What do haters of "capitalism" really hate?

Dear hater of capitalism,

You're absolutely right to feel that there's something wrong. There is an oligarchy, and democracy doesn't seem to be working to make anyone's lives better. In face, it keeps getting worse.

What I'd like for you to consider is a slightly different perspective on that. Instead of assuming that big business causes the corruption in government, consider the opposite - that government is what causes corruption of big business by regulating it, which in turn causes businesses to spend a lot of money trying to influence state power as much as possible to benefit themselves.

Don't confuse "capitalist," which means free markets, with state managed trade like NAFTA. Free trade doesn't require any kind of special "agreement" or any laws or regulations. Why should the state have power to tell you whom with and how to conduct your business? Especially when those laws are not made in the "general welfare," because the true "general welfare" is not using force to limit the freedom of people to transact business with whomever they want, wherever they want.

Many people who oppose the xenophobic, unfree US immigration policy oppose "Free Trade" and then point to NAFTA. NAFTA is CALLED free trade but it isn't. That's the argument against it. It's state managed trade, and yes it's terrible and exploitative in the favor of the industries who got the law influenced to favor themselves at the expense of others or consumers and immigrants. It's the state that has militaristic armed border forces - not business. Business love to hire them - that's why they come! The argument against border enforcement is he argument against the state - a truly free market for labor and goods would solve all the issues that correctly bother you.

Capitalism and free trade are based purely on voluntary association, while "corporatism" is only enabled by the state. The corporation is a legal fiction of a status created by the state that limits liability of shareholders. All business monopolies are made possible entirely by the monopoly that government demands on the use of force. If you try to compete with state granted monopolies, the state will send it's police agents to assault the property and personhood of the would-be competitors. In a truly free market, there would be market entrants and competition, not monopoly backed by potentially lethal force and theft of property by the state on behalf of corporations that register with the state for the right to use it's power to assault their competitors. That's exactly what we have now.

Even in cases of monopolization of a resource by one business entity, there are always substitutes, and there would be incentive for an ingenious person to find a way to create more distribution for acceptable substitutes or invent a substitution if the demand is high enough for someone to decide it would be a higher valued use of their time to work on solving that problem vs. doing something else with their time. True capitalism is based on purely voluntary association and agreement. Compare that kind of peace - where fighting doesn't happen because it's not economical - compare that with the sheer brutality employed by the state, which locks people in cages for not complying with "laws" that criminalize activities that have no victim, and locks them in a cage for failing to pay their tithe that is used for funding wars and death and destruction, and ruining lives here and all over the world??It's not the private sector that prints money out of thin air, it's the Federal Reserve that does it.

More on the the state and war - private businesses don't wage war - they compete to provide value to customers and to attract skilled employees. It's only regulation - the power to create influence for sale - that introduces the corruption which you correctly observed. Private businesses don't wage war - it requires the mountains of counterfeit cash created by the Federal Reserve, the constantly inflated fiat paper money and fractional reserve banking of the state to finance it. The state pays for this by printing money and creating it out of thin air, based on inflated valuations of other worthless paper. The entire value of the entire economy is the same - but they just stole some of the value of your savings. Inflation is an invisible tax.

When you hear on the news that inflation is some percentage, think that the government have counterfeited inflation into the economy that has been over 2000% since 1913. If you support peace and individual liberty and oppose aggression, then please consider that the solution can not come from the state, the problem is the state. If you empower the state, you will get nothing but more war and more oppression.

If you love peace and civil liberties and individual freedom, please consider that "capitalism" is not what you hate.

Forrest M. Mimms posts on Realclimate!

Realclimate is the home of the Global Cooling? Deniers, some of the people involved with it are involved with the now-exposed CRU climategate scandal.

Mimms is the author of the awesome "Getting Started in Electronics" series of books

http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Started-Electronics-Forrest-Mims/dp/0945053282 that helped my childhood remain nerdy and girlfriendless until I turned 17.

Comment at http://www.realclimate.org/?comments_popup=1994#comment-145290

Real Climate,

Many of the Hadley CRU e-mails and the infamous HARRY-READ_ME.txt include deeply disturbing content. Almost as troubling is the under-reaction of Real Climate as this scandal expands. This scandal deserves an immediate and fully transparent response from the climate science community, not the “circling of the wagons” approach cited by some.

While I am not a professional climate science, I design atmospheric monitoring instruments and have used them to create a 20-year time series of calibrated measurements of the ozone layer, column water vapor, aerosol optical depth, direct UV-B and various other parameters from South Texas. I have worked under various assignments for NASA GSFC in the US and Brazil and have just completed a major book for NOAA. I was a co-PI for GLOBE for 6 years and have been a USDA UV-B network site manager for 6 years. My findings have been published in the refereed literature, and I have served as a reviewer for several leading scholarly journals. I have also reviewed an array of technical books for McGraw-Hill, Prentice-Hall and Academic Press.

I trust that this background will establish that I and others who practice traditional, objective climate science–and the public that has paid many of our expenses–are fully entitled to a prompt end to the blacklisting, withholding of data, destruction of e-mails, ad hominems, threats and other misconduct so blatantly displayed in many of the leaked Hadley CRU documents by scientists who somehow found time to communicate with one another between their many trips around the world. Real Climate was created by some of those whose troubling correspondence is now before the world. So Real Climate is where reform should begin.

QUESTIONS:

1. Late last night I received a poignant inquiry from a student requesting advice about being a “climate science grad student in the IPCC era.” Some climate scientists have written that they, too, are receiving similar questions from students who are troubled by the content of the leaked e-mails and certain other documents and who are even being asked to “tweak” their data to fit preconceived notions. What steps can be taken by societies, journals, universities and government agencies to protect scientific integrity and peer review, permit dissenting views, end blacklisting, provide transparent access to methods and data, and restore public trust in climate science? Will Real Climate sincerely advocate and openly promote these and other essential reforms?

2. Your recent posts are a welcome improvement from what can be found in even a cursory scan through Real Climate. You also seem to be allowing comments and questions from a much broader audience, and this is also very good news. My concern, however, is that the tone and ad hominem nature of some Real Climate comments before last week are disturbingly similar to that of some of the leaked e-mails. (This is not surprising in view of the tone of some e-mails from a Real Climate founder in the leaked CRU e-mails.) Will Real Climate hereafter follow the friendlier and more open approach that you have recently exhibited and end the disparagement of those whose positions Real Climate views as incorrect? Will Real Climate follow the lead of Judith Curry in responding to questions from the climate science community in general and grad students in particular? Will Real Climate sever its relationship with scientists who have damaged climate science by advocating the misconduct revealed in many of the Hadley CRU e-mails and documents?

Thank you for considering these questions. Based on a lengthy telephone conversation this morning, I am far from the only practicing climate observer who will be highly interested in your responses.

Forrest

Forrest M. Mims III
Editor, THE CITIZEN SCIENTIST (www.sas.org/tcs)
http://www.forrestmims.org
http://www.sunandsky.org
twitter.com/fmims

Why "Consensus" is Not Science

It's about a lot of areas of "science" - science is a branch of philosophy, specifically epistemology. What is knowledge? How do we acquire it? How do we know that we know what we think we know?

People use the word "consensus" as if it applies to science, but in the realm of epistemology, this is meaningless and misleading. Especially when the "group" that reaches "consensus" uses the power of the state to exclude people who are trying to test their hypothesis by deriding them as cranks, or uses words like "settled science," which is also a political, not scientific concept.

"Consensus" and "settled science" are not science, they are confirmation bias, inadequate sample size, and rejection of the very process that is science in the attempt to get the power of the state to turn in a way that uses force against others in ways that fits their "consensus" opinion. "Consensus" isn't science, it's a conglomeration of logical fallacies.

This kind of non-scientific thinking permeates "science." Here are a few areas that I think have not been adequately examined, and where there are "consensus" conspiracies that actively prevent research that is attempting to falsify their premise from being funded or published, and paint the proponents of, who are as well qualified as they are albeit often smaller in numbers a kooks, cranks, and insignificant outliers. (IE not part of the groupthink that is encouraged by the "consensus" control of government funding of science).

Anthropogenic global warming

Lipid hypothesis - about saturated fat and cholesterol and whether it's healthy or poison

Whether fossil fuels are biogenic or abiogenic and how they formed, and whether they are renewable resources or not

The HIV/AIDS hypothesis - it's never been isolated in the way that other retroviruses have, it's detection is by nonspecific markers

The role of grains and beans in degenerative diseases

All "policy" studies that compare two or several possible paths by government to determine the "best" one based on arbitrary criteria, yet never include secondary effects - ie: the "law" of unintended consequences, and never include possible outcomes from solutions that would occur in an unregulated free market.

All claims by advocacy groups that clinical trials, cohort studies, reviews, observational studies "prove" things.

Those are some of the worst examples of science-abuse I can think of.

UPDATE

Michael Crichton (RIP) wrote about this in 2003. Wonderful article!

http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html

New name for the Crimatologists

I am going to start referring to them as "Global Cooling Deniers."

Even Jon Stewart is mocking the Global Cooling Deniers now.



"Poor Al Gore, global warming debunked by the very Internet he invented!"

rotflmao

Climatic Research Unit (CRU) "Hacked" Data for Download

I came across a copy or the original file that was dumped, uploaded it here:

http://www.filefactory.com/file/a1f7c1f/n/climactic-research-unit-foi-leaked-data.zip

I giggle a bit that the hackers are being called criminals.

If someone had hacked the Climate Audit blog (a group of climate change skeptics) and found secret emails with instructions from Exxon-Mobile and Dick Cheney instead, there's no doubt that the hackers would be referred to as brave whistleblowers acting in the interest of science.

Never mind that "consensus" isn't a scientific concept, it's a political one...