Political Philosophy

Profit Motive vs. Power Motive

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The Cost of Energy is a blog dedicated to energy issues that shows up in one of the side bars from time to time. Each time I’ve read a post there it’s been one sneering at anyone who questions the absolute certainty of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW).  In this post, he is ostensibly  complaining about some critic of CAGW (BTW, characterized as akin to one who denies the occurrence of the Holocaust) cherry picking some piece of data or the other.

I didn’t bother to check into that complaint because what caught my eye was the snippets he had highlighted, especially this part:

Mike Beard is a free-market conservative and pro-business. No one who calls himself those things can afford global warming to be true.

It is an article of faith among all leftists that anyone who has a profit motive is instantly more untrustworthy than those who nobly eschew profit for the pursuit of  political power. In their own minds, leftists are an intellectually superior group of altruists whose predictions are always instantly more accurate than the predictions of those with grubby commercial interests.

Yet in recent history we had a major event that demonstrated how the “pure hearted” leftists flew off into a destructive flight of self-interested fantasy, while those observers who were “free-market conservative and pro-business” not only had a more objective understanding of the problem but provided a solution that benefited everyone.

Back during the energy crisis of 1973-1984, we had the exact political dynamic that we see with CAGW: On the Left we had the clear-eyed altruists only wanting the best for everyone, while on the Right we had the self-deluding, incredibly greedy and selfish energy companies who only cared for their short-term profit at the expense of everyone else.

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Explaining Why Socialism Doesn’t Scale

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The fundamental problem with socialism is that it won’t scale organizationally. Too many people look at very small scale communal organizations of a few dozen or even a few hundred people and assume that form of organization can scale up to the hundreds of millions.

The best way I’ve found to explain it is to use the example that everyone has experience with: a group of people deciding on where to have lunch.

One person can decide easily, two require a quick conversation, but the length of the conversation increases exponentially as more people are added. By the time you reach more than a dozen or so people, you start having to delegate individuals to go around and get everyone’s opinion. By the time you have two to three dozen, you start having votes and committees. Planning for a hundred people requires votes, committees and a week’s lead time. Deciding for thousands requires specialists and months of collecting opinions and planning. Deciding for 10,000 or more is simply impossible.

Everybody understands intuitively that the more people you add to the lunch group, the longer the decisions take to make, the more time and resources go into making the decision and the more mediocre the final choice — e.g., it takes hours with numerous phone calls and emails and everyone ends up eating bland, overcooked chicken because everyone finds it the least offensive dish.

What socialists don’t understand is that all forms of collective decision making suffer from this scaling problem. They naively assume that because they can imagine how they would make the right decision in any particular circumstance (where to have lunch with a couple of friends) that therefore we can create a real-world political system to do the same thing (decide where 300 million people will have lunch).

Socialism and collective decision-making in general always lead to slow and costly decisions that result in mediocre outcomes. In the end, we feel lucky if we eat before 3pm and that we find enough ketchup to hide the taste of the entree.

Madison Update

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Shocking news:

Madison — Law enforcement is now searching for Democratic senators boycotting a Senate vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair plan Thursday in an attempt to bring the lawmakers to the floor to allow Republicans to move forward with action on the bill.
 
One Democratic senator said that he believed at least most of the members of his caucus are in another state. At least one, however, Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said he was still in his Capitol office listening to constituents.
 
In a press conference just off the Senate floor, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) said that Democrats were “not showing up for work” and that police were searching for them to bring them to the floor.
 
“That’s not democracy. That’s not what this chamber is about,” Fitzgerald said of the boycott to reporters.
 
Sen. Tim Cullen (D-Janesville) confirmed Thursday that Democrats are boycotting the Senate action on the bill in efforts to block a quorum and keep the measure buylevitra from passing. Because 20 senators of the 33-member house are needed to be present to pass a fiscal bill, the body’s 19 Republicans will not be enough to pass the budget repair bill without at least one Democrat present.
 
“They can’t pass this bill if there’s not a Democrat in the chamber,” Cullen said.
 
Cullen said he believed at least most of the Democrats were now outside Wisconsin, though he declined to say where.

I literally cannot believe this. The Democrats got creamed in the last election, and they decide to skip out when it comes time to vote. I hope the state police find at least one of them to force a vote. If this doesn’t get resolved fast, I will be making a personal appearance at my state senator’s office demanding that he explain his actions. I am absolutely furious.

Madison on the National News, Vouchers, and Other Random Thoughts

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I was a bit surprised this morning when I was listening to Bloomberg on my morning drive and there was a mention of the protests here in Madison. Bloomberg’s news reports are pretty concise (for those not familiar, Bloomberg is pretty much a financial news station), and for a story to make the Bloomberg news is a pretty big deal.

In addition to this, I have been receiving a lot of email and phone calls from business associates across the nation. Since this thing has gone national, people are seeing images of the thousands of people clogging the streets on the capitol square.

I was reminded of a post Shannon Love put up just over a year ago. A small aircraft crashed into a building in Austin and Shannon put it this way:

… but for all that the crash directly affected me it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. Had my spouse not called, I wouldn’t have know about it until I did my lunch-break scan of Instapundit. I can’t even see the smoke. Everything I know about the event comes from the TV news.

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For the Children?

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The heat is on, and in a big way. I have been writing about the new governor in Wisconsin, Scott Walker and his bold moves on the budget. The government workers unions have mobilized fully, organizing large demonstrations on the capital square. Traffic was snarled yesterday here in downtown Madison. We had a customer in the area who desperately needed materials. We had to wait until after hours to get to their facility, but we took care of them and they were very happy with our service.

Today, I believe, is the last day for the demonstrations. I did see a Repbublican guy on the news last night who said that he has the votes to get this legislation through.

But I think today the unions will have pushed their demonstrations too far.

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