“In order to make people equal, you have to treat them differently. If you treat people alike, so far as government is concerned, the result is necessarily inequality.
"You can have either freedom and inequality, or unfreedom and equality.”
"[Let's look at] the example of the greengrocer, living in an authoritarian state [who] habitually puts a sign 'Workers of the world, unite!' in his shop window each day even though he doesn’t believe the slogan but understands it is necessary to demonstrate his loyalty to the regime and ensure he stays out of trouble.
"One morning he decides he will no longer put out the sign .... His seemingly trivial action enables him to live more honestly even if he risks official penalties. ...
"Czech playwright Vรกclav Havel ... who became President of his country in 1989 after the Soviet-backed, communist government collapsed. ... argued that private individuals [lie our greengrocer] can help overturn repressive systems simply by refusing to participate in expected rituals of obedience, no matter how minor.
"And random acts of resistance like the greengrocer’s can give courage to others similarly tired of enforced conformity in totalitarian states — or in liberal democracies. ...
"What Havel saw so clearly is that totalitarian systems don’t primarily run on violence — they run on the complicity of the population. Each person who goes along with the ritual reinforces the illusion that the ritual reflects genuine consensus. Each greengrocer who puts up the sign makes it harder for the next one to refuse.
"New Zealand’s version of this operates through social rather than state coercion, which in some ways makes it harder to name and resist. ... The country is small and the networks are tight; the social cost of being known as a dissenter is higher in a place where everyone knows everyone.
"The result is a kind of pre-emptive self-censorship that Havel would recognise immediately. ... The New Zealand consensus is not a single monolithic ideology but a cluster of positions that have achieved a kind of sacral status ...
"Some of the most charged include the application of Treaty principles across virtually all public policy, certain framings within debates about Mฤori sovereignty and co-governance, consensus around specific approaches to climate and housing policy ... To question them is to be located, socially and professionally, as the kind of person who questions them, which is itself a disqualifying mark.
"Havel’s prescription is deceptively simple and genuinely demanding: live in truth. ... It means saying plainly, in your own sphere, what you actually think.
"The greengrocer who refuses to put up the sign does something that seems trivially small but is in fact a profound disruption — he breaks the illusion of consensus ...
"In a New Zealand context this looks like the scientist who publishes findings that complicate the preferred narrative, even knowing it will generate institutional discomfort.
It looks like the journalist who covers a story the consensus would prefer left alone.
It looks like the professional who declines to sign the ritual statement and explains why calmly and without apology.
It looks like the historian who prefers to deal in objective facts rather than subjective “stories” and won’t bow to a critical theory neo-Marxist dialectic.
It looks like the council member who won’t participate in a prayer (disguised as a karakia) before a meeting because of its religious significance.
It looks like your author who will not use Aotearoa for New Zealand or insert te reo words into a narrative written in English.
It looks like the ordinary person who says at a dinner table, 'I don’t think that’s quite right,' and is willing to sit with the social discomfort that follows.
"What Havel emphasises is that this is not heroism in any dramatic sense -- it is simply the refusal to participate in the agreed-upon falseness. And its power is precisely that it is available to anyone. You do not need a platform or an institution or a movement. You need only the willingness to say what you see."
"Roy, a commenter on my 'Lessons from Iran,' says there is no such thing as human rights: 'Human rights [he says] are given and allowed by Governments.' ...
"If Roy is right, it means that the Iranian people do not have the right to life or liberty because the government of Iran has not given and allowed them to have those rights. By way of an opposite example, it also means that New Zealanders have those rights only because the government has given them to us or allowed us to have them. ...
"John Locke (1632-1704) produced the rationale for certain rights to exist independently of any expression of them in government legislation or the common law. I go into detail below, but the essence is that human beings have certain characteristics which differentiate them from other living things, characteristics which demand of each person that they allow every other person to live their own lives without forcing them or attempting to force them to act or not to act in a particular way.
"That means each person has the right to be left alone and each person has the reciprocal obligation to leave everyone else alone.
"This is a moral imperative, and humans may occasionally or habitually refuse or fail to act in that way. That’s why we have laws proscribing certain conduct. ...
"Humans cannot sustain and live their lives in the uniquely human way unless they are free to do so. Freedom is the fundamental ‘human’ right. It subsumes the right to life because if the individual’s freedom is respected, so also his life will not be in jeopardy from others’ aggressions. It subsumes the right to pursue happiness because if the individual is free, he is free to pursue happiness so long as in doing so he does not trample on others’ freedom.
"The caveat “so long as in doing so he does not trample on others’ freedom,” is vital. It is why so many so-called rights are bogus because, for example, they involve taking from others thereby violating the others’ right to be free."
"Israel is not just targeting Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders. They are specifically going after the officers who killed protesters -- the people who ran checkpoints and shot Iranians in the streets during the January uprisings when the regime massacred thousands of its own citizens.
"And they're calling them first. Victor David Hansen described one exchange [in the video from 10:03]: an Israeli contact reached an IRGC officer and told him he was a dead man. The officer's response: ๐ ๐ฆ๐ข๐ฉ, ๐'๐ฎ ๐ข ๐ฅ๐ฆ๐ข๐ฅ ๐ฎ๐ข๐ฏ ๐ธ๐ข๐ญ๐ฌ๐ช๐ฏ๐จ. ๐๐ถ๐ต ๐ ๐ฅ๐ช๐ฅ๐ฏ'๐ต ๐ฅ๐ฐ ๐ข๐ฏ๐บ๐ต๐ฉ๐ช๐ฏ๐จ ๐ธ๐ณ๐ฐ๐ฏ๐จ. He did do something wrong. He killed protesters. And Israel knows exactly who he is, where he is, and what he did -- because Iranians inside the country are feeding them the intelligence. Cell phones. Starlink. A population that hates this regime so deeply that ordinary citizens are calling in GPS coordinates of checkpoints from their apartment windows.
"This is what Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran actually looks like in practice. It's not just satellites and signals. It's millions of Iranians who want this regime gone and are willing to risk everything to make it happen."
EVER SINCE THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION in the nineteenth century and ever-increasing global freedom in this one, human progress has been on a roll -- so says author and rational optimist Marian Tupy. He outlined his arguments and data a few nights ago at an enjoyable NZ Initiative presentation.
Miserabilist Thomas Malthus famously expressed the idea that while resources would only expand at a linear rate, population will expand exponentially -- a disaster waiting to happen. But Malthus was writing about rabbits, or animals without the brain that humans have; and he was writing before the industrial revolution, when that brain was put to powerful practical use. Malthus was not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong, as Tupy's data abundantly proves.
Take that Malthus!
In just the last four decades alone, commodities across the board have become more abundant thanks to globalisation and increasing freedom. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, long a source of concern, the average calorie intake is now ticking up to 2,500!
THAT FAMOUS PANGLOSSIAN THOMAS BABINGTON Macaulay talked in the nineteenth century about the inevitability of progress: “In every age," said Macaulay, "everybody knows that up to his own time, progressive improvement has been taking place; ... On what principle is it that with nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” It's still possible to remain optimistic even with the many steps backwards anti-freedom forces insist we take.
I was reminded of Peter Boettke's analogy of the horse race between Smith, Schumpeter, and Stupidity -- the progress of Smith's Division of Labour and Schumpeter's progress in technology (well explained by our presenter) has to continually stay ahead of the various degrees of Stupidity inflicted on us all. It's a tribute to human reason and the power of human freedom to wield it that we have to thank for continuing and ongoing progress.
OUR PRESENTER DID GET A LITTLE pushback from a questioner who interrogated his concept of abundance. Is abundance always good, asked his questioner? A super-abundance of nuclear weapons, for example, or opioids, is hardly a good thing for human progress, he maintained.
It's a fair point, and it resonates with those who argue that to expect infinite growth on a finite planet you must be either insane or an economist. For both points, I think, economist George Reisman makes a profound point in response: the loss of the concept of economic progress.
Tupy still talks of human progress but of economic growth. Reisman (a student of Von Mises) would suggest he'd be better to combine the two to answer both objections: i.e. to talk of economic progress rather than economic growth.
Growth is a concept that applies to individual living organisms. An organism grows until it reaches maturity. then it declines, and sooner or later dies. The concept of growth is also morally neutral [the point made by our questioner], equally capable of describing a negative as a positive: tumours and cancers can grow. Thus the concept of growth both necessarily implies limits and can easily be applied negatively.
In contrast, the concept of progress applies across succeeding generations of human beings. The individual human beings reach maturity and die. But because they possess the faculty of reason, they can both discover new and additional knowledge and transmit it to the rising generation ... with each succeeding generation receiving a greater inheritance of knowledge than the one before it and making its own fresh contribution to knowledge. This continuously expanding body of knowledge, insofar as it takes the form of continuously increasing scientific and technological knowledge and correspondingly improved capital equipment, is the foundation of continuous economic progress.
Progress is a concept unique to man: it is founded on his possession of reason and thus his ability to accumulate and transmit a growing body of knowledge across the generations. Totally unlike growth, whose essential confines are the limits of a single organism, progress has no practical limit. Only if man could achieve omniscience would progress have to end. But the actual effect of the acquisition of knowledge is always to lay the foundation for the acquisition of still more knowledge. Through applying his reason, man enlarges all of his capacities, and the more he enlarges them, the more he enlarges his capacity to enlarge them.
He notes here that it Ludwig Von Mises who had first alerted him to this vital distinction.
The concept of progress differs radically from the concept of growth in that it also has built into it a positive evaluation: progress is movement in the direction of a higher, better, and more desirable state of affairs. This improving state of affairs is founded on the growing body of knowledge that the possession and application of human reason makes possible. Its foundation is the rising potential for human achievement that is based on growing knowledge.
While it is possible to utter denunciations of too rapid "growth" as being harmful, it would be a contradiction in terms even to utter the thought of too rapid progress, let alone denounce it. The meaning would be that things can get better too quickly -- that things getting better meant they were getting worse. [Capitalism, p.106]
FYI, Professor Reisman has kindly made his book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (in which you can read all his arguments) freely available for reading, saving, and printing. Download the link here.
"President Trump has created the conditions for another quagmire in the Middle East, and the question is whether American military excellence can rescue him from his own impulsiveness and incompetence.
"Here is the present situation, in a nutshell: The United States and Israel have established absolute air dominance over the nation of Iran. ... The intention of the air campaign is clear: to destroy the regime’s capacity to harm its neighbours while also creating the conditions for a revolution on the ground. ...
"So why, then, is Trump lashing out at American allies? Why was he 'shocked' that Iran struck Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait in response to American attacks?
"Perhaps the answer lies in a Wall Street Journal report from last Friday. According to The Journal, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump that Iran might attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz and Trump shrugged off the threat and launched the attack anyway. ...
"But Iran did not capitulate. ... Instead, it has effectively closed the strait, and it’s reportedly done so without choking off its own oil exports. In other words, while other nations can’t ship oil through the strait, Iran still is.
"Iran ... could well emerge from the conflict with its regime intact (and perhaps even more hard-line) and its power over the world economy undiminished. ...
"Trump launched a major war on his own initiative while announcing competing and potentially contradictory war aims. Is the goal regime change? Unconditional surrender? Or is it much narrower — the destruction of Iran’s missile and drone forces, sinking its navy, stopping its nuclear programme and destroying its ability to wage war through its proxy forces, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and the kaleidoscope of allied militias in Syria and Iraq. ...
"Even when wars are carefully planned, with allies brought on board and a majority of the public in support, they are still highly volatile and unpredictable. ...
"My great concern is that Trump has [instead] created the conditions for failure. ... And now, dismayed that the war has not resulted in the regime’s immediate capitulation or destruction, he’s flailing about, once again threatening the viability of NATO if our allies don’t come and bail him out from a war they did not start and did not ask for.
"As an American, I want our forces to succeed, once they are committed. I want to see the military open the Strait of Hormuz as quickly and painlessly as possible. I want to see the Iranian regime collapse and replaced by a democracy. That regime is loathsome. It’s an enemy of the United States. It deserves to fall. If it does, I will cheer its demise.
"At the same time, however, my patriotism can’t blind me to reality. This is not how our democracy should go to war. Trump is not the right man to lead our nation into battle. People I respect applaud Trump for his courage in taking on Iran. But I don’t see courage. I see recklessness. I see thoughtlessness.
"I see a man who plunged a nation into a conflict without fully comprehending the risks. I see a man full of hubris after achieving success in much more limited military engagements. And he’s now counting on two of the world’s most competent militaries to essentially bail him out.
"He’s counting on them accomplishing a mission without clear precedent in military history: destroying a hostile regime and forcing its compliance entirely from the air and sea, and to do so quickly enough that the economic pain doesn’t overshadow the military gains. ...
"Trump has only himself to blame. He led America into an unconstitutional war. And now he’s compounding that sin by proving to be every bit as reckless a commander as he is a president."
"Either Donald Trump holds his nerve, crushes the Iranian regime, rides out the oil shock and reopens the Strait of Hormuz, or he and America are finished, exposed as unserious, fickle and incapable of forward planning, a superpower manquรฉe felled by drone-wielding barbarians."
"Morally it was entirely justifiable to attack the Islamic Republic of Iran. ... Whether or not it was tactically correct [or strategically mapped out] ... only history will tell.
"As much as those against the war will be wanting Trump to lose, to embarrass him, this is a very narrow and suicidal position. ...
"Overthrowing the regime would be a success; weakening it so it falls due to domestic pressure (including from the Kurdish north) would be a partial success --- but emboldening it even if its ability to project abroad is significantly weakened, would be ... a victory for the regime, and a victory for its proxies.
"For it would embolden Iran and its proxies to attack not just in the Middle East, but beyond ... This would make us all less safe, it would embolden Islamists across the world to promote their ideology, and for a few to be willing to use force to terrify us all. ...
"At this stage the biggest risk is that Trump chickens out, and wants a 'deal.' There is no 'deal' with those who want you dead, who want your country dead and another dead. As much as the international law purists want pontification from the Western world about the legality of the war on Iran ..., that horse has bolted."
"But as with Bush II's Iraq War, the question to come is: do they know what the hell they're going to do next. With this administration, that's unlikely .... So it will need every circumstance to go the way of those Iranians celebrating [in these photos]. As Eliot Cohen says, 'Something of an exercise in ambivalence here. I would like to see the Iranian regime go down hard -- and am not confident Trump knows what he is doing.'
"Let's [still] hope with crossed fingers for a lion of freedom to arise from the attacks."
Sadly, it seems the NZ Treasury's Chief Strategist Struan Little doesn't understand inflation.
Speaking to the NZ Capital Markets Forum, he gave the audience a helpful rule of thumb for fuel price rises here:
[E]very US$10 increase per barrel of oil roughly translates to 10 cents a litre extra for New Zealanders at the petrol pump. Therefore, prices at around US$100 a barrel mean a 40 cents a litre increase in New Zealand.
That's helpful. The conclusion he drew from that however is not:
In that scenario [he said] ... the impact on CPI [i.e., of the official inflation figure] would be around 0.5 percentage points – that is around 3.1 – 3.2% instead of 2.7% in the baseline in the year to June 2026.
This is nonsense.
Yes, there will be a rise in the specific price level of oil. But unless there is a concomitant rise in the local money supply, there is no way that can cause a rise in the general price level, which is what the CPI is supposed to measure.
In fact, in the absence of a concomitant rise in money supply, the impact on the general price level will be precisely zero because to spend more on fuel means having to spend less on other things.
Yes, the price rise for oil does affect almost every thing in the economic system. Which makes a problem for all of us. But the only way for all those other things to rise in price as well is for there to be an across-the-board increase in monetary demand. And the only way that can be possible is for there to be an increase in the supply of money available -- the most likely cause of that in the present environment being governments continuing to borrow too heavily.
Little's error is an example of what economist George Reisman calls the myth of Crisis-Push Inflation -- a subset of the myth of so-called Cost-Push Inflation. It's usually a way for politicians to deflect attention for their profligacy in borrowing.
At least Little does call that out, even if he falls prey to that other error.
If you want to go green, you should do so without the state’s coercion, says Timothy Terrell at the Mises Institute conference in Oklahoma just last week. In this guest post, based in a lightly edited transcript of the talk, he explains how entrepreneurs and property rights can protect forests, wildlife, and open spaces better than bureaucracies, using real-world examples of “enviropreneurs”....
'Nature-al’ Entrepreneurship: Being Green Without the State
by Timothy Terrell
I subtitled my talk being green without the state, but I'm not trying to put some sort of free-market twist on a lecture about how you need to use an electric lawn mower or recycle or something like that. I'm in fact going to try to avoid pushing my preferences about uses of the environment altogether. That's not really my point here.
People have different ideas about what is good and about what is useful. And I like the many useful things that we can make with the resources we extract from the environment.
Many people like me also enjoy wilderness land and views of wildlife. I like forests and rivers. I like knowing that some species of antalope or rhinoceros are still with us, even if I'm not actually going out and looking at it myself.
What I want to do is show that entrepreneurship is compatible with those goals.
Entrepreneurship and the environment
An entrepreneur is a person who anticipates a future consumer demand and tries to adjust the factors of production to accomplish that, for the consumer, in search of a profit. For many people, this seems just diametrically opposed to the idea of solving problems related to the use of the environment. I'm going to suggest it's not only not incompatible, that it's essential that we think of things this way.
We tend to think of entrepreneurship as being separate from the natural world, or at least just making goods that require extracting some substances from the world and then manipulating them into some product. What I'd like to do here is make the case that entrepreneurs can do this with nature as well, creating goods in a sense that have nature in its natural state, or at least something close to it.
Environmental resources have value that is determined by the goals of the customers. The entrepreneur must satisfy those customers to earn a profit. So we say that environmental value is imputed -- that is to say that the value of the resource in the environment is derived from the value of the product that's made from that resource.
An environmentalist of the anti-capitalistic type however, which is a very common type, might protest. Um, wouldn't we say that elements of the environment have some sort of value apart from whether they can be turned into a toaster or turned into a fur coat? And uh, you know, they might say, well, do we have to make everything uh into some kind of raw material for a factory? And I would say, well, certainly not. We have to think more broadly about what customers really want.
Entrepreneurs respond not only to people who want goods that are manufactured out of the environment. They respond to people who value the natural world as more than just a source of calories, minerals, or fibre.
Many people want goods and services that are the products of factories. We all do that to some extent, but we also value goods and services that are best provided by an environment in its natural state. So, people want the same kinds of things I want when I head out to the wilderness, as I like to do and don't get to do as much as I'd like.
Maybe some people just want the knowledge that there is a place where land and wildlife exist without human contact. Even if that means we're not necessarily going to go and visit that place. Many of us just like knowing that there is such a place and providing those things is not outside the realm of entrepreneurship.
Value? Whose value?
But I think we need to clear up something first. Some environmentalists want to separate the idea of value from a valuer. And I think that's a that's a serious problem.
"[Utilitarians], in the fashion of [Jeremy] Bentham, pronounce the greatest happiness of the greatest number to be the social end, although they fail to make it intelligible why the happiness of the greater number should be cogent as an end upon those who happen to belong to the lesser number."
~ Felix Adler from his essay “The Relation of Ethics to Social Science,” in H.J. Rogers, ed., Congress of Arts and Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), vol. 7, p. 673 [cited in Murray Rothbard's article 'Utilitarian Free-Market Economics']
"It has become starkly obvious that the Maori seats are being used by activists to [ghettoise Mฤori: to isolate them, separate them, cut them off, according to a cultural identity]. ...
"Ghettoisation can be done to a person or group, or people or groups can do it to themselves. ...
"Israr Kasana, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant to the Canadian city of Calgary, explains why he and his family rejected the temptation to adopt the comfortable way of establishing themselves within a Pakistani community. He says 'Ghettoisation or marginalisation of any kind is bad for society. It creates exclusion, imbalance, envy, anger, ignorance and, more importantly, distrust.' ...
"The Maori seats encourage people to ghettoise themselves according to cultural identity, whereas what we must surely want is a society in which people of all races are able to coexist together in peace and cooperation as equal citizens under the law." ...
"[Then National leader Bill] English said [in 2003] the National Party 'stands for one standard of citizenship for all.' ... 'That’s why a National-led Government will abolish the Maori seats.” Of course, it did nothing of the sort when National came back into government in 2008 under John Key. Instead, the Key government abetted the infiltration of all parts of New Zealand society by elements who would substitute authoritarian tribal rule for a free and democratic society, a process which was accelerated by the Ardern/Hipkins governments. ...
"Under pressure from ACT and New Zealand First, the coalition government has walked this back a bit but not to the extent needed to offer meaningful restraint of the authoritarian tendencies which unthinking acquiescence by most of us has unwittingly allowed. ...
"Leadership is needed. We need a Prime Minister who will say loudly and clearly what English said in 2003 ... Today, when NZ First has advanced a Bill for a referendum and ACT says get rid of the Maori seats now, the opportunity is ripe for that sort of leadership.
"Getting rid of the seats, especially by or endorsed by referendum to show it is peoples’ will, would not only remove an anti-democratic excrescence, but also be a signal that enough is enough and that henceforth we shall be a 'multiracial society [where] people of all races are able to coexist together in peace and cooperation as equal citizens under the law.'
"[T]he Mฤori seats were created to bring Mฤori into the parliamentary system and guarantee representation, rather than exclude them.
"By 1867, when the Mฤori Representation Act 1867(1) passed, Europeans outnumbered Mฤori roughly four to one. ...
"The Mฤori seats addressed a real problem: under the New Zealand Constitution Act 1852 [2] voting required individual property or household qualification. Most Mฤori land was communally held, leaving Mฤori largely unable to meet the franchise. ...
"The seats also guaranteed meaningful participation. Four electorates—three in the North Island, one for the South—were superimposed over existing electorates. Mฤori with qualifying property could still vote in European electorates, giving many a dual vote. [4] Officials went to extraordinary lengths to ensure participation: in 1890, a returning officer undertook a six-day trek through dense Urewera bush to establish a polling station at Maungapลhatu. [5] Such efforts are hardly consistent with a strategy to suppress Mฤori voices. ...
"Seats were originally intended as temporary until Mฤori qualified under the general property franchise [6] ...
"While Mฤori were under-represented by modern proportional standards [when the Mฤori seats were created in 1867, each European electorate represented roughly 3,500 people, while each Mฤori electorate represented around 12,500 people [7]], the four seats ensured guaranteed parliamentary representation, at a time when European immigration was rapidly outpacing Mฤori numbers. This was enfranchisement, not suppression.' ...
"However today the original rationale for the Mฤori electorates has disappeared. In the current Parliament 33 MPs identify as having Mฤori heritage — about 27% of the House — far exceeding Mฤori’s roughly 17% share of the population. Even without the seven reserved seats, Mฤori representation would remain substantial, the historical purpose of the Mฤori electorates has now been fulfilled and, consistent with the 1986 Royal Commission on the Electoral System and with Article 3 of the Treaty of Waitangi, they should now be abolished in favour of equal representation for all voters."
In its raw form [as a steel billet], it’s worth around $1.
If it’s turned into horseshoes, its value rises to about $100.
If it’s made into sewing needles, its value jumps to roughly $500.
If it’s crafted into watch springs and gears, it can be worth around $100,000.
And if it’s transformed into precision laser components, like those used in lithography, its value can reach $10-50 million.
What gives escalating value to the simple raw material is the mind. It is the mind that transforms the value of a metal bar into the value of those horseshoes, needles, watch springs, and precision labour components.
Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
That was Ayn Rand, writing in answer to the question: "What is Capitalism?"
Rand was almost unique in writing about the role of the mind in man's existence; about its role in invention and production and valuing. "It is the mind," her novel Atlas Shrugged illustrates, "that is the root of all human knowledge and values -- and its absence is the root of all evil."
"Too often ‘multiculturalism’ is mistaken for ‘multiracialism,’ when the two could not be more different. A multiracial society is one in which people of all races are able to coexist together in peace and cooperation as equal citizens under the law. A multicultural society is one in which people are encouraged to ghettoise themselves according to national or cultural identity."
Environmentalist Paul Erlich alarmed the world back in 1968 predicting a "population explosion" which forecast “the greatest cataclysm in the history of man” -- food shortages escalating hunger and starvation “into famines of unbelievable proportions.”
In the obituary for the 93-year-old doom-monger, who died this week, the New York Times called his predictions "premature." But they weren't even wrong. They didn't happen, and they never will. (See above for how cataclysmically wrong the catastrophiser really was.)
Some of his other failed and frankly nasty predictions:
"In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
"In ten years [this was 1970] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."
"By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
“Sometime in the next 15 years the end will come, and by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
“By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”
"We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."
Yet despite being wrong about everything, the failed forecaster made a million and was showered with awards.
Several decades ago, gloom-monger Paul Erlich and techno-optimist Julian Simon had a bet.
Erlich was certain resources were running out and humanity was doomed. Simon asserted they weren't and wouldn't be. The bet was that, by the end of that decade, a basket of resources chosen by Erlich would cost more to buy — more, said Erlich, because by then those resources would be running out. Less, said Simon in reponse. (Simon, you see, was confident that the ultimate resource, from which all others derive, is the human mind — a machine for turning shit into useful stuff.)
Simon won.
Resources weren't running out.
They still aren't.
The "Simon Abundance Index" (SAI, below),which measures the relative abundance of resources since that bet, now stands at 609.4. Meaning that in 2023, the Earth was 509.4 percent more abundant in 2023 than it was in 1980!
How astonishing is that! World population since 1980 has almost doubled; while resources produced by human beings have multiplied by more than five times!!
Turns out that as global population increases, that "virtually all resources became more abundant. How on earth (literally) is that possible?"
Unlike Erlich and the sundry other doom-sayers who litter the planet today, Simon recognised that without the knowledge of how to use them, raw materials have no economic value whatsoever. They are just so much stuff. What transforms a raw material into a resource is knowledge — knowledge of how that stuff might satisfy a human need, and how to place it in a causal connection to satisfy that need. (The great Carl Menger explained this process way back in 1870!) And since new knowledge is potentially limitless, so too are resources.
Infinite, because the ultimate resource is the human mind.
1. Malthus published his book on English overpopulation and overconsumption in 1798. Thereafter, the population of England rose, and the prices of wheat fell relative to wages. 2. Marx published 'Das Kapital' in 1867, arguing that workers' wages would be squeezed to zero by capitalist competition (based on a much-debated and probably incorrect "Engels' Pause"). Thereafter, English wages skyrocketed. 3. Ehrlich published his book about coming global famines in 1968. Thereafter, global famines collapsed, and standards of living across much of the world rose.
Forget these failed forecasters. Sign up to Tupy's Human Progress agenda instead.
"I can’t tell you exactly how I would respond to someone who defended Hitler, but I know what I would not do: stalk him on social media, contact his employer to try to get him fired, or ask my government representative to help criminalise such talk. Does this make me a free speech absolutist? Not quite. ... [More of a] free speech maximalist....
"[T]he maximalist position grants special status to free speech and puts the burden of proof on those who wish to curtail it. While accepting some restrictions in time, place, and manner, free speech maximalism defaults to freedom of content. It aligns with the litmus test developed by U.S. Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, which holds that government should limit its regulation of speech to speech that dovetails with lawless action:
'Let’s go kill a few Germans?' Not kosher. 'The only good German is a dead one?' Fair game. ...
"But but … critics sputter … what about hate speech? Free speech maximalism posits that you can’t regulate an inherently subjective concept. ...
"To those concerned about the dangers of loosening our tongues, I offer Greg Lukianoff’s bracing maxim: 'You are not safer for knowing less about what people really think'.”
"[W]hen the pandemic hit Ardern and Robertson had a decision to make. Respond in a fiscally prudent manner or borrow seventy billion, at least thirty of this was spent on non-pandemic frippery, and wrap themselves in a cloak of virtue while leaving an economic calamity to a future set of politicians. ...
"Ardern and Robertson used the pandemic to advance their own agenda ... [John] Key saw a crisis and, lacking an economic agenda or political philosophy, ran to the international money men to maintain the status quo rather than attempt meaningful reform.
"Given the content of the Covid Report the current government is right to highlight Robertson’s fiscal incontinence; pointing to the 70.4 billion total spend as a contrast with their own rectitude.
"Except. Well. ... [Nicola] Willis, who has managed to add over twenty billion new debt in her first two years in office, is projected to increase sovereign debt by more than Robertson achieved over the next five years.
"And this is without a pandemic, major earthquake or outbreak of foot and mouth. ...
"Imagine a company director who has seen revenue fall but maintains payroll by borrowing. Eventually the line of credit ends, staff lose their employment and the director is forced to sell the family home.
"It's 2029 [the Iranian regime] was bloodied and enraged, but not defeated, in a 3-week aerial campaign in 2026. They've had 3 years to rebuild. Not their civilian infrastructure -- their arsenal of drones and hypersononic missiles. Plus their capacity to manufacture them.
"Now the hardened underground facilities where they make, store, and launch them are now safely below the penetration depth of US bunker-busting bombs.
"In technology development, three years is an eternity.
"The new drones are faster, have a smaller radar signature, and are much smarter. Their hypersononic missiles have much longer range. They can hit anywhere in Europe. From a ship, they can hit anywhere in the US.
"Three years was also enough for [the regime] to enrich uranium to weapons grade. And to perfect their warhead design. And to manufacture dozens of them
"One fine morning -- Sep 11, by purest coincidence -- the US Fifth Fleet is hit by a swarm of drones. In the chaos, distracting the US military, three salvos of hypersonic missiles are launched. Tel Aviv goes up in radioactive smoke six minutes later. 15 to 20 minutes later, countries friendly to the US -- Germany and the UK -- get hit.
"And ships disguised as tankers launch at the US from both oceans.
"The survivors wonder what happened. They had confused two different things:
the 2026 war had an unconstitutional start;
Iran was not a serious threat.
"And nuclear. ...
"This is what the next Iran war would look like if the US abandons this one (i.e. loses) now. ...
"There is an elephant in the room. Let's acknowledge it. If we lose now, [the Iranian regime] will be emboldened. It may take them a year to rebuild their arsenal and make longer range missiles, and nuclear warheads. But they will do it, and unleash terror on a global scale. ...
"I did not say that I think the US will do this. I say if the US does this, then the result is predictable. ...
Not immediately. [The regime's] capability has been degraded. They will rebuild capability, and add much more (including nukes). And start the next war, at the moment they choose.
"I have made no secret of the fact that I think Trump is a terrible president, a dishonest narcissist who operates on whim and whose whims change ten times a minute.
"The major risk of a war like this with a terrible Commander in Chief like this is that his whim will change. ...
"The risk is TACO [i.e., Trump always chickens out]: the risk of Trump leading this attack is that he will chicken out, and give up.
"[Now it's begun] we shouldn't work to push him to do that. ...
"This is an argument for not going to war in the first place. But once the war is going, it is not an argument for abandoning it!
"'When you're going through hell--keep going!' (Winston Churchill)."
"The rebbe rightly rejects the false alternatives from
Machiavelli: 'be feared or be loved.' But he does not mention
a key attribute of the good man: INDEPENDENCE."
"One of Machiavelli’s most famous ideas is that it is 'better to be feared than loved.' He observed that, in power struggles, being feared can prevent betrayal or confrontation and can command a certain kind of respect. "My goal in life is not to pursue power at any cost. I also reject the false choice between being feared or being loved by others.
"What I seek instead is happiness—achieved through my own independent effort. I do not wish to live as either a master or a slave to anyone.
"Whether others fear me or love me cannot be the foundation of my happiness, because that would make my well-being dependent on them. True happiness, for me, comes from independence: from using my own thinking and actions to create the things I want to see existing."
In January Javier Milei explained to a room of Davos delegates to the WEF forum how the world works, and how economic progress and prosperity happens. This is an excerpt. [Milei's speech was originally in Spanish, and the English version at the WEF website has been transcribed by AI. I have edited slightly it for smoothness and clarity. Emphases mine]
Xenophon ... [first] highlight[ed] the benefit of private property by stating that the owner's eye fattens his cattle. [Or as the English saying has it: "It's the master's eye that makes the mill go"]... Xenophon then delves into the dynamic realm, noting that efficiency also entails increasing wealth: that is, increasing the available quantity of goods through entrepreneurial creativity, namely through trade, innovation, and recognising opportunity. ...
"[T]he institution of private property deserves a separate chapter. By focussing on it, the Austrian School of Economics from Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Kirzner and Hoppe to Huerta de Soto has demonstrated the impossibility of socialism, thereby dismantling the illusory idea of John Stuart Mill that postulated independence between production and distribution; a form of academic deafness that led to socialism, and cost the world the lives of 150 million human beings -- while those who managed to survive the terror, did so in absurd poverty.
In line with [those writers'] previous remarks, and consistent with Xenophon's second [point], economic theory has identified four sources of economic progress.
First, there's the division of labour, which was illustrated by Adam Smith through the pin factory example. At its core, this is a mechanism that generates productivity gains, manifested as increasing returns. Although its limit is determined by market size, the size of the market is positively affected by this process. However, it is also worth noting that this virtuous process is not infinite and that its ultimate limit lies in the endowment of initial resources.
Second, there is the accumulation of capital, both physical and human. With regard to physical capital, the interaction between saving and investment is crucial, highlighting the fundamental role of capital markets and of the financial system in carrying out such intermediation. On the human capital side, the focus should not be limited to education alone, but should also include the development of cognitive capacities from birth, as well as nutrition and health, basic elements for gaining access to education and the labour market.
Third, there is technological progress, which consists in being able to produce a greater quantity of goods with the same amount of resources, or to produce the same output using a smaller quantity of inputs.
Finally, there is entrepreneurial spirit, or rather the entrepreneurial function, which, according to Professor Huerta De Soto constitutes the main driver of the economic growth process. Because, although the three factors mentioned are important, without entrepreneurs, there can be no production, and living standards would be extremely precarious.
In fact, the entrepreneurial function is not so much focused on short-term efficiency, but rather on increasing the quality of goods and services, which, in turn, leads to higher standards of living. On this basis, what truly matters is to expand the frontier of production possibilities to the maximum extent possible.
Thus, dynamic efficiency can be understood as an economy's capacity to foster entrepreneurial creativity and coordination.
In turn, the criterion of dynamic efficiency is inseparably linked to the concept of the entrepreneurial function, which is that typically human capacity to perceive profit opportunities that arise in the environment and to act accordingly to take advantage of them. This makes the task of discovering and creating new ends and means fundamental, driving spontaneous coordination to resolve market imbalances.
Moreover, this definition of dynamic efficiency proposed by Huerta de Soto coherently and appropriately combines Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction with North's concept of adaptive efficiency.
Naturally, given the role of the entrepreneurial function, the institutions under which it develops are of vital importance. In this regard, both Douglass North and Jesรบs Huerta de Soto consider one of the key functions of institutions to be that of reducing uncertainty.
So, while North presents them as a set of humanly devised constraints that structure social interaction in a repetitive manner, Huerta de Soto considers that these institutions, conceived by human beings, emerge spontaneously from a process of social interaction without being designed by any single individual, and that they reduce uncertainty in the market process.
As Roy Cordato points out, the appropriate institutional framework is one that favours entrepreneurial discovery and coordination. Accordingly, within this framework, economic policy should aim to identify and remove all artificial barriers that hinder the entrepreneurial process and voluntary exchanges.
Given the decisive influence of institutions on economic progress, this directs our attention to the importance of ethics, as societies that adhere to stronger moral values and ethical principles in support of institutions will be dynamically more efficient and will therefore enjoy greater prosperity.
Accordingly, the fundamental ethical problem is a search for the best way to foster entrepreneurial coordination and creation.
Therefore, in the field of social ethics, we conclude that conceiving human beings as creative and coordinating actors entails accepting axiomatically the principle that every human being has the right to appropriate the results of their entrepreneurial creativity.
So the private appropriation of the fruits of what entrepreneurs create and discover is a principle of natural law because if an author were unable to appropriate what they create or discover, their capacity to detect profit opportunities would be blocked, and the incentive to carry out their actions would disappear. Ultimately, the ethical principle just stated is the fundamental ethical foundation of the entire market economy.
So, what we've just demonstrated is that free enterprise capitalism is not only just but also efficient and also that it is the one that maximises growth.
RELATED: Here's Per Bylund at the latest Ludwig Von Mises conference explaining that it's entrepreneurs, not politicians, who change the world for the better.
This is an amusing account below of an important public meeting. Important in the context of making Auckland an affordable city.
Here's some quick context: Auckland's town planners have strangled the city in red tape for years. In recent times however, many planners and councillors (and mayor Wayne Brown) have come around to the realisation that the fewer houses built, the higher the prices for those houses: that, just maybe, people might be allowed to do a bit more on their land, to maybe build a little more densely.
Opposing this, of course, are the councillors and politicians of the leafier suburbs like Christine Fletcher -- and of course David Seymour, who's dropped his party's alleged principles about property rights to wring his hands instead about there being 'no density without infrastructure.'
There's no greater hand wringer than Christopher Luxon however, who decided over summer that Auckland Council must 'downzone' their proposed plan change that would allow greater density.
So this meeting Wednesday night was to confirm where the push for greater density would be maintained in the upcoming Plan (where would be upzoned), and where that push would be relaxed a little (where would be downzoned).
When the government’s efforts to intensify Auckland were debated at council back in August last year, critics took turns wringing their hands about the strain it would place on infrastructure. Plan Change 120 [which will allow greater density] could end up putting apartments in places that weren’t set up to handle them, they fretted. “Ultimately you can’t do all this upzoning without making the commitment to provide the infrastructure that will support it,” warned Albert-Eden-Puketฤpapa ward councillor Christine Fletcher ...
Yesterday the worriers got their wish. Thanks to a government backdown wrangled over chardonnays and summer barbecues, councillors are allowed to reduce the capacity in the new plan from two million to 1.6 million houses. Council’s policy and planning committee was meeting to decide where to make those cuts, and its chair Richard Hills started out explaining the staff recommendations to prioritise places 10km or more from the city centre. Asked why those areas should get first dibs on downzoning, council planner John Duguid was clear: it was because the land within 10km of the city centre had the best access to public transport, employment opportunities, regional amenities like parks and pools and three waters capacity, as measured by Watercare:
Three waters capacity in the central areas is set to improve even more when the Central Interceptor comes online soon. (Image: Watercare)
It should have been a celebration. But what would you know, most of the people who were once so concerned about ensuring housing is near infrastructure weren’t happy. Instead they were stewing over the revelation that the places with the best infrastructure were in their well-to-do wards. North Shore councillor John Gillon had looked at the maps and found that a 10km radius from the city centre would include the entire area he represents. He moved an amendment, seconded by Fletcher, to delete the 10km clause, saying he was “concerned” about the figure.
Waitฤkere councillor Shane Henderson was having none of it. He pointed out that west and south Auckland had accepted the vast bulk of the new houses in Auckland since the Unitary Plan passed in 2016. As for strain on infrastructure, those areas have limited pipe capacity and less access to public transport, and we see the effects of that outside-in planning in rush-hour congestion, parking shortages and sewage overflows, he said. Henderson argued Fletcher and Gillon were engaged in “a poorly dressed up move to take away intensification from the best-equipped parts of the city”. “The intention is simple: to downzone wealthy suburbs. There is no sensible reason for excluding central isthmus communities – again – from doing their part.”
The mayor was, if anything, more blunt. He said Gillon’s motion was aimed at putting housing in Pukekohe rather than areas close to “all the infrastructure”. “I don’t want to see endless sprawl just so nimbys in Parnell and politicians can get re-elected,” he said, in what appeared to be a shot at his political nemesis, Act leader David Seymour. “That’s disgraceful, I can’t vote for it.” ...
As Brown saw it, his colleagues’ first purpose was elitism. But if they had a second priority, it was delay. Gillon and Fletcher also put forward an amendment proposing to ask the government for more time to enact Plan Change 120. ...
The demand was familiar. Fletcher has asked for more consultation in just about every planning meeting for years, and the mayor was incensed. “I want to get out of this without further delay and dithering,” he said. “God almighty, it would be great to do something this three-year period.” ...
“For fuck’s sake, get on with it,” he said, as Fletcher spoke for the final time. ...
Afterward, Brown expanded on his frustration with Fletcher, saying the meeting was “one long filibuster to stop poor people living in her area.”
Read the whole thing here. It's an entertaining lunchtime read.
.jpeg)
