Government & Policy — VOICES for REASON

In the latest issue of The Energy Advocate, editor and physicist Howard Hayden gives a thorough explanation of how different forms of light bulbs work, and why incandescent light bulbs are the most pleasing to most eyes. Here’s an excerpt:

Filaments in [incandescent] electric lamps are not as hot as the surface of the sun, yet the light they emit is very similar. Each one emits light in the entire wavelength range visible to the human eye . . . .

Incandescent lamps are notoriously inefficient, emitting less than 10% of the input power as visible light. The problem with more efficient sources like fluorescent lamps is that their light is not a continuous spectrum, but rather a handful of individual wavelengths. The effect is to distort colors of objects illuminated by the light.

Note that this “inefficiency” of incandescent light bulbs is the source of their scorn by the environmentalist left and their effective ban by the federal government. Energy Secretary Steven Chu reveals the mentality behind the ban when he says, smugly, of a law preventing individuals from buying the light bulbs they want: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”

What is Chu ignoring when he calls the choice to buy regular bulbs a “waste”?

Well, for one thing, he’s ignoring the fact that while incandescent light bulbs are not efficient in the sense of producing as much light per unit of energy as possible, they are incredibly efficient in the sense of producing the most desirable light for our money (including our energy). There is a rarely consulted passage of a rarely consulted document that champions “the pursuit of happiness.” When I choose to buy an incandescent light bulb, I do so because that gets me the best light for my money—with “best” emphatically including the quality of illumination I will enjoy as I read books, talk to friends, work in the evening, etc. To our government, such considerations are irrelevant; as long as I can fit neatly into government statistics that say I’m emitting less CO2 but I’m still alive and have access to illumination, why should it matter whether I enjoy my life more or less?

The ultimate standard of efficiency (be it energy efficiency, economic efficiency, or any other form) is the individual’s life and happiness. If anyone ever tells you that something you love is “inefficient,” and the cure is to shove something you hate down your throat, then “efficiency” has become a mere rationalization for tyranny.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

FoxNews.com has just released a new op-ed of mine on the nuclear safety issue. In the piece, entitled, “Nuclear Power Is Extremely Safe — That’s the Truth About What We Learned From Japan” I write that:

To think rationally about nuclear safety, you must identify the whole context. As the late, great energy thinker Petr Beckmann argued three decades ago in his contrarian classic “The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear,” every means of generating power has dangers and risks, but nuclear power “is far safer than any other form of large-scale energy conversion yet invented.”

To read the whole article, click here.

You can buy “The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear” here.

Finally, to listen to my discussion with Dr. Jay Lehr on nuclear safety on Power Hour, my monthly interview show on energy issues, click here.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In my latest Forbes.com column (co-authored by Yaron Brook), “What’s Missing from the Budget Debate,” I argue that to cut the entitlement state, you have to reject the morality of need and defend the individual’s right to live and work solely for his own sake. Ira Stoll at Future of Capitalism raises an interesting objection:

I don’t think it’s necessary to reject responsibility for your brother or your neighbor in order to support some entitlement reform or reductions. It’s possible to accept responsibility (or choose to accept responsibility) for your brother or neighbor, without accepting it for all Americans, or for the whole world. One can have different levels of obligation to people in different circles. At issue in the entitlement debate Messrs. Brook and Watkins are writing about is what obligation, if any, Americans have to each other as Americans, since not even the far left, so far as I can tell, is talking about including the entire world’s population into Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Here’s my response, posted in his comments:

Thanks for taking note of our column, Ira, and for your thoughtful comments. I think, however, that framing the issue in terms of “circles of obligation” clouds the issue because it blurs a crucial distinction: obligations an individual voluntarily accepts in pursuit of his own interests, and unchosen obligations an individual supposedly has that demand him to sacrifice his interests.

I would argue that a person pursuing his self-interest has all sorts of voluntarily-accepted obligations. For instance, I have obligations to treat my wife a certain way, not as some painful duty, but in order to foster a relationship that means a tremendous amount to me. Similarly, I’m contractually obligated to write the best columns I can for my employer.

That is radically different from the idea that there are people I have a self-sacrificial duty to help regardless of their value to me. Once you accept that idea, it doesn’t matter whether you happen to think it applies only to certain others. You’ve conceded the essential issue: the individual is not sovereign, and the needs of his neighbor trump his pursuit of happiness. It’s hard to see how you can then defend against the person who says that your “neighbor” ought to include your entire town, or city, or county, or planet. Indeed, isn’t that what moralists like Peter Singer (to say nothing of Christian theorists) have argued?

In my view, you can’t fight the welfare state by defending the welfare town. You have to fight for the individual’s moral and political right to pursue his own self-interest.

Ayn Rand addresses some of these issues at aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/charity.html and aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sacrifice.html. I encourage anyone interested to take a look.

Alaska is the home of Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field in American history. It is also the home of many other potentially momentous oil discoveries, which have for years been thwarted by the arbitrary, anti-development power environmental groups wield over the state. As Dave Harbour explains on MasterResource today, the situation has reached a critical juncture:

It is indisputable that for the last 2.5 years the Federal government has undertaken a campaign of economic genocide against Alaska.

The Trans Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS) is 2/3 empty and declining at a 6% annual rate while billions of barrels of oil lie untapped on federal lands…

The Obama Administration will have killed Alaska’s economy and thwarted America’s economic recovery if TAPS ceases operation for lack of readily available but off-limits federal oil.

As I have described in the Wall Street Journal, environmentalist opposition to Prudhoe Bay and the Alaskan pipeline helped contribute to America’s energy crisis of 1973. Make sure to reader Harbour’s whole post to understand what’s at stake today.

image: Wikimedia Commons

One popular view of environmentalism is that while there are some “extremists” or radicals who are truly anti-development, anti-industry, and anti-capitalist, the core of the movement is advocates and intellectuals devoted to making our environment a better place to live.

But if one looks at many of the statements of “mainstream” environmentalists, one finds some truly disturbing ideas. I shared some of these statements recently on my Facebook page.

Here’s one from Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich, an environmentalist icon: “A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” That quote was actually co-authored by White House science “czar” John Holdren (in the book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions) and not renounced by either.

Another revealing quote from Ehrlich is

A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.

This quote is from The Population Bomb, the best-selling book that, due to its embrace by the environmentalist left, transformed Ehrlich from an obscure butterfly scientist to a celebrated “ecologist” at Stanford.

Or take this one, from billionaire Ted Turner, a “mainstream” environmentalist if ever there was one. “A total [world] population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

Why is it that Ehrlich and Turner (as well as many others) are not outcasts but heroes in the environmentalist movement? A good place to start in answering that question is my discussion of environmentalism with Dr. Onkar Ghate on Power Hour. On that episode, Dr. Ghate explains how environmentalism–the philosophy that untouched wilderness takes precedence over human life–is dangerous in any dose, whether it is used to stop vital drilling in Alaska or to pine for a world in which 95% of us don’t exist.

(To subscribe to Power Hour—”the show where today’s top energy experts break down today’s top energy issues”—click here.)

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On the latest episode of Power Hour–the monthly Internet Radio Show where I interview today’s top energy experts to discuss today’s top energy issues–I talked to energy consultant Tom Tanton, an expert on the technology and the politics of “alternative energy.”

We hear all the time about the exciting promise of “alternative energy”–and the variations of it: “green energy,” “clean energy,” “renewable energy.” “Alternative energy,” roughly speaking, refer to sources of energy that are not successful on the market now but that proponents claim will be superior to market sources of energy, if only the government gets involved.

For instance, Al Gore, in arguing for the abolition of all CO2-emitting electricity, and much of CO2-emitting transportation by 2018, said that he knows of ”renewable sources that can give us the equivalent of $1 per-gallon gasoline.”

On past shows we’ve looked at some of these so-called alternative energies on a technical level, understanding why it’s so hard for, say, solar panels to be affordable and reliable as a major source of energy. On this show we take a different angle. We are going to look at some of the history of how government-led alternative energy works in practice. How does it actually work when the government promotes wind turbines or electric cars?

To talk about this issue, I brought on Tom Tanton, a man who knows as much about the reality of alternative energy as anyone–because he worked for three decades at the California Energy Commission, which has spearheaded numerous alternative energy programs over the decades, including programs for just about every “new” technology we hear about today. I think you’ll learn a lot from this episode.

(By the way, if you want an easy way to fit Power Hour into your schedule, download it to your MP3 player and listen to it during your commute.)

Download this month’s show:

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ARC senior fellow Dr. Onkar Ghate has an editorial on FoxNews.com today. “Ayn Rand is everywhere,” he writes, and “her political opponents are growing nervous.” With some Tea Partiers and politicians praising Ayn Rand’s views, what “worries advocates of the welfare state is that they have never before faced any moral opposition.”

Whatever the rhetoric of Republicans and Democrats in the past, they agreed on the basic goal: more and more government controls are necessary to rein in businessmen, “manage” the economy, and minister to those in need.

No matter which party was in power, therefore, we got things like Sarbanes-Oxley, bailouts of GM and Citibank, a huge prescription drug “benefit” and ObamaCare. Politics was a squabble about the efficacy of any proposed controls, not a dispute about the morality or immorality of imposing controls in the first place. As Krugman observes, in years past everyone “accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state.”

But now its advocates sense that this is no longer true, that some Americans are beginning to question the moral legitimacy of the welfare state. To strangle this questioning in the crib, supporters of government controls are trying to persuade their opponents to abandon Rand.

The current tactic is to tell Tea Partiers and “conservatives” that if you take religion seriously, you can’t be a fan of the atheist Ayn Rand. . . .

Dr. Ghate notes that “this much is true. Rand’s moral teachings are fundamentally different from Jesus’ teachings.”  But he goes on to ask the question, “Did Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers not reject the Sermon’s advice in creating America?”

Read the rest of the op-ed here.

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Recently on his blog, Paul Krugman claimed that he predicted the recent housing bubble as early as 2004. His cited 2005 op-ed certainly does speak of an impending housing bubble. But whatever credit he deserves for seeing it should be revoked because by his own admission he was calling for the Fed to maintain low interest rates, which was a major cause of the housing bubble. (For more information, see this course by Yaron Brook. For more general information on the impact of central banks on boom-and-bust cycles, read up on Austrian Business Cycle Theory, which is most famously advanced by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.)

Of course, Krugman insists that he was calling for low interest rates, but not for a housing bubble. But these artificially low interest rates misled many people to go into debt to either build or purchase houses—houses they could not afford when interest rates rose later. Once rates were rising, the Fed faced the following alternative: either they would have to continually expand the money supply to maintain these artificially low rates and thus, through inflation, continue robbing people of the purchasing power of their savings. Or they would have to eventually let rates return to normal and thus, letting those who went into debt feel the pain. In either case, a large number of people were inevitably going to be hurt by this Fed policy, as is what actually happened when the bubble burst.

In essence, Krugman’s calling for low interest rates while insisting that he was not advocating for a resulting asset bubble is demanding for a cause without its effects. It is just as absurd as if he wanted to smack a buzzing hornet’s nest while simultaneously insisting that he has zero intention of aggravating stinging insects.

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Over at the Wall Street Journal online, Gregory Conko has an interesting article about the Food and Drug Administration’s upcoming hearing on Avastin. That’s the cancer-fighting drug that was recommended for disapproval by the FDA’s oncology committee almost a year ago.

Conko, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has focused on the really important theme here. Choices about whether to undertake risky, expensive treatments are properly made by the individual patient, in consultation with her doctor, not by compulsion from a government bureau. He writes:

When well-known scientist Stephen Jay Gould was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer in July 1982, he was told the diagnosis meant a median survival time of just eight months. His doctor gave up on him. But he lived another 20 years.

“Means and medians are the abstractions,” he wrote in Discover magazine in 1985. “Therefore, I looked at the mesothelioma statistics quite differently—and not only because I am an optimist . . . but primarily because I know that variation itself is the reality.”

Like Gould’s doctor, the FDA and its technocratic supporters are giving up on breast cancer patients because of their slavish obsession with median response rates. Everyone can agree that, on average, Avastin does not extend most patients’ life expectancy. But some patients have responded incredibly well, living years longer than expected. The medical community calls them “super responders.” Statisticians might describe them as “outliers.” But they’re real people, alive because of Avastin.

I had something similar to say in an op-ed a while back, responding to the oncology committee’s finding that Avastin does not “represent a favorable risk/benefit analysis.”

Does that mean the drug fails to help any woman more than it hurts her? Not at all—many individual women benefit from the drug. But the FDA regards such facts as sentimental distractions, to be deliberately ignored when deciding the fate of a drug like Avastin. The FDA’s idea of a risk/benefit analysis deals with health in the aggregate, as revealed in statistics involving large populations, not with the health of individuals.

But can risks and benefits really be weighed at the level of society as a whole? A society is only a collection of individuals. A society doesn’t enjoy life, or suffer—only individuals do. Metaphors aside, a society doesn’t get sick and die—only individuals do. To appreciate the difference, consider how a rational patient with breast cancer decides whether to undergo drug treatment.

Such a patient weighs (among other things) the statistical likelihood of a favorable result against the statistical likelihood of painful side effects. At all times, her judgment is individual and personal: How will my life improve if these tumors temporarily stop growing? How might side-effects interfere with my enjoyment of life? How much better will I feel if the results are above average—or how much worse, if the results are below average? How much is an additional year, month, or week of relatively normal life worth to me?

The FDA’s experts take professional pride in refusing to allow such individual considerations to influence their decisions. Instead, they float among the statistical clouds, observing that Avastin delays tumor growth by only 3 to 12 weeks on average and that some patients actually get worse after taking the drug. From behind a veneer of scientific respectability supplied by charts and graphs that ignore the individual patient, these experts then ask a question to which no rational answer can be given: What is the meaning to society of one month in an individual’s life?

I’m glad Gregory Conko and CEI are speaking up on this issue. Everyone interested in making sure pharmaceutical companies have the freedom to sell life-saving drugs should follow this controversy closely.

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Certain portions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—better known as Obamacare—“may violate the Constitution of Ayn Rand, but they do not violate the Constitution of the United States.” So said Acting Solicitor General Neal K. Katyal on Wednesday, defending Obamacare before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

Whoa. Let’s slow down.

As everyone knows, there’s only one U.S. Constitution. So Katyal’s reference to “the Constitution of Ayn Rand” is obviously a rhetorical device—but for what end? For the purpose of reviling through mockery a certain view of the Constitution’s nature and purpose, a view championed not only by Ayn Rand but by the Founding Fathers themselves.

Rand held that the Constitution’s purpose was and is the protection of individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Although she was not a constitutional scholar and never originated a theory of legal interpretation, she knew as a matter of history and political philosophy that the Constitution embodies a certain view of the relationship between the individual and the government. In her article “The Nature of Government,” she wrote:

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government.

Elsewhere in the same article, she said:

A complex legal system, based on objectively valid principles, is required to make a society free and to keep it free—a system that does not depend on the motives, the moral character or the intentions of any given official, a system that leaves no opportunity, no legal loophole for the development of tyranny.

The American system of checks and balances was just such an achievement. And although certain contradictions in the Constitution did leave a loophole for the growth of statism, the incomparable achievement was the concept of a constitution as a means of limiting and restricting the power of the government.

Expanding on Rand’s view, I wrote the following in an op-ed for the Christian Science Monitor:

As a matter of historical fact, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution for a certain purpose. They wanted a government that would respect and protect the individual’s rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Aside from certain contradictions (the worst of which, toleration of slavery, required a bloody civil war to expunge), the Constitution is dedicated to protecting the individual from society by means of a limited government. The Supreme Court cannot objectively interpret the document’s language apart from this essential purpose.

Regrettably, however, too many of today’s judges reject this approach to constitutional interpretation. Instead, they follow the path marked out by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who sat on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932. “All my life I have sneered at the natural rights of man,” Holmes wrote, reflecting his view that the individual rights venerated by the Founders have no objective validity and therefore no role in discerning the Constitution’s meaning.

Judges may harbor personal opinions on man’s rights, Holmes conceded, but such notions have “nothing to do with the right of a majority to embody their opinions in law.” Holmes’s view directly contradicts that of James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, who reviled unlimited democracy as “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.”

Unfortunately, for more than a century, the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution without regard to the principle of individual rights. As a result, a statute like Obamacare—which contains wholesale violations of the rights of doctors, patients, and insurance companies—could sail through Congress without much worry that the courts will bar the way.

We can now see more clearly the purpose behind Katyal’s sarcastic reference to “the Constitution of Ayn Rand.” Even though virtually all the case law is on his side—even though the courts have given Congress carte blanche to rule the economy—Katyal realizes there’s a stubborn individualism in America that refuses to lie down in submission while a juggernaut like Obamacare rolls over them. Because Ayn Rand has actually articulated and defended the moral basis of this American ideal, she stands out as the symbol of what Katyal wants to warn against. By singling her out, Katyal is reminding the judges that the American ideal of individual rights is none of their concern—that the Supreme Court regards the Constitution’s purpose as irrelevant to interpreting its language—that the judges’ job is to rubber-stamp Obamacare and not worry about its victims.

The judges on the Eleventh Circuit, who are duty-bound to follow Supreme Court precedent, will not be breaking new ground in the realm of constitutional interpretation. But if some future Supreme Court were to move the judiciary toward a more objective approach, those justices would not be enforcing some imaginary “Constitution of Ayn Rand.” They would be enforcing the one and only Constitution of the United States, that often misunderstood yet precious gift of our freedom-loving forebears.

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