from a concern for the freedom and dignity of the individual person, or the sanctity of human relationships based on voluntary association and peaceful, market betterment. They do not come from a cherishing of the institutions and the heritage of a constitutional order based on the eternal concern for the threat of tyrants who would reduce mankind to slaves and serfs bound to the command of those possessing power.
    “No, theirs is a frustration and fury that the reins of coercive control have passed into the ‘wrong hands’ – hands different from theirs and used for government planning and plunder purposes different from the ones they want and desire. Theirs is an insistence on the illegitimacy of Trump’s presidency, because all are illegitimate who do not share the values and views of those soldiers for ‘political correctness’ fighting for a bright and better collectivist future of their own imaginings.”

 

Trump’s Mixed Bag of Economic Policies

There are friends of freedom who honestly and sincerely take umbrage at any such criticisms of Donald Trump. They point to the fact that he withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords concerning the environment; that he opened America to a fuller and more market-based energy policy that led to a boom of cleaner-air natural gas and which did not crucify fossil fuels on a cross of dangerous global warming central planning; he lowered corporate and individual taxes and introduced deregulation of many government restrictions on business activity.

Also, by early 2020, before the coronavirus crisis and the government-imposed lockdowns and shutdowns of a good amount of the country’s economic activity, national unemployment had gone down to about 3.5 percent, with various minority groups and age groups reaching 50-year historic unemployment lows. The U.S. economy was operating at what most macroeconomists would normally have considered more or less “full employment.”

At the same time, however, he drew the United States into trade wars, making some goods more expensive and sometimes less available to both American consumers and producers importing the inputs with which they manufacture their own outputs. His policies led to retaliations like those from China against American agriculture that resulted in Trump spending tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars to shore up part of the farming community that his own trade policies damaged.

Trump’s entire outlook on trade and competition was a populist neomercantilism in which the presumption was that if other countries prosper it must imply that some other country had lost. International trade was a zero-sum game. In his mind, the world was taking advantage of America; it was “them” versus “us” in which the “us” aggregated away all the particular microeconomic ways that trade barriers, restrictions, and manipulations resulted in harm to numerous economic “innocent bystanders” in the name of trying to target some chosen beneficiaries. (See my articles, “The Zero Sum World of Donald Trump” and “Trump’s Economic Warfare Targets Innocent Bystanders” and “America’s Economic Commissar of Trade” and “How Much Damage Will Come from this Trade War?”)

He publicly bullied senior corporate executives when they relocated or downsized manufacturing facilities and reduced workforces in those areas that Trump thought should have special treatment; basically, because he considered those states critical for winning a second term in 2020. He presumed to know where factories should be located and what products were essential for “American greatness.” In other words, he was an economic social engineer and central planner on these matters. (See my articles, “Presidential Hubris: ‘Let Me Run the Country’” and “U.S. Revives the Personal State”.)

He was not willing to rein in federal domestic spending, and indeed did nothing even to try. American voters, he said, liked their Social Security and Medicare, so he would not challenge their wisdom by making the case for entitlement reform or repeal. When Trump took office in January 2017, the national debt was about $20 trillion. At the end of his administration, the national debt has increased to over $27.5 trillion; a nearly 39 percent increase in one presidential term. Even not counting the additions to the 2020 fiscal year deficit spending due to the government’s increased borrowing resulting from Trump and Congress’s response to the coronavirus, the national debt would still have increased by at least 25 percent by the end of Trump’s four years in the White House. 

The Song Says, It Ain’t What You Do, But the Way That You Do It

But, say some of the free market-oriented supporters of Trump, his personality and his bombastic, rude, crude, and offensive manner and mode of expressing himself should be irrelevant. Results and outcomes, not rhetoric and demeanor, should matter, at the end of the day.

The intellectual take on things is that ideas and their applied results should be judged on their own merits, separate from who or how someone may have articulated their implementation. In theory that is absolutely a reasonable insistence so debates and discourse do not degenerate into ad hominem attacks that never grapple with the ideas rather than simply assaults on their expositor.

But in the real world, certainly in the realm of democratic politics but also even in the rarified heights of academia and the intellect, who and how ideas and policies are presented taints how they are received and taken seriously or not. Every word out of Trump’s mouth, every insult and offending phrase, every declaration of contempt for anyone and anything that failed to hail him as the “great American” and questioned his decisions, colored people’s judgment of what policies he wanted or actions he undertook.

A lot of people have come to seriously dislike him. They would not want him as a next-door neighbour, and they certainly would not want him dating their daughter! That it was Trump that many people were voting against is seen in the fact that in spite of his negative standing with so many voters, Republicans gained seats in the House of Representatives, retained a numerical stalemate in the U.S. Senate (with the vice-president as the tie-breaking vote for the Democrats), and did not lose control of any state legislatures already in their hands. It’s you, Donald! It’s all you!

Trump’s Responsibility for the Events at the US Capitol

He was his own worst enemy. This culminated in the events of January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. Constitutional scholar Anthony Turley and Judge Andrew Napolitano have made reasonable arguments that Donald Trump’s words to his supporters before the violence at the Capitol Building were not incitements to violent action under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and therefore should be considered “protected speech.”

However, something may be legal, but unwise. It may not be subject to criminal prosecution, but it might be, nonetheless, an influencing factor on the conduct of others. Both before and after the presidential election on November 3, 2020, Trump insisted that if he did not win it only could be because of voter fraud and cheating. Then when the votes were counted and results were announced, the fact that he was declared the “loser” – one of Trump’s favourite terms to dismiss and demean his opponents – this, then, showed the outcome had been rigged.

Even when his appeals to state-level electoral boards, to federal judges, and finally to the Supreme Court were all turned down due to lack of sufficient evidence and proof of voter tampering to challenge the result, this, too, was a demonstration of the conspiracy against him. When the three justices on the Supreme Court who he had nominated to that office rejected his appeal, in Trump’s mind this showed their lack of loyalty to the man who had put them there. How could they not overturn the election when they clearly “owed him?”

Angered, indignant, frustrated, and desperate to right the wrong that Trump repeated night and day that their man in the White House was being removed unjustly and therefore all that he promised to do for them and the country would be denied, some of those who drank Trump’s Kool-Aid decided to take things into their own hands. Yes, those who broke into, disrupted the Congress’s business, and vandalized the Capitol Building are the ones legally responsible for their own actions before the law. But even if Trump is not legally culpable, his was a voice whispering tales of treachery in their ears for a very long time. It was time to try to save the country, because their “saviour” said the country would be in danger without him remaining in the White House. 

The Releasing of the Collectivist Demons

And now the collectivist demons have been set loose. Democrats, “progressives,” “democratic” socialists, and the huge cadre of identity politics would-be totalitarians in the halls of higher education who see racism and sexism everywhere from the moment they wake up to the minute they fall asleep, see their chance.

Like “enemies of the people” being airbrushed out of photographs in Stalin’s Russia when they had fallen out of favour with the “best friend of every Soviet child,” those on the political “left” in America see their chance to erase from existence the last four years of U.S. history. Even before taking the presidential oath of office and delivering his inaugural address on January 20, 2021, Joe Biden outlined his agenda for nearly $2 trillion of additional federal spending. Tens of millions for the full centralization of federal control and distribution of the anti-Covid-19 vaccines. Hundreds of billions of more borrowed dollars for continued subsidization of many of the very millions of people the government lockdowns have thrown into unemployment, depleted savings, and ruined lives.

At a time when many businesses in, especially, the service sectors of the economy are hemorrhaging revenues due to state governments once again ordering their closing or reduced activities, Joe Biden promises to raise the national minimum wage to at least $15 per hour; pricing even more people out of existing or potential employment in the market shows just how much Joe “cares” and assures more dependent people on government largess, people who will owe their votes to the Democrat hands that feed them their handouts. (See my article, “Freedom and the Minimum Wage”.)

What presidential executive orders and discretionary power have done can then be undone by the next occupant in the White House. For instance, Joe Biden intends to reverse Trump’s U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accords on climate change; and he will reintroduce increased regulations of businesses and government land use by appointing different heads to the federal departments, bureaus and agencies tasked with the duty of restoring the “taming” of private enterprise.

A push will be made for greater federal control and direction of health insurance and medical care. The new president and Democratic-controlled Congress will, no doubt, go for versions of the Green New Deal, which means government central planning of what and how private enterprises do their business in the name of “saving” the planet. “Corporate Social Responsibility” will become the watchword to rationalize and justify more government intrusion into how businesses manage and operate their enterprises for purposes of racial, gender, and income “equity.” (See my articles, “The Green New Dealers and the New Socialism” and “The Nightmare Fairyland of the Green New Dealers” and “The Case for a Coercive Green New Deal?” and “Stakeholder Fascism Means More Loss of Liberty”.)

Tribal Collectivists on a Mission to Purge Racist and Sexist “Capitalism”

What is driving this is not simply the “usual” desires for political power and traditional presumptions behind dreams of social engineering. More deeply, by those at the more radical end of the Democratic Party and “progressive” movement, is a determination to destroy the philosophical, political, and economic premises and foundations upon which the United States was based.

At the beginning of this article, I suggested that religious wars are the most unforgiving because one or both of the protagonists is certain that the “truth” is on their side. It is a battle between good and evil, salvation or damnation. For the identity politics warriors and the cancel culture crusaders, they are on a “mission” for an ideological cause: The delegitimizing and destruction of philosophical individualism, of political freedom, and of economic liberty.

In their secular holy roller hysteria, the entire history of “America” is tainted with slavery, racism, and oppression of women and “people of color” for the benefit of a male, white elite of capitalist exploiters. All the talk about personal freedom, civil liberties, and free market opportunities are the smokescreens of creating a “false consciousness” among all those harmed by “the system” to accept their unequal and abused statuses in society.

All of it, of course, is merely the new variation on the stale and old wine of Marxian class conflict analysis, but relabeled into a story of race and gender oppression and conflict. Social class, per se, does not determine your identity and place in capitalist society. No, it is your race and gender classification that mold who you are, how you think, and give you meaning and relationship to others. The individual disappears in the collectivist pigeonhole into which identity politics warriors have assigned him. Welcome to the new hybrid: Marxo-Nazism. See my articles, “Tyrants of the Mind and the New Collectivism” and “An Identity Politics Victory Would Mean the End to Liberty” and “Collectivism’s Progress: From Marxism to Race and Gender Intersectionality” and “The New Totalitarians” and “‘Systemic Racism’ Theory is the New Political Tribalism” and “Save America from Cancel Culture” and “Self-Censorship and Despotism over the Mind”.)

The Ideological Faith of the New Tribal Collectivists

For the “true believer,” reason and evidence have little or no place. He has been “born again” with the certainty that “real” understanding of the world has been given to him. He is called to deliver humanity from its “original sin” in white privilege and oppression. What rational discourse does one apply when a professor in New York insists that 2+2=4 is a concept that “reeks with white supremacist patriarchy?” (See my article, “Watchwords that Threaten Liberty”.)

Tearing down statues, renaming buildings, silencing and slandering people, from a salesman to a scholar, for saying a word, using a phrase, repeating a witticism, or cracking a joke that the “woke” people consider an abomination against the “marginalized,” are all elements and aspects to erasing “America” from the knowledge and history of humankind. The entire experience of the United States is to be made into an Orwellian-like “non-person.”

And Trump’s words and deeds that have offended, put off, and repulsed so many in the country has provided the “hook” for our Marxo-Nazi fanatics, in conjunction with their Democratic Party and “progressive” allies, to brand and tar anyone and anything with the racist and sexist label for expulsion from any hearing or respectable place in society. Since if you are not with them, then you are against them. And, therefore, you must be an explicit or implicit “Trumpist,” which has rapidly become as damaging to one’s character and future as being called a “Hitlerian.” That is, an enemy of decency and democracy. Would you want one of “them” sitting, working or living next to you?

Friends of liberty must gird themselves for an intellectual and ideological battle the likes of which very few of us have experienced outside of a totalitarian state and its campaign of mind-controlling propaganda. The rise (and plummet) of Trumpism has helped make it possible.

* * * * 

Richard M. Ebeling, an AIER Senior Fellow, is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina.
This post first appeared at the American Institute for Economic Research blog.

His most recent book is For A New Liberalism.
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FRIDAY MORNING RAMBLE: The boring bloody budget edition

Anyone have links to good Budget commentary? Because I struggled to stay awake throughout Bill’s self-justifying dirge, so failed to post my own. (And I’m betting I’m not the only one who so struggled.) How about you add good links in the comments, if you have any, and I’ll add them up here as I see them. In the meantime, while Americans were sleeping…

One measure of today’s housing crisis: Remember when a new subdivision wasn’t national news?
New subdivision gets green light – RADIO NZ

Here come more cowboys.
State houses checked for WOF – Mike Butler, BREAKING VIEWS

10 Questions for Loopy Len on his backtracking Unitary Plan.
Planning Parrot: 10 Questions for Len Brown – WHALE OIL

He’s right, you know.
Open the Door to Migrants – Luke Malpass, NZ INITIATIVE

And the real danger to opening the golden door is … ? “A US border security expert who won a Fulbright and decided to write his thesis on New Zealand’s border security … concluded the major threat to New Zealand’s borders was not terrorism but a biosecurity breach.”
Burn after reading – DIM POST

Just who would society be better off without? A disabled son, or someone saying he should be killed off “because of their cost to society?
Better Off Without You – AUTISM AND OUGHTISMS

You know, any politician could do the same today. < cough > cannabis < cough >
The Real Reason for FDR's Popularity – Mark Thornton, MISES DAILY

Allegedly.
The 25 hardest things about living in New Zealand – BUZZFEED

The truth about the death in Benghazi of US ambassador Chris Stevens and his colleagues is slowly emerging—with the Obama Administration delaying it at every step.

Andrew Bolt offers “10 signs that the death of the global warming scare are unmistakable. Now it's time to hold the guilty to account.”
10 Signs that warming scare is all hot air
Where are Gore’s hurricanes?
Green energy: keeping warm by burning billions of dollars
Are the satellites lying about poor, drowning Kiribati?
Look at this other drowning island, the Global Mail writer insisted. So I did…
Robyn “100 metres” Williams comes up 99.3 metres short

Windows 8 is only the beginning of Microsoft’s problems, and maybe the start of understanding creative destruction?
Microsoft blues – ECONOMIST

“Unemployable” head of BP Tony Hayward finally lands a temp job.
Ex-BP boss Tony Hayward gets life back with new job at Glencore Xstrata – HERALD SUN

A free chapter from David Stockman’s superb new book, The Great Deformation – The Corruption of Capitalism in America
New Deal Myths of Recovery – LEW ROCKWELL

A new book by every modern economists and central bankers’ hero.
How I Printed So Much Money in Zimbabwe That the Country Experienced Hyper-Inflation – EPJ

See what I mean: “Paul Krugman just endorsed the mad money printing that has been launched in Japan under the rule of the new Prime Minister Shinzo Abe…”
More For the Krugman File – EPJ

Don’t believe Chinese data, especially when it’s good.
China's Data Manipulation In One Chart, And Why The Real Data Implies Weakest GDP Growth In Over 20 Years – ZERO HEDGE

Do believe European data, especially when it’s this bad.
France Double-Dips As European Recession Is Now Longest On Record – ZERO HEDGE

A Capitol Hill briefing on copyright by a group of free-market economists, lawyers, lecturers and entrepreneurs.
CopyRIGHT: Can Free Marketeers Agree on Copyright Reform? - CEI Video

What say you, Bitcoin boosters?
US Government Begins BitCoin Crackdown – ZERO HEDGE

Yes, you too can make your own Periodic Table of Spices (above).
Magnetic Periodic Table of Herbs and Spices – INSTRUCTABLES

Did you know you can attend this July’s “Objectivist Summer Conference” in Chicago wherever in the world you are by webcast? With some great sessions in the offing—from The Politics of Pretend to Convincing the Intellectual Property Skeptic to Frank Lloyd Wright to 1910: “The First Golden Age”—you really should check it out:
Livestreaming – OBJECTIVIST SUMMER CONFERENCE, 2013

Recent historical analysis of the toxin America’s founders left subsequent generations to clean up.
Thomas Jefferson's Nightmare – HISTORY NEWS NETWORK

You know you can download whole books free at the Mises Institute, right? Like this collection of essays by Hayek, for example, including his classics like ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ and his contribution to the calculation debate.

She’s right, you know.
Breaking news: Stuffed Rape Culture – HAND MIRROR

An exploded view of a Frank Lloyd Wright classic…
Usonia at SCJ – WRIGHT IN RACINE

The importance of knowing your history.
Ten Things Romans Used for Toilet Paper – ROMAN MYSTERIES & WESTERN MYSTERIES

Not really the right day to be thinking about it, but if you are…
Tips for Bike Commuting to Work – BLISS TREE

Here you go:

Had enough of hearing how hard composers and musicians’ lives are? So was Rimsky-Korsakov.
Rimsky-Korsakov on the “hardship” of the composer’s life – STEPHEN HICKS

If you liked yesterday’s Ralph Vaughan-Williams, then you’ll love this:

All sorts of great things are appearing on YouTube, including long forgotten TV broadcasts of the magnificent Count Basie band like this 1965 example from the BBC, which almost on its own justifies its existence. Almost:

Oh yeah, it’s NZ Music Month. Anybody else head along to see “old timers” Danse Macabre and Penknife Glides at King’s Arms?

Brazier Noir:

[Hat tips Peter Longfield, Jazz on the Tube, ewald engelen, Geek Press]

Thanks for reading,
and have a great weekend!

PC -

Sun sets on solar

 

Renewable energy is generally unaffordable energy. It’s unreliable energy. [It's not renewable, and it's barely energy.] For years, this so called “sustainable” energy has instead been heavily-subsidised energy – the alleged energy warmists would point to in arguing that conventional fossil-fuel energy should either be banned or taxed into extinction. Sustainable only by virtue of the subsidies, and utterly unsustainable without.

A whole alleged industry on the mooch.

But the sun is now setting internationally on solar power, and all those “green jobs” Russel Norman and his cronies talked about for years are revealed as nothing more than moonshine.

It’s been an interesting time of late. Within the last few weeks, Solar Trust of America (STA), owner of the world’s largest solar plant, filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11, and nobody expects much of it, if anything, to emerge from it. STA joins a long list of companies in the solar energy sector, who’ve gone bankrupt, ducked into protection from their creditors, suspended production indefinitely or are simply circling the plughole.
    Across the world, a few of the more prominent and expensive casualties are Solyndra, Solar Millennium AG, Energy Conversion Devices Inc, Q-Cells, Solon, Solar Millenium, Solarhybrid, Ener1, Range Fuels, Beacon Power Corp and there’s a whole lot of others.

What else distinguished these companies other than the word ‘solar’ in their title?

Nearly all of these companies were the beneficiaries of huge government startup grants or loan guarantees.

Ah. They were all moochers. Cronies sucking off the state tit. A very green business model indeed.

The products they made were effectively sold to consumers with a subsidy, to make them more attractive. The customers also had the benefit of some generous feed-in tariff schemes. All that money that was sunk into them has now gone and the specific green industry sector it was expected to create, is pretty much moribund.

This is the very “green industry sector” Russel and the Greens have been touting. The cheerleading for mooching has continued under James Shaw – and would undoubtedly form part of any deal with whatever Government might partner up with them.

Yet even with the subsidies these green succubi were unsuccessful, consuming more resources than they ever produced. And the wreckage is not confined to the US.

In Germany, which gets the same amount of sunshine as the US state of Alaska and where inexplicably nearly half the solar power output of the world was installed, investment experts expect not a single solar cell company to be in business in five years time, since not one of them is currently showing an operating profit, nor is expected to do so in the foreseeable future. In Germany alone, the government have to date handed out about €100 billion in subsidies to renewable energy and even there, the most fervently green country in Europe, they’ve begun to have some serious doubts. It’s a money pit. The promised green jobs haven’t appeared and unemployment in the developed nations continues to rise. On a world-wide basis, the money wasted runs into the billions of dollars.
    Billions and billions and we’ve ended up with pretty much nothing. Actually, that’s not quite correct. What we will have, within a decade or two, is a clear up job that’ll make Chernobyl look like a training day. As the vast arrays of panels age, they’ll crack and contaminate the topsoil with poisonous chemical particles. Take a careful look at the picture below, because that’s what we’ll have to pay to detoxify, and make no mistake, we’ll be the ones paying, despite a few of the companies installing these panels having given undertakings to dispose of the panels at the end of their service life. The hard-nosed investor in me reckons they’ll be safely bankrupt by the time any such expensive undertakings have to be honoured.

I wonder where we will store all that contaminated topsoil? Perhaps wherever we’d planned to store nuclear waste, before we decided not to build any more nuclear plants.

So why are all these crony companies going bust? Simple: they were never profitable from day one, and were never going to be profitable thereafter. Their whole business case was based on subsidies.

[But[ subsidies …were never supposed to last forever. They were part of larger stimulus packages, which were only supposed to get those businesses up and running. If the business proposals and revenue projections were correct, all those companies should have been running profitably by now. They patently weren’t, so pretty much the same questions arise ….
    The business case for the whole industry was supported by numerous studies by scientists, academia, so-called industry experts and advocates of renewable energy, all of whom said it was the clean and profitable future of energy production. Obviously, all those studies were seriously wrong and ended up costing governments billions. Has anyone got back to these “experts” and asked why the studies and their financial models were all so bad? Given how shoddy their expert advice has proven to be, is anyone asking for the money back, which we paid for this supposed expertise? In the light of how bad expert advice in this area has been, is anyone reviewing advice for similar green sectors, such as wind power? Anyone? Anywhere?

Of course not. And you can double-damn guarantee that you’ll be hearing the same bullshit business case being made by the Greens again from here to the next election, lapped up and regurtitated without research by their lamestream media colleagues. Yet,

Never in the history of the world, has such an amount of money been wasted, without any trace of financial oversight or accountability. Not only has the money been squandered, but at a time of high unemployment, the fashionable rush to create illusory green jobs, has actually destroyed jobs in the real economy. A study in Spain concluded that for every green job created by their massive renewables investment, the real economy lost 2.2 real jobs and only one in ten of those green jobs created, will be permanent. The much touted transfer of jobs from the real economy to the green economy simply never occurred either. Similar studies in Britain, Canada and Scotland have come back with equally appalling numbers.

Do we need to repeat that here?

In the UK, they’re calling the rise in this fashionable non-energy and the rocketing energy prices it creates “fuel poverty” – poorer folk pushed into extremity by the rinsing price of energy under David Cameron’s subsidies of the fashionable and carbon taxes on the reliable.

The UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change’s (DECC) latest report in July 2011, which only gives figures up to 2009, estimated that 18% of UK households were then officially classified as being in fuel poverty. The UK Citizen’s Advice Bureau, again a guesstimate circa 2009, is concerned that 5.5 million people in UK face living in freezing conditions through Winter, because of self-rationing or disconnection. Given the steep jump in domestic power prices over the last three years, the figure must now be well over 25%.

Must we really repeat that here?

Governments wasting vast amounts of taxpayer’s money on financially absurd projects is always bad but if the net effect of doing so, is to impoverish and harm their own most vulnerable citizens, then it’s unforgivable.

It would be.

.

RELATED POSTS:

• “Dr Norman says ‘‘smart, green economics’ is the way to go because the international market for sustainable products and clean energy technology is growing rapidly.’ Really? Is that right?
      “Well, no.  It’s not. Like virtually everything else the Ginger Whinger says, it’s not right. Not right at all. The international market for “clean energy” is bankrupt.  Not just struggling. Not just a little bit bankrupt. It’s completely, wholly and abjectly bankrupt.”
  Russel: 'Don’t sell the power companies—throw money my way instead'
• “Russel Norman is still talking about “a smart, green economy” as if that were an actual thing. It’s not. So why does the media not challenge Russel Norman for continuing to pretend he owns the source to some economic magic bullet?”
  Smart green failure
• “Russel however continues to talk about "a smart, green economy.” But the fact is, no such thing exists—at least not in the terms he means, with bans on power producers and subsidies for so-called “green tech.” The failure of any “green stimulus to get off the ground—in Spain, in Germany, in the US—even with huge motivation and billions of dollars in subsidies is just another clue that Russel is talking nonsense…
      “If Russel really does want some lessons from economics for his environmentalism [as he claims he does], he might reflect that the whole of economic activity consists in creating new values and, new goods and new resources, and moving them and transforming them to the place(s) and the state in which they are most valued… But this fact continues to elude Russel and his followers, who continue to cry wolf while remaining blind to the incredible results all around him.”
  Re-designing Russel’s “green” economics
• “Renewable energy is economically unsustainable energy. Google thought they could change that. Google failed.”
  Renewable energy is still unsustainable energy

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Friday afternoon ramble

A wee Friday afternoon ramble through the tabs on my new Flock browser:

• Paul Walker praises Obama. Doesn’t happen often. But it does when the Messiah “discards two major campaign pledges on international economic policy” – and those discarded pledges were to name China a currency manipulator, and to forswear renegotiation of NAFTA. Says Paul: “One of the biggest fears about the Obama administration was that, with regard to international economic policy, the President might actually follow through on his campaign rhetoric. That would have been a disaster, and so its good to see he isn't.”
• Lindsay Perigo is less excited. “Fewer than 100 days into his presidency, Barack Chavez-Obama is shaping up as treasonous…”
• 250 jobs axed at the IRD? That means, says Glenn Jameson, that there’s only 5750 to go.
• From the UK: Looks like both Gordon Brown (recently) and David Cameron (last year) are jumping on Obama’s voluntary slavery bandwagon. Says the Devil’s Kitchen: “it seems that the Prime Mentalist has found a solution to the fact that the state just doesn't have the money to keep people in compulsory education until they are 18: don't actually educate them (no fucking change there, eh?), but make them indentured slaves instead. . . Because when I want to feel proud of my country, I definitely like to highlight state slavery as one of the best things about it. You fucking moron." Read Would you like some state slavery, or some state slavery? and find out how to swear properly. [Hat tip Rory Hodgson]
• From the West Island: Looks like Plan Rudd for Team Holden is tits up. Already.
  
• Deflation Has Gone Global, says Mish at MISH'S Global Economic Trend Analysis. “Deflation properly defined is a net decrease in the money supply and credit, with credit being marked to market. Deflation by that measure went global long ago.” Which means either prices and wages are allowed to fall – as they’re already doing in some markets – so the decreasing amount of money can buy as much as before, or we’re going to be in this for a very long time.
• Still, New Zealand’s big four Australian owned banks have been rated inside the top 20 of the world’s 50 safest banks, says Bernard Hickey. Good news, as long as you ignore that all fractional reserve banks are technically insolvent anyway.
• Echoing comments made by Austrian economists such as George Reisman and Peter Schiff, Libertarianz leader Richard McGrath says attempts by governments to intervene during a time of market correction will prove counter-productive and costly in the long run. “The nine-day fortnight is just the latest example of voodoo economics, promoted by ignoramuses,” he says. Read Nine Day Fortnight Is Economic Lunacy.
• Speaking of bitter bloggers, media morons and Deborah Hill Cone – as I was last weekend, when I fixed all the problems of the press for them – you’ll enjoy the New Clarion’s analysis of that annoying CNN reporter at last week’s Chicago Tea Party. Read CNN Reporter Blanks Out On Camera.
• Meanwhile, from the newsletter of NZ’s Foundation for Economic Growth comes this gem:
• Stephen Jennings is the founder of the Moscow-based Renaissance Group including Renaissance Capital - the leading investment bank in Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States and sub-Saharan Africa. Born and schooled in Taranaki, he studied business and economics at Massey and Auckland, before joining the New Zealand Treasury. Later he worked with Credit Suisse First Boston before founding Renaissance Capital in Moscow in 1995. Today he is ranked by London’s Financial News as among the top 100 most influential people in European capital markets and has been described by a fellow banker as the only foreign oligarch in Russia.
  The NZ Business Round Table invited him over to give this year's Sir Ronald Trotter lecture. Amongst many other things he had this to say:
• "My personal assessment is that as a society we are drifting away from this type of hard-nosed common sense reasoning; to put it politely we are becoming too inclined to believe our own myths. We are more likely to move forward if we talk about why the World Economic Forum ranks New Zealand 51st for burden of government; 67th for the extent and effect of taxation and 90th for hiring and firing practices."
• Read the full speech here at NZCPR: Opportunities of a Lifetime: Lessons for New Zealand from New High-Growth Economies.
• Iran is in the news again for all the wrong (but usual) reasons. With or Without Nukes, Iran Is a Mortal Threat, reminds Elan Journo.
• “Changes” to the Resource Management Act? Who is anybody kidding, here? Local Government New Zealand reckons “changes designed to simplify and streamline the Resource Management Act may actually create more delays and increase costs.” Really. Ya think? Meanwhile, Business New Zealand – the government’s friend – says “it supported the fundamental principles of the Resource Management Act , but . . .” Apparently they don’t realise their first clause makes the second redundant.
• Cactus Kate maintains that if her alma mater wants to give Helen Clark an honorary doctorate, then she will start binning those alumni contribution requests. Farrar reckons “To be truly appropriate, I think they should make it a retrospective degree!”
• The Humble Libertarian humbly and studiously lists and links the “top 100 libertarian blogs and websites” from around the world. The Ayn Rand Institute makes it in (with an apology); Not PC doesn’t (thank you to readers who’ve promoted it).
• And The Nearby Pen lists the top 20 Objectivist blogs. Once again, I don’t make the front page – but the honourable mention is much appreciated. :-)
• While we're listing blogs, here (courtesy of Bernard Hickey and the Irish Times) are the world's best financial blogs. You'll see by the presence of alleged economist Paul Krugman on the list that "best" is not a measure of acumen, so much as traffic.
  
• Whale Oil discovers that California's 'Green Jobs' Experiment Isn't Going Well. No surprises there. “The last thing the economy needs is a ‘green solution’ to a problem that doesn't exist and then cripples our economy right when we need it to be clawing its way out of a socialist induced recession.”
• George Reisman agrees, but sees a way ‘green jobs’ could be made to work. “Indeed, advancing the goals of environmentalism is capable of creating a virtually limitless number of jobs. Big-rig trucks and their ‘polluting’ emissions might be done away with by replacing them with human porters who would carry freight on their backs. Ocean-going ships and their emissions might be done away with by replacing their "dirty engines" with the clean labor of banks of oarsmen. (Sails would be a substitute too, but they are no match for oarsmen when it comes to the number of workers needed.) Automobiles and their emissions might be replaced by sedan chairs and teams of litter bearer. . . “
  The possibilities are endless.
• Residents of W(h)anganui get to vote on whether they spell their address the way Ken Mair wants them to, but Aucklanders don’t get to vote on whether they get to live in Rodney Hide’s new fascist uber state. The Standard reckons that this represents yet another National election promise broken – “that National policy before the election was to let Aucklanders have their say on any proposal to change our city.” I’m inclined to agree with them.
• Good news from the coming depression: Crocs are going to disappear forever! Even if it takes a decade of stagnation and unemployment, that may just be worth it if that’s true.
• From the how-come-this-isn’t-making-news file, comes this story from Stratfor: the Taliban problem is going critical in nuclear Pakistan. It is making news in some places, anyway. The Daily Mail:Pakistan is a 'mortal threat' to world, says Clinton as Taliban surge towards Islamabad. [Hat tip Leighton Smith]
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas House, a Frank Lloyd Wright gem (dedicated website here) is reopening. Volunteer Gayle Manning says this is especially good news, since “she and her colleagues can call off the ghost of Susan Dana, the home's eccentric socialite, now deceased, who was known to dabble in the paranormal. ‘We sent her to visit the ex-governor to make him pay for what he did,’ Manning joked Tuesday. ‘I'm sure she's here dancing in the gallery now, thrilled like the rest of us’."
• For the first time in American legal history, a judge has explicitly endorsed important principles of Ayn Rand’s political theory in a published appellate opinion. Story here.
  

• After Salon writer Glenn Greenwald spoke at a Cato forum about his new study on Portugal’s successful drug decriminalization program, he sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie to discuss his research. Head here for the video.

• You wanted a local cannabis cafe? The Daktory is just what your doctor probably ordered – a club that allows you to peacefully indulge your favourite habit in the company of friends and fellow members. Join here. More here:
  
  
• Environmentalists, listen up. Forbes.com published this article yesterday based on Art Carden’s paper "Economic Calculation in the Environmentalist Commonwealth."
  Here's the gist, says Art: “private property and prices are necessary for rational economic calculation; therefore, without private property we cannot know what responsible environmental stewardship even means. Bringing more resources into the cash nexus--by privatizing garbage collection and recycling, and by eliminating building restrictions in large cities--can reduce the amount of environmental damage that gets done.”
  Good to see then that the FrogBlog’s ‘Toad’ maintains on this Kiwiblog thread that he, at least, is a supporter of property rights. For one race, anyway.
• The upside down world of John Maynard Keynes got us into the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and it looks increasingly like it’s going to keep us there for some time. Keynes was “more bureaucrat than economist,” says Mark Thornton. “In fact, he would best be described as an anti-economist…”Sounds like too high praise, really. Read ‘The Upside-down World of John Maynard Keynes’ and see if you agree.
• Want a sober, rational summary of what just happened to the world’s economies? Want a cracking good read? Then the book you’re after is Tom Woods’s Meltdown, as this short book review should persuade you: It’s Austrian theory for everyone!
• And while we’re talking new and essential books, Bob Murphy’s new book on The Fake History of the Depression is another one. Real name: The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal.
• Did I mention Austrian economics? Some Objectivists (who should remain nameless, but whose names might include the words Richard and Salsman) suggest that Austrian economics should be shunned in favour of the supply-siders and the “rational expectations” school. Austrian economics is “inane,” says Salsman. Per-Olof Samuelsson fisks this ridiculous notion in a piece he calls Objectivism and "Austrian" Economics – compatible or not? (or: Richard Salsman is a Moron). As Wladmir Kraus says, “I liked [this] piece very much. It's forceful and to the point. If an Objectivist, after having read [this] analysis, still finds the nerve to believe and propound Salsman's nonsense about the Austrian school and George Reisman in particular, he's either a fool or dishonest fool.” Take that, fools. [And there’s More Salsman Nonsense here if you’re so inclined.]
• And finally, if you enjoy my daily art and architecture posts here at NOT PC, which I post to show you that there’s more in the art world than just crap art, then you’ll love Lindsay Perigo’s Music Gems of the Day that he’s been posting, well, every day – and for much the same reason. Scroll down at his blog to see (and hear) them all, from Sibelius, to Massenet, to Bach.
  The most recent is Dimitris Sgouros at an open-air evening performance of Liszt's Harmonies du Soir.
  
  Enjoy!

PS: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is still in the top fifty at Amazon. Help keep it there.
Which means here’s what you need to add these to your list of essential reading this week, or to give to a friend:

New 'sins' for a new century (update 2)

The Vatican has outlined "seven new deadly sins for our times." (Story here at The Times.) Where the earlier sins drawn up by Pope Gregory all of fourteen centuries ago dealt with sins supposedly against God -- things full of life-enhancing individualist exuberance like lust, gluttony and pride -- these new "sins for the twenty-first century" are designed, so the Vatican says, "to make worshippers consider the increased impact their lives have on other people in light of globalisation."

In other words, this is the socialisation of sin. Where the church once wanted you to feel bad about enjoying yourself because their God might not like it, now the church wants you to feel bad about enjoying yourself because you neighbour might not. As a colleague comments, "I love the Socialist idea that individual sins are not as important as social sins!" And I love the idea that your neighbour is more important than the Pope's imaginary friend. At least that much is true. When your neighbour twitches the curtains they do it so you notice, but no one yet has ever got a call from God asking us to turn our stereo down.

So let's look at these new sins for the twenty-first century. Where once the sin of envy might have got you boiled in oil, now the sin of 'environmental damage' will see you boiling Gaia. Allegedly. For this alleged offence, the catholic church prescribes a large indulgence paid to the catholic church. Naturally. They saw Al Gore had a good deal going, selling indulgences for the mortal sin of exhaling carbon, and they thought they ought to get in on it. And since they invented the whole 'making money off of guilt' thing, they figured they owed it to themselves to reassert their place in the market.

The new list condemns "manipulative" genetic modification, carrying out experiments on humans, polluting the environment, causing social injustice, causing poverty, being "obscenely rich," and selling drugs. Oddly enough, the list itself omits the sin of paedophilia -- not presumably being considered "deadly " enough -- but a Vatican spokesman at least conceded this was a "mortal sin" which

had even infected the clergy itself and so had exposed the "human and institutional fragility of the Church." The mass media had “blown up” the issue “to discredit the Church”, but the Church itself was taking steps to deal with it.

Of course they are.

Now, one thing to notice about these sins is that they're just made up -- just made up in the sense that your little brother 'just makes up' the rules in the middle of a game. These aren't biblical sins, they didn't come from the head of God -- an angel didn't appear to the Pope or his angels giving them this new dispensation. When Bishop Girotti from the frighteningly-named Apostolic Penitentiary, the Vatican body which oversees confessions and plenary indulgences, says that "priests must take account of new sins which have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalisation," what he's saying is that the church is no longer a leader, it's a follower -- humanity is playing its own games, few people now want to play with them, and like a small boy (oops!) the church is desperate to find some way to catch up and join in and make money. When the head of the Apostolic Penitentiary concedes that surveys show 60 per cent of Catholics even in Catholic Italy no longer go to confession, what he's saying is that fewer and fewer people are finding any relevance in the church, and the church is worried.

That's a good thing. This new list is simply a last desperate tilt by a church on the edge of irrelevance -- a desperate church that has looked at itself and decided to head back to its core business: selling guilt for money.

After all, there's a very venal reason for the church get in on this latest scam. It's been pointed out all over that the idea of buying 'carbon offsets' to allay concerns about the carbon emissions of the likes of events like Live Earth are somewhat similar to the indulgences that the various Popes used to sell to rich parishioners to pay for new churches. The church invented the scam -- St Peters in Rome was built on the back of these indulgences -- and now they want to take it over again.

NB: Just for clarity, the BBC reports the seven 'new' sins to be:

1. Environmental pollution

2. Genetic manipulation

3. Accumulating excessive wealth

4. Inflicting poverty

5. Drug trafficking and consumption

6. Morally debatable experiments

7. Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

UPDATE: Susan the Libertarian has her own list of seven sins for Pope Ben:

1. Tax. All taxes. Tax is theft, Ben, and a contravention of your boss's seventh commandment.

2. Censorship. All censorship. It is thought control.

3. The Electoral Finance Act. Yes, it's censorship, but it's such a travesty it deserves its own spot.

4. The Greens. Having lost the economic battle when the Soviet Union fell over, they swapped their red cardigans for green ones by playing the environmental card. 21st-century frauds.

5. Do-Gooders. Those who have no qualms in telling us all what to do, and always for our own good. You know them: they support all the usual causes and they're invariably white, middle-aged socialists. The worst.

6. AGW. Warmists. The zealots thereof. Those Who Must Not Be Questioned. They are today's reactionaries and every bit as frightening as their counterparts of old.

7. Reality TV and all 20-somethings in the pages of the women's mags. Brainless, mind-numbing and almost impossible to tell one from the other.

UPDATE 2: The Lay Science Blog analyses the not-quite encyclical and concludes, "I don't see how you can follow a set of statements that - when you analyze them - are basically meaningless..."

Suitably vague, and at times nonsensical, you can't help but wonder if they ran them through a focus group first. No doubt they'll repackage the Ten Commandments next. Oh, and they're predictably anti-science.

The new list is not as snappy as the original: pride; envy; gluttony; lust; anger and greed are joined by: environmental pollution; genetic manipulation; accumulating excessive wealth; inflicting poverty; drug trafficking and consumption; morally debatable experiments and the violation of fundamental rights of human nature. A quick glance reveals two interesting things, 1) that two of these are a direct attack on science, and 2) that they are so vague as to be meaningless. Let's take each one in turn, and then we'll look at what this means for Vatican policy.

UPDATE 3:   Hallelujah! says Lindsay Perigo.  "Sin comes of age" -- New Age.