Political Philosophy

Powering Down

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Here’s the great French scientist Sadi Carnot, writing in 1824:

To take away England’s steam engines to-day would amount to robbing her of her iron and coal, to drying up her sources of wealth, to ruining her means of prosperity and destroying her great power. The destruction of her shipping, commonly regarded as her source of strength, would perhaps be less disastrous for her.

For England in 1824, substitute the United States in 2009. And for “steam engines,” substitute those power sources which use carbon-based fuels: whether generating stations burning natural gas, blast furnaces burning coke, or trucks/trains/planes/automobiles using oil derivatives. With these substitutions, Carnot’s paragraph describes the prospective impact of this administration’s energy policies: conducting a war on fossil fuels, without leveling with people about the true limitations of “alternative” energy technologies and without seriously pursuing civilian nuclear power.

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Innovation and Social Structure

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Currently reading Turning Points in Western Technology (D S Cardwell, 1972.) The author observes that during the late 1700s and early 1800s, the state of French science and mathematics was very advanced–more so than that in Britain–and asks the question: Why was industrial development in Britain so much more successful than that in France?

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Worthwhile Analogy

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Imagine that some of our Congresspeople–Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Robert Byrd, for example–formed a professional sports team. Baseball, basketball, football–take your pick.

Would anyone invest money in such a team? Would anyone go to watch it, for any purposes other than mockery? I think the answer is pretty obvious.

Well, the average Congressperson probably knows far more about sports than he knows about business. Almost certainly, he watches sports on TV…he may well have played himself in his younger days…whereas the typical Congressional knowledge of business is comparable to a baseball-watcher who doesn’t understand the difference between balls and strikes. Yet this Congress, with the encouragement of the Administration, is arrogating to itself the power to micromanage every business in the country in excruciating detail.

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Job Killing Regulations

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The President of the United States presides over a government that employs a huge number of people who write regulations that either slow down job creation or are actual job killers. In these times of high unemployment, the President could, by executive order, instruct these employees to use their existing discretion in favor of the interpretation that would save or create the most jobs.

There would be no need to wait for the Congress. There would be no need to spend the public’s money on this initiative. This executive order would be entirely ‘shovel ready’ and its impact on the deficit is overwhelmingly likely to be positive. So far as I know, President Obama has not signed such an order, nor has he given any evidence that he is even considering it.

Why?

The “Complex” Left vs. the “Simple” Right

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Over at Hit&Run, there is a thread about how simplistic and empty Sarah Palin is compared to Obama or previous conservatives. Leaving out the fact that both Reagan and Goldwater suffered the same contempt in their time that Palin does now, it does raise the issue of whether it is important that leftists do in general produce much more complex and “sophisticated” explanations of political ideas than do conservatives.

The major reason that non-leftists’ ideas look “simplistic” compared to leftists’ ideas is that non-leftists’ ideas are usually nothing but statements about the limits of human knowledge.

For example, all arguments for the free market can be distilled to something like:

No human or group of humans has a predictive model of the economy. As such we cannot predict the consequences of economic actions we take. This is especially true of large-scale actions. Therefore, the best policy in the overwhelming majority of case is to not attempt to use the coercive power of the state to try and steer the economy, because the we cannot predict the results and we are more likely to do harm than good.

By contrast, leftist arguments are statements about the possession of knowledge by some elite group of human beings. The “complex” leftists arguments are detailed elaborations of what they think they know in each particular case.

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