A Question for Progressives
Dick Clark the Younger was IM’ing me about his crashing of a Moveon.org health care rally in Boston. Dick had an anti-government sign that is not appropriate for a family blog and somebody confronted him. Dick asked, “Why do you want the biggest murderer in the world running health care?” I guess the answer is that George Bush is out of power now, so everything is fine?
Murphy and Callahan, Military Experts
In the Chicago Tribune Steve Chapman writes (HT2LRC):
On Oct. 7, 2001, the United States launched one of the most stunningly successful military operations in its history. Just four weeks after terrorists directed from Afghanistan killed nearly 3,000 people on American soil, we struck Al Qaeda and Taliban government targets with aircraft missiles and Special Forces soldiers. By early December, the Taliban was out of power, Al Qaeda had fled into the mountains and victory was ours.
But that was eight years ago. Did anyone expect back then that we would still be in Afghanistan today, with more troops than ever? The war we thought we had won is not only dragging on but getting worse.
You know, I’m getting really sick of this “nobody could have predicted” garbage. Whether it’s WMD in Iraq, the housing crash, the Bush administration manipulating the terror alert levels, or the fortunes of the Afghanistan occupation, people who were pooh-poohing the defeatists or conspiracy theorists at the time are now saying, “It’s not our fault for missing this. All responsible experts agreed with us at the time.”
Well, as far as Afghanistan, Gene Callahan and I knew what was up. I grant you, we didn’t publish a joint op ed in the Wall Street Journal the day before the US invasion, but on September 6, 2006 I wrote:
Wasn’t THAT Mission Accomplished a Long Time Ago??
Two things struck me about this USA Today article. First, the “biased liberal anti-American” media led me to believe that everything was fine in Afghanistan; this insurgency sort of came out of nowhere, as far as major media coverage. Second, notice that the general isn’t saying, “We’re going to pull out in six months.” No, he’s just saying that if they don’t defeat the Taliban in 6 months, the locals won’t support them. But our troops will still stick around, shooting and liberating.
Then in the comments, Gene said:
As I recall, the US troop death toll has risen every year since the invasion. I recall Ann Coulter stupidly squawking about [how] the US military was so much better than the Soviet’s, because we “conquered” Afghanistan in a couple of weeks and they couldn’t in ten years. She didn’t seem to be aware that the USSR was not trying to conquer Afghanistan — their puppet government was already in place! They were trying to crush a rebellion — just like we are, and we’re halfway to their total years already.
However, Gene doesn’t get to take credit for this, as he elsewhere has disavowed any responsibility for his past writings (see comments here).
Last point: In that 2006 USA Today article (the link still works), the NATO commander said they needed to break the Taliban within 6 months if there were ever to be hope of winning. So, everyone’s coming home now, right? We just need to email this link to the Pentagon to remind them?
TokyoTom Moving the Goalposts?
As longtime readers of Free Advice know, my two biggest critics (in terms of accusations, not necessarily weight) are Silas Barta and TokyoTom. They are members of the very tiny set formed by the intersection of “Extreme Libertarians” and “Global Warming Alarmists.” (And I believe they are the only two elements of the intersection of the prior set with “Readers of Free Advice.”)
Before proceeding with the main point of this post, let me mention two interesting tidbits about TokyoTom. First, I have dubbed him the Rosa Parks of cap-and-trade. (See the second-last paragraph here.) Second, drawing on my skills that were last deployed when cracking the German’s Enigma code, I have realized that “TokyoTom” is actually a subliminal activation code: “To Kyoto M”. I fear that “M” is the control name given to Barack Obama during his programming.
Now that we’ve dispensed with the introductions, on to the substance: In this Potpourri post, I linked to Chip Knappenberger’s discussion of a forthcoming Lindzen/Choi paper which estimates that the global climate’s sensitivity to CO2 is actually one-sixth the IPCC’s best-guess. To this, TokyoTom responded (and I post it here under the spotlight with his prior permission):
Bob, I gotta say that your comments on climate science are both overly eager and predictable.
…
As for Lindzen, the paper hasn’t even been published yet and already guys like Bradley and Knappenberger are – as they are paid to do – blogging it around like it’s gospel. Do you share a similar need to rush these things?Furthermore, where is your common, real-world sense on the climate “sensitivity” (amount of average temp [increase] w/ a CO2 doubling)? The average temp has risen only 0.6 C in the last half century, to a peak we have maintained for the past decade, and the Arctic and all of the world’s glaciers are visibly thawing, and a host of other changes that affect human activities and ecosystems are underway – based almost wholly on emissions that occurred decades ago.
Regardless of what the temperature “sensitivity” to a doubling turns out to be – and recent emissions and those looming over the next decades are very likely to have a price – it should be crystal clear that the climate is exquisitely sensitive to even small AVERAGE temperature changes (which are more pronounced up North).
My quick responses:
(1) The Lindzen/Choi paper has been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This is standard practice to discuss academic papers once they’ve been accepted, meaning the referees have signed off and the editor is happy. It can take months or even years for the thing to actually turn up in print. (For example, my Nordhaus critique was officially accepted by Bob Higgs’ journal I think last May or so, and I believe it’s not actually appearing until this month.) Since the fate of the global economy and climate hangs in the balance, I would think TokyoTom would want the latest, peer-reviewed arguments and data to enter the discussion.
(2) Note well the part I put in bold. TokyoTom doesn’t perhaps realize it, but what he is saying is, “Even if it turns out that the impact of CO2 emissions on global temperatures is one-sixth what the models current assume, nonetheless the observed warming of the 20th century is almost wholly due to CO2 emissions during the 20th century. And so that’s why emissions need to be capped–ideally by the market, but if not possible then by governments–before it’s too late.” I don’t think Tom’s position will hold up here.
(3) To anticipate one possible response, I believe Silas Barta’s own position is that large-scale CO2 emissions from industrial activities constitute a form of property rights violations on people around the world, and thus it shouldn’t matter to libertarians whether the climate sensitivity is 3C or 0.01C; aggression is aggression. However, the problem with this argument (if indeed Silas would go this route–I am NOT saying this is what he would say!) is that the whole reason we are classifying it as aggression in the first place, is because of the alleged contribution to climate change. After all, nobody is advocating a cap on how many times a day you can whisper in your own basement, since there is no demonstrable harm that this causes to other people. This is true, even though scientists could show (with sufficiently powerful equipment) that whispering in your basement has physical impacts on people in Bangladesh.
OK, let the tidal wave ensue… (And I’m referring to hostile comments, not my preferred climate outcome.)
Unemployment: "What goes up, must come down / spinning wheel, got to go ’round"
Apparently Blood, Sweat and Tears work for CNBC:
Unemployment Jumps to 9.7%, But Pace of Layoffs Slows
The pace of U.S. job losses hit a one-year low last month but the unemployment rate jumped to a 26-year high of 9.7 percent, the government said Friday in a report showing a slowly improving labor market.
Suppose there’s another crash in September, and unemployment jumps up to 11 percent by the following report? I imagine we’ll see commentators discussing the decline in the third derivative of the 140-year moving average of the “improving labor market.”
Apologies to My Two Favorite Economic Bloggers
In an extraordinarily rare occurrence, this week I have criticized both Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen in separate blog posts. But last night I realized I was a bit too harsh. (I am not being sarcastic here, again another extraordinarily rare occurrence.)
This 8-page Krugman essay is actually really good, in terms of history of (mainstream) economic thought. (I had only had time to skim the first page when I ranted about it yesterday afternoon.) I don’t have any problem with his explanation of the battle lines in academia. Of course, the only flaw is that he totally ignores the niche in “theory-space” held by the Austrians. Krugman thinks you have to either believe that markets are flawless and bubbles are literally impossible, or you have to believe that capitalism is flawed and requires government oversight. Of course he is overlooking the possibility that government intervention can cause bubbles and other problems in market economies.
As for Cowen, in this post I flipped out because he first had said, “(By the way, some libertarians like to pretend that Milton Friedman blames the Fed for “contracting” the money supply by one-third in that period but in reality Friedman blames the Fed for having let the money supply fall by one-third and not having run a bank bailout.)”
But then in response to people who challenged this assertion, Tyler clarified by saying, “When I perused Friedman’s writings lately, I found that, as far as I could tell, he never discussed how to deal with widespread bank insolvency. I interpret him as believing that [lender of last resort] and loose money and the FDIC could deal with banking crises…”
As I say, I flipped out here, because it seemed Tyler’s interpretation of Friedman was precisely what the knee-jerk libertarians were “pretending” that Friedman believed.
However, I thought about it some more, and I realized that the case is not as open-and-shut as I originally thought. To say someone thinks the Fed should act in a crisis in its “lender of last resort” capacity can mean all kinds of things. Indeed, you could say that Bernanke himself (except for the outright purchases of some assets) is “bailing out” AIG and others through emergency loans. I think Brad DeLong was the first person I saw who brought up the point that the dividing line between an institution that is merely illiquid as opposed to insolvent is not as clearcut as we normally think. In our example, if the Fed is willing to give “loans” at 0% interest no matter the condition of the borrower, does that mean the Fed is acting as lender of last resort, or is it bailing out that institution?
Anyway, I still think Friedman did NOT advocate massive bank bailouts in the Great Depression, and I also think Tyler is contradicting himself when he says (a) Friedman DID advocate bank bailouts in the Great Depression but (b) Friedman never discussed widespread bank insolvency. (If [b] is true, how can [a] be true?) But my first reaction–where I accused Tyler of admitting that Friedman held precisely those views that Tyler had earlier chastised libertarians for attributing to Friedman–was unwarranted. It all depends on what activities we allow to the Fed when it’s wearing its “lender of last resort” hat.
An Interesting Theory of Higher Education Costs
When I got back in my car after leaving the gym–what, you thought this figure was natural?–I turned on the radio to discover a familiar voice on NPR’s “Marketplace.” The commentator gave a theory of the high price of college tuition.
Out of the 310 words in the commentary, the word “government” appears 0 times. Instead, the commentator said that higher education was a form of placebo effect, and concluded with, “Colleges and universities may appear inefficient or overpriced, but it’s a business model likely to stand the test of time. As long as we keep on thinking that it works, it probably does.”
I don’t need to tell you who the commentator was, do I?
A Pleasant Thought
At my request, MercedesRules (who is a serious gold bug) has been sending me some of the commentary from today. A few of the really paranoid guys are predicting that gold will break $1000 tomorrow in conjunction with an awful jobs report. Regardless, they are sure the end of life as we know it is near.
At the Mises Circle last weekend, I reminded the audience that at this stage in George Bush’s presidency, 9/11 hadn’t occurred yet. “So the best is yet to come.”
Faint Praise From Goldline
I’ve been meaning to complain about this for awhile, but with gold flirting with $1000 now’s a good time: Who were the ad wizards that came up with Goldline’s catch phrase, “And it’s never been worth zero!” ? Couldn’t Purina say the same thing about cat food? Should I go long on cases of Fancy Feast?
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