Sheldon Richman

TGIF: Beware the Government-“Science” Complex

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 24, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The government-"science" complex ostensibly promotes the search for facts about our world, but it actually promotes and enforces orthodoxy, protects resulting paradigms, and manufactures apparent consensuses that are questioned only at one's reputational peril. That's why I put the word science in quotation marks. I could have called it pseudoscience or junk science. In contrast to real science, "science" is little more than the broadcast of evidence-free alarms that politicians and bureaucrats, advised by anointed government-financed "scientists," use to justify political action and...

Why Do Climate Alarmists Dislike Climate Realist-Optimists So Much?

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 23, 2021 | Blog, Politics

F. A. Hayek, the Nobel-Prize-winning economist of the Austrian tradition, provided a possible answer to the question posed in the title. Although Hayek (1899-1992) to my knowledge had nothing to say about the climate controversy, his views on macroeconomics met with a similarly critical attitude from those who practiced economics at a level far, far removed from individual action. He too was in essence called a science denier, in this case the science was economics. Here's what he said when contrasting the method of the natural sciences of "simple phenomena" with the methods of social and...

TGIF: Get Rich Quicker!

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 17, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

"I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” --John Stuart Mill, 1828 We mustn't let the wrongdoing of politicians and bureaucrats blind us to the good things going on in the world. Outside the political realm, many things are doing pretty darn well. The long-term trends for many indicators have been positive for the last couple of centuries. Short-term disturbances, most often the result of political mischief, are temporary, and the progress resumes when the politicians loosen...

TGIF: Bad Sign?

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 10, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

When I see four of those yard signs on my morning walk, I chuckle. If I'm in a mischievous mood I might someday suggest a couple of memes that the owners might add. I could embrace all of those memes, but not without some qualification and in several cases, a good deal of qualification. But that's for another day. Today I want to focus on numbers 5 and 6: "Science Is Real" and "Water Is Life." I wouldn't comment on these were it not for their ominous implications for government policy. Some people are ready to spend trillions of other people's money because of what they suppose those sayings...

TGIF: Why Do We Question Motives?

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 3, 2021 | Featured Articles, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

I don't know if we're in the heyday of questioning the motives of people we disagree with rather than simply rebutting them--character assassination, that is--but it's got me wondering why this is such a popular pastime these days. Think about how often we hear people's motives impugned--even when they have impressive credentials--because of their positions on COVID-19, climate change, nutrition, racial policy--you name it. Considering motivation is not a bad thing per se, but too often it substitutes for a counterargument. That's a confession of vacuity. To oversimplify a bit, let's assume...

Really?

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 1, 2021 | Blog, Economics, Libertarianism

Someday our descendants will laugh with embarrassment at the people today who pore over weather records prepared to proclaim an existential threat from a fraction-of-1-degree rise in the average global temperature over any previous year "on record," that is, unless the government spends trillions of dollars on a program of virtually totalitarian control of our lives. "On record" actually means "in the last century and a half" because that's how far back "the record" goes. And that, by the way, roughly coincides with the beginning of the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850, which continues to...

TGIF: Safety Can Be Hazardous to Our Health

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 27, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Kudos to Glenn Greenwald, a rare leftist voice of sanity on so many issues, for opening his recent article this way: In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to...

TGIF: Thinking about Energy

by Sheldon Richman | Aug 20, 2021 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its sixth "assessment report" earlier this month. As usual it generated its share of alarmist headlines. The report is several thousand pages long, and I'm certainly not qualified to digest, much less judge, it. I do think it's wise, however, to view the headlines and politicians' statements about it critically. The poppycock quotient of rhetoric about the supposedly looming environmental catastrophe is extremely high, not to mention toxic. At the risk of being accused of cherry-picking, I will point out that one expert on the...