A Passion for Liberty
Tibor R. Machan @ Rational Review
Posts tagged AGW
Column on Am I A Corporate Shill?
Jul 5th
Am I A Corporate Shill?
Tibor R. Machan
It has always been my view that corporations are groups of people united for various purposes, often to benefit from a business venture guided by competent management. Initially I worried little about the legal details, nor even about the legal history. A bunch of people incorporate or form a company to achieve certain perfectly acceptable, even admirable goals. Sometimes this can be done via a partnership, sometimes by incorporating, sometimes for profit, sometimes not.
Then I started to get involved in political philosophy and found that there is a whole lot of hostility toward these outfits, mainly from Leftists but also from some so called left-libertarians. I am not sure why from the latter. I figured why from the former, though, namely because promoting one’s economic prosperity either alone or in the company of a large number of others had to amount to ugly greed. And that I found to be way off course, just the sort of nonsense that they tried drumming into me in my native Hungary back in the lovely days of Stalinism.
These days, for example, if you are not falling in line with the anthropogenic global warming message, it is very likely that you will be labeled by the true believers a shill for corporations. Sure enough, a few days ago I sent some numbers and analyses to someone I know who is an AGW champion because I get along with him reasonably well (although we aren’t friends, merely pals, perhaps) and I always hold out hope that people will consider arguments that go against their beliefs and support mine.
I received an email from this bloke dismissing what I sent to him as the production of corporate shills, specifically people funded by the Koch brothers, Charles and David. The Koch brothers are indeed wealthy from doing very solid business in oil-refinement, I think, but I am not sure. I know both of them just a tad, enough to know that they are honestly convinced of whatever they claim to believe and don’t put the cart before the horse by manufacturing evidence, argument and research so as to buttress their pet notions or personal or economic interests. As with me, so with them, if I recall right, the convictions in the sphere of political economy came way before the chance to make some money from working in support of them. Indeed, I became a libertarian and a defender of the free market system of economics, first and then I did make a few bucks from speaking at some conferences, publishing, etc. While I certainly wish I could have made much more money from all this, I didn’t and the idea of holding some belief about something not because I thought it reasonable and true but because it supported some prejudice of mine would be so self-debasing that I could not do it.
Nonetheless the pal of mine had no trouble implicating me in selling my soul to corporate interests. Just how does he know this? And how does he know that the Koch brothers do not sincerely believe in libertarianism but support it merely because they see economic benefit from it?
Now it is true that even some libertarian economists are reductionists and hold that everything someone does comes from the belief that it will promote one’s economic advantages. On this score Marxists and some free market theorists see eye to eye. But whatever the source of the idea, it is bunk. Most of us haven’t much of a clue about whether holding certain beliefs will advance our prosperity. We may come to accept that there is more hope for us being libertarians than being communitarians or Marxists but no one can be sure. In my own profession, as a university educator, I am pretty sure in retrospect that I would have made out much better financially and in terms of holding a prominent post had I never found libertarianism convincing, had I joined the bulk of academic political philosophers who tend to be located on the Left.
I suppose when you have no arguments it is then tempting to impugn your adversary’s integrity. It’s a coward’s escape, I believe.
Column on AGW and Due Process
Mar 3rd
AGW Science and due process
Tibor R. Machan
A powerful and vital aspect of the fully free society would be that only those burdens may be imposed on citizens that they have been convincingly shown, via due process of law, to deserve. This is roughly how the criminal law works. This is why the prosecution carries the onus of proof and not the defense–all the defense (the skeptic!) needs to do is point out serious holes in the case being mounted by the prosecution and the jury will acquit.
In contrast, when in the old Soviet Union a police officer suspected someone of criminal activity, this would pretty much close the case and the accused would have to try to do something awfully difficult, namely, prove a negative: “I am not guilty.”
The New York Times reports in a recent issue that AGW–anthropogenic global warming–scientists are beginning to mount a defense of their work in light of the growing skepticism that follows some of the recent (more or less serious) malpractice by some of them. As The Times presents the story, some of the scientists are pretty much baffled by the persistent skepticism. They appear to believe that their education, research, and academic credentials should suffice to make the case for what they earnestly believe.
This suggests that the protesting scientists share the attitude with the police officers of the former Soviet Union–a suspect is guilty until proven innocent. These–though by no means all–scientists appear to want the skeptics to conclusively disprove AGW.
But in a debate about the AGW hypothesis it isn’t the doubters who owe the proof, just as in a court of criminal law (as noted above) it is not the defense that owes the proof but the prosecution. And this is quite sensible: the assertion that someone has done the crime is provable if true since there is a reality corresponding to it; the assertion that someone hasn’t done the crime is not except for showing that the case in support of guilt is weak, not true beyond a reasonable doubt. (Proving negatives is only possible once the argument for the positive is in place, otherwise on is shooting in the dark!)
What the scientists need to realize is that a sizable portion of the public holds to the idea: the onus of proof is on those asserting the AGW theory. And it needs to be a solid proof at that since the consequences of accepting it imply Draconian burdens to be imposed on the public, burdens no one ought to suffer unless there is powerful proof that it is deserved.
Al Gore & Co. are very enthusiastic about imposing these burdens not just on Americans and other citizens of developed countries but on virtually everyone across the globe, even those whose chances to finally emerging out of poverty will be severely undermined by them. Given the prospect of such public policy consequence, the pro-AGW scientists simply must realize that many of us don’t want a plausible theory, not even a probably true one. What we want is something that nails the case firmly, without any reasonable doubt left. But this of course the scientists haven’t managed to produce and there is evidence that among them there are quite a few skeptics–e.g., reportedly among physicists. In other words the pro-AGW scientists need to realize that they don’t run the show and cannot expect to lord it over the rest of us merely because they have a strong suspicion about AGW. That will not suffice for free men and women, not by a long shot.
Perhaps it is a sign of the waning influence of the classical liberal political and legal tradition that we are witnessing with these scientists insisting that their current case alone should suffice and we need all comply, never mind reasonable doubt. That would be a devastating development for it could establish a precedent that is completely antithetical to how a government in a free country must treat the citizenry. It would, in short, begin to usher in dictatorship. I doubt even scientists confident of their belief in AGW want something like that to happen.
Column on What is the Public Interest
Mar 1st
What is the Public Interest?
Tibor R. Machan
In the midst of the current orgy of capitalism-bashing, unleashed by those who earnestly believe that they should be directing the buying and selling activities of the public, there is once again a good deal of talk about how we must all serve the public interest and forget about our own selfish goals. Just a few days ago Al Gore went on a demagogical frenzy, denouncing “market triumphalism” and lamenting the perfectly sensible concern that “Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carr[y] a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated” (i.e., Soviet socialism). He even asserted, without a scintilla of proof, that the Cold War victory of democratic capitalism–which means, the mixed economy over a dictatorially planned one–”led, in the United States, to a hubristic ‘bubble’ of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere.”
Of course, no such thing happened at all. Ever since its inception the United States has been a mixed system. One need but remember that even among the Founders there was a vehement debate about how centralized the U. S. government should be, with Alexander Hamilton leading the statist faction and Thomas Jefferson those who favored less concentration of power.
In other words, to quote Ronald Reagan, “Here we go again.” The cheerleaders of statism try to gain advantage by distorting history. In the last fifty or more years there has not been any effective move away from the “democratic sphere.” (Just consider as a case in point, the U. S. Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling that eminent domain law can be used to transfer ownership from less to more taxable private use, a distortion of the market friendly Fifth Amendment if there ever was one.) The Congress has moved steadily toward populism, away from a system restrained by the Bill of Rights, by principles of classical liberal justice. Al Gore simply wants to move faster with all this, more power to his crowd, period.
The moral system these avid fans of statism are peddling is the doctrine of service to the public interest. You know, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” and similar calls to have us all abandon the Declaration’s ideals in favor of those of communitarianism, even out and out socialism. The public interest is back with a vengeance. But what exactly is it?
In the history of political thought the public interest or common good has been identified in a variety of ways but perhaps the most provocative and influential has been Jean Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the general will–in more recent lingo, “the will of the people.” No, this is not some democratic consensus of a majority of the citizenry. It is, instead, a belief in some overarching universal purpose that the citizenry of a country must serve. But then what is that purpose? Yes, that is indeed the rub.
That purpose is exactly what those who peddle the idea say it is. It is in fact the purpose of the likes of Al Gore or anyone else who invokes the idea. The public interest or general will is nothing definite apart from what those who make reference to it want it to be. It is the promoters of the idea that all of us must serve the public interest who, frankly, establish what it is. It is their own agenda, what they take to be important, never mind the rest of the public!
It was in fact the American Founders, who learned a good deal from John Locke, who advanced a pretty sensible and workable idea of the public interest, even while they had some disagreements about it. They believed, and laid this out in the Declaration of Independence, that government promotes the public interest when it secures the individual human rights of all citizens. All of them, not some special group’s with its subjective agenda. Their brilliant solution to the problem of just what is the public interest is that it is the protection of everyone’s liberty to live as he or she chooses, provided it doesn’t thwart the same liberty of others.
Such a minimalist conception of the public interest does full justice to our human nature! We are all in need of liberty and we are also very different from one another which this liberty then fully accommodates. One size does not fit all except for one thing–everyone must be free. And that is the only sensible, morally sound idea of the public interest. Trouble is that this idea doesn’t accommodate the goals of those who want to impose their agenda on the rest of us. It is those folks who give rise to the scandalous special interest politics of Mr. Gore’s democratic sphere. (And he isn’t being up front about that either since if the democratic sphere fails to include the agenda of the AGW crowd, it loses legitimacy for him.)
Al Gore & Co. don’t like market fundamentalism because what that amounts to is individual liberty for everyone and functions as a bulwark against regimenting us all to fall in line behind Mr. Gore. For my money, I take market fundamentalism any day over the kind of fundamentalism that gives Mr. Gore & Co. power over all of us.
