VOICES for REASON

One argument sometimes heard in favor of green energy is that sources such as wind and solar are “free, forever.”  Al Gore, in particular, has said repeatedly that to end our “overdependence on outdated, heavily polluting carbon-based technologies . . . we need sources that are free forever, like the sun, wind and earth.” (See also here, here and here.)

On a superficial glance, this might seem to have a certain ring of plausibility. To use the energy in oil, coal and natural gas takes a lot of work and resources: the fuels have to be discovered, extracted, transported, processed, refined, and distributed—all at great effort and expense.

By contrast, sunlight and wind are flows of energy that already occur all by themselves in nature. Sunshine is, literally, a stream of electromagnetic energy flowing onto the earth. Similarly with wind, which consists of air particles that carry kinetic energy by the very fact of their being in motion. We can feel the effects of such energy without effort, just by sitting in the sun and enjoying the breeze.

But if you give this even a tiny amount of additional thought, you should quickly realize that the “free forever” argument is just plain silly.

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For months, Republicans’ singular strategy in the health-care debate has been to attack Democrat plans as “a government takeover of health care.” There are at least three major problems with this strategy. 1) It fails to acknowledge that we already have a government takeover of health care, thanks to government policies dating back to the 1940s. 2) It fails to acknowledge the major, systemic problems caused by our current, government-controlled system, such as skyrocketing prices across the board. (For more on this, see Jeff Scialabba’s posts here, here, and here.) 3) It fails to offer a positive, truly free-market alternative.

In recent weeks, finally, the Republicans offered a positive health care proposal of their own. Read the rest of this entry »

In my previous post I described how controls breed controls: when politicians intervene in the economy, they create distortions and problems which, unless corrected by rescinding the controls, necessitate further controls–a process ultimately resulting in total control by the government over the economy. We can see this process at work in the two domestic issues that have dominated headlines over the last year: the debate over health care and the financial crisis.

In both cases, the conventional wisdom has been that the free market created problems only government intervention can solve. In both cases, the conventional wisdom is wrong: it was government controls that created the problems. Read the rest of this entry »

Ayn Rand was an uncompromising defender of laissez-faire capitalism, which, she held, means “the abolition of any and all forms of government intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.” In her essay “Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?”, she noted:

There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept “just a few controls” is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.

This view would shock most people today. They take it as self-evident that we must have some combination of freedom and government control of the economy. The idea that “just a few controls” would lead to “gradual enslavement” strikes them as dubious, to say the least. But the evidence for this proposition is all around us. A free country doesn’t dissolve into authoritarian rule over night, but by steps–some small and innocuous, others vast and brazen. Today, we’re seeing examples of both.

Here’s a recent example of the former: Read the rest of this entry »

Every day, Americans use about 3 gallons of oil a day. That’s almost one billion gallons total.

It’s hard to find anyone who thinks this is a good thing. Indeed, the overwhelming view heard in our culture is that our use of oil is an “addiction”. This term was popularized by former President–and oilman–George W. Bush in his 2006 speech.

Barack Obama is even more opposed to oil: “the age of oil must end in our time,” he has declared unequivocally. And: “the country that faced down the tyranny of fascism and communism is now called to challenge the tyranny of oil.” (Note: our President is comparing our use of oil to movements that killed a combined 100 million people.)

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On Friday I discussed the life-serving benefits made possible by the thriving, but fragile, medical technology industry in the United States. Literally millions of lives have been bettered and extended by the products this industry has created, such as defibrillators and advanced surgical tools. For an idea of how amazing the technology in this field is, consider that Paralympian amputees are now argued to have an advantage over non-handicapped, Olympian athletes. It’s not a pipe dream that advances in this industry might one day soon be able to restore sight to the blind, or complex motion to the paralyzed.

Not a pipe dream, that is, unless any of the health-care reforms in Congress come to pass.

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America is the world leader in medical device innovation, producing more new medical devices annually than any other nation. Its medical technology industry is responsible for nearly two million jobs and is one bright spot in a health-care system with many flaws. Yet, as I’ll discuss here and in my next post, if the health-care reforms presently advancing through Congress are enacted, the medical technology industry as we know it may be severely cut down.

Let’s begin with the good.

What exactly does the medical technology industry do? It designs and manufactures products ranging from stethoscopes to artificial knees to drug delivery systems to imaging machines. These devices better the lives of everyone who steps into a doctor’s office or hospital. They facilitate the delivery of medical care; they reduce the need for surgery and cut recovery time; they make living with chronic diseases manageable; they keep people from dying prematurely.

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One thing the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall should remind us of, in addition to the sheer brutality of communism, is the economic devastation it caused–and the unequivocal economic superiority of freedom. “If you want a contemporary demonstration of the respective merits and performances of a free economy and of a controlled economy,” Ayn Rand wrote in 1961, “a demonstration that comes as close to an historical laboratory experiment as one could hope to see–take a look at the condition of West Germany and of East Germany.”

From the end of World War II until the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East and West Germany were separated, not only by bricks and mortar shells, but by economic doctrines. People who shared a common history, a language, an environment, demonstrated over the course of decades the superiority of markets over government planning.

While retaining various forms of welfare and interventionism, Western Germany’s economy was largely free after the war. Property was privately owned, and prices and wages were determined by market forces. East Germany, however, conformed to Soviet-style central planning. The Socialist Unity Party of Germany oversaw all production, most of the means of production were owned by the state, and prices and wages were placed under centralized control. In other words, the government dictated what to produce, how to produce it, and how to distribute what was produced.

The results? Read the rest of this entry »

In the United States, the soldier’s profession has traditionally been framed as one of service and sacrifice in the name of a “greater cause.” But American soldiers are not martyrs—and it’s time our government stopped treating them as such. Alex Epstein explains in “What We Owe Our Soldiers.” Ideal reading on this Veteran’s Day.

While you read the following story, try to figure where it took place. Where in the Middle East might you expect a woman to receive such humiliating treatment?

For good reason, the woman in this story (a physician) and her husband (an academic) decide to immigrate to the U.S. to pursue a better life; he sets off first to get established and she’s to follow, with their children. That requires obtaining passports for them. When the time comes, she applies for the passports in person and brings with her a legally valid power of attorney signed by her husband. But her application is flatly denied.

Why? The clerk tells her that the power of attorney gives her the right to dispose of her husband’s property, but “not the guardianship of his children.”

“But they’re my children, too, sir,” she replies.

“A woman is not the guardian of her children. Do you understand?” This apparently is the conventional Islamic way.
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