“Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail…. Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.”
– Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 219.
“It is a mark of how far we have gone on the road to serfdom that government allocation and rationing of oil is the automatic response to the oil crisis.”
– Milton Friedman, “Why Some Prices Should Rise,” Newsweek, November 19, 1973.
Milton Friedman is best known for Monetarism, a school of economics that effectively challenged fiscal-side Keynesianism.
“Environmental lobbies need to work with industry and encourage sustainable practices. Hysteria, dogma and hypocrisy will not save the planet. Neither will thousands of retweets. Balanced approaches separating real green from pretend, crony green is the true pathway to ecological progress.“
Environmentalism is now firmly entrenched in our daily lives. It is part of pop-culture. It is even a marker of identity for some people.
Yet is the widespread support given to the environmental movement anything more than supercilious tokenism? Is being ‘green’ just another fashion statement, rather than any laudable drive to protect fragile ecosystems? Are we now at a point where the word ‘Green’ has wrongly become synonymous with ‘Good’?
That’s the topic of this new video: “Environmentalism: Why Green Isn’t Always Good.”
Obviously, there are elements of the environmental movement which are committed purely to protecting our precious environments.…
“[Sen. Harry] Reid’s attacks have drawn cries of McCarthyism from around the political world, including MSNBC host Joe Scarborough and Mother Jones editor Daniel Schulman. And they’ve even created discomfort among liberal big-money donors and operatives, who worry the argument might expose them to charges of hypocrisy, while they also question the effectiveness of running against donors who won’t appear on any ballots.”
– Kenneth Vogel, “Behind Harry Reid’s War Against the Koch Brothers,” POLITICO, July 7, 2014.
It was an all-too-familiar reframe: guilt by association (and in this case guilt from false/good association). At Climate Progress, Joe Romm breathlessly reported last month that “Bjorn Lomborg Is Part of the Koch Network—and Cashing In.” In Romm’s vitriolic words:
…You know the T-shirt-wearing climate inactivist Lomborg (aka the Danish Delayer) from such recent gems as “Subsidizing renewables won’t stop global warming” and “What an increasingly wonderful world” and “The Poor Need Cheap Fossil Fuels” (seriously — or not).