“… the very principle of constitutional government requires it to be assumed, that political power will be abused to promote the particular purposes of the holder; not because it always is so, but because such is the natural tendency of things….”
– J. S. Mill (1861) [1]
Two very wise men provide warning to us today.
Voltaire (in 1764): “In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other.”
Bastiat (in 1848): “The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.”
And now a 21st century observation:
…“When government undertakes tasks for which it is ill equipped it squanders the authority necessary for carrying out its core responsibilities.
“So why did nations from Australia to Europe and states such as California adopt an ineffectual bureaucratic cap-and-trade system? In a word: bribes.”
– James Hansen, “Washington [State] can Lead: Unwashed Version,” October 26, 2016.
“In every country and state where I have tried to make the case for a simple, honest carbon fee-and-dividend the politicians respond that they want part of the money to spend on ‘this and that’ ….”
– James Hansen, “Carbon Pricing: A Useful Cautionary Tale.” October 28, 2016.
The civil war in the environmental community, already evident in the debate over the future of nuclear power, also exists in climate policy between carbon taxation and cap-and-trade. MasterResource has published numerous posts summarizing the views of climate scientist James Hansen, and intellectual leader of CitizensClimateLobby.org…
“Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”
Doom and gloom—and subsequent real-world falsification—hallmark the long career of John P. Holdren, neo-Malthusian and President Obama’s beginning-to-end science advisor.
Halloween Holdren has been quiet about the outlandish in recent years because he does not want to embarrass his boss. But his many statements, beginning in the early 1970s, never disowned, remain for the record.
Today is a good time to refresh our memories of the man who just might be the scariest presidential advisor in U.S. history!
Read—but don’t be frightened. The sky-is-falling gloom of Holdren, his mentor Paul Ehrlich, and others is in intellectual and empirical trouble. From Julian Simon to Bjorn Lomborg to Indur Goklany to Matt Ridley to Marlo Lewis to Alex Epstein, the technological optimists have the upper hand in a debate that continues to rage.…