Dishwashers, ice makers, and drain uncloggers are all under attack. Puritans and paranoids are working with bureaucrats to unravel all the gains that markets have made for civilization. They are driving us back to the compost pile, the river for cleaning, and, eventually, having to hunt and gather for food.
FULL ARTICLE by Jeffrey A. Tucker
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Money quote: “We can see where this is headed. Just as people hoard old toilet tanks and old washing machines that actually use water to wash clothes, so too people will now have to hoard their old refrigerators because they work. We are becoming like the Cubans with their 1950s-model cars, holding on to them for dear life if only to preserve some elements of civilization in the face of government attacks.”
When nature becomes a good in and of itself, even if it serves no purpose, we have a problem. It becomes even worse when we decide that the nature that we do not own should be protected at gunpoint.
A tree, to these people, is worth more than a human life. When did our value system get so out of whack?
“When did our value system get so out of whack?”
When people started looking “beyond” selfishness and advocated that the standard of value should be something other than one’s own life, I suspect.
I’m sorry, but since when did anything have “value” except against a human life? Only humans value anything.
I disagree with that statement.
Aliens?
Right on.
On the other hand, these same green bureaucrats forbid the use of “nightsoil,” and instead dump it down the drain. And they wonder why ecoli can spread so easily in the water systems?
I wanted to put a modern composting toilet in a rural desert area to save water and create better topsoil for my surroundings. The county and state didn’t give a crap, as they have their own rules and laws that really have little to do with sanitation and disease prevention. Instead, I needed to use much more petroleum based fertilzers with Phosphurus inside. Green earth protectors my foot.
Mises explained that all interventions end up causing the opposite of that which was intended. But, as Jeffrey points out, the hectoring class does not care. It simply wants to make our lives as miserable as possible. Frankly, I cannot understand why, except that incompetent people latch onto something that defies logic in the belief that they are the chosen ones to see what others cannot. Decades ago Eric Hoffer wrote about this phenomenon in “The True Believer”, in an attempt to explain Hitler and Stalin.
“Green” Schemers Are Ego-driven And Animal-like!What has happened is: those with no moral authority are given authority under the aegis of the coercive State.Free reign is given to the ego-driven and since it is the animal that is the manifestation of this type of self-driven, hedonistic way of life a society run by the ego-driven takes on the characteristics of this lower form. Hence the drive towards the cave, mentioned by Jeffrey Tucker!
What a lazy son of a gun! Ofcourse the environment should matter over doing a little less work. What the heck…?
Working less by using efficient soaps is in fact saving the environment. If you know how to read, I assume you do because you know how to write, then read Jeffrey Tucker’s article.
You will see that banning phosphates causes the use of more energy, more water, more heat and therefore it is more damaging to the environment.
The end result is that those regulations will hurt the environment more.
When all the layers of the “environmentalist” arguments are peeled back, there is only this left: “Human, go to the cave – go straight back to the cave – do not pause for the industrial revolution – do not pause for the invention of the wheel and above all, do not pause to think.”
Bravo, Mr. Tucker! No doubt Wesley Mouch is involved with these attacks on free markets and individual liberties. Keep up the fight!
Even though there are spots where clunky CFL’s don’t fit, we’re about to wipe incandescent bulbs off the planet. And at the cost of increased mercury all over the environment.
I thought CFLs were good till recently when I heard they don’t really last enough to “pay for” their high initial price. They still look good, and produce good light, so if those were all the considerations I would buy one.
The mercury doesn’t matter because if it weren’t in the lightbulb, the govt would just mandate it in our shots. Tell us to make our entire diet out of Karo, watch our teeth rot. Put mercury fillings in… [watch us go haywire, put drugs in containing mercury or fluoride whatever] The only time the govt doesn’t want us to consume mercury is when it comes in fish, because fish are otherwise good for us.
CFL’s occasionally do this fume releasing thing and ballast catching on fire thing, somewhat more frequently, statistic-wise, than the old tube flourescents. I had my entire home fill with fumes and finally located a flickering CFL in the basement that was the source. I’ve often wondered what the foul smelling emission actually was. There is a viral video showing one that caught on fire. What an all-around BAD idea. I am stocking up on incandescents. 74 cents for four at Wal Mart. Some are even made in America. They are going to be phased out, larger wattages first. I’m kinda old so I don’t have to stockpile too many, but they will be fighting over them after my demise. Unless a bulb police force forms and comes knocking at my door to confiscate them.
The insanity appears to continue unabated. Hence my view that the republican party is worthless and must be gutted and re-filled with libertarians. There is nobody in government who stands up to this sort of thing.
Why not gut the Democratic Party and fill it with libertarians? That way, even if the good guys lose, the debate willl be about how to sound more libertarian, instead of how to make socialism sound more mainstream.
How about dumping all the parties?
I am reminded of the removal of lead from gasoline–it was to stop kids in the ghetto from getting lead poisioning. Turns out it was lead in paint chips they were eating, but lead stayed out of gasoline nonetheless.
Leaded gas was sold under the notion that it was harmless, despite the truth being known to the sellers. The fraud issue, at least, would have put it in the crosshairs eventually.
Yeah, ’cause as all right thinking people know, unleaded gasoline is harmless.
Yeah. Riiiight!
Guess you’ll going to have to run your cars on water.
Sione
Could! Should!!
And removing lead from paint because a few irresponsible parents didn’t watch their toddlers means replacing your latex/acrylic every 5 years instead of every 10 or 15, so more titanium dioxide, etc.
Hey, we’ve all been eating lead paint for generations, and we’re all OK, right? Right? C’mon, now: right?
Well, maybe there’s some cause that’s greater than lead ingestion in play here…
*I* want lead-free paint in *my* house, dude.
And Titanium dioxide isn’t hurting. Actually, it’s in your toothpaste.
Agreed, but it takes a big-footprint industrial process to extract the raw materials and refine them into the latex/acrylic paint that has to be applied three to four times as often.
Arguing against removing lead oxide from paint is like arguing against removing asbestos from insulation… it’s utterly ridiculous. Lead cannot be made non-toxic. However, this is not to say the government (fed, state, local) has not gone absurdly overboard in regards to its remediation.
Besides, the invention of water-based Latex house paint practically created the DIY home-improvement business. I think everyone has benefited from this. Modern latex formulations last far longer than the old linseed oil lead-oxide-based paint ever did.
Banning tetraethyl lead from gasoline is one of the few environmental laws of the late-20th century that has actually been a success. Most of the environmental “horrors” still commonly associated with DDT were actually caused by leaded gasoline and in the exhaust of vehicles running on it. Tetraethyl lead is extremely toxic, far more so than MTBE, or ethanol.
They got the lead out of gasoline by using MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) as the anti-knock additive in the gas. They were told that the MTBE would be dissolved into water by rain, leak from underground storage tanks and pipelines, and from spills, and end up in the groundwater, and thus arrive in wells for drinking water. It has all come to pass as predicted. The health risks of ingesting MTBE were unknown according to a USGS paper published in June 2005. It all just makes me want to move somewhere else, but I’m not sure any other country is any better. Maybe I should look into moving somewhen else.
Keith Töpfer
My life is so empty without leaded gasoline.
… “attacks on civilization”… picture of cavemen… Jeffrey Tucker… this can only be a large, lukewarm bucket of phosphate-and-lye-filled awesome.
Nobody’s better at lampooning the earthers than Tucker. Well done, again.
I like to call them “primativists” myself.
Mr. Tucker, I think you ascribe entirely too much good will to our rulers. Power and compliance in their hands, serfdom for the peasantry: these are their goals. Everything else is just an excuse.
The strange thing is that libertarian private-property philosophy is probably the most “green” way to be, and yet, none of the environmentalists get this. People care for private property, or if they want to buy land to pollute on, the pollution must stay there(eventually requiring technology to deal with the increased pollution load). Most serious environmental problems occur in places owned or controlled by the government – navigable water, public grazing lands out West, etc.
Good point.
If (haha) we start taking personal responsibility to protect our health it will result in a net positive for us all. In a big way we make that decision when we make a purchase, or refuse to. Keep people informed and the market will decide.
Doctors unions, government agencies like the FDA and pharmacist unions have all conspired against self-medication and to take away your freedom and responsibility and your power to make your own medical decisions.
Ah, but in a private property based society the Greens wouldn’t have the power to order the rest of us around, whether we do what they want us to or not being beside the point. Power is a heady drug, and no one who’s tasted it wants to give it up.
Lye is also necessary for soap making, and I have noticed that it does seem to be getting harder to find in the hardware stores. There is only one brand that I know of that is actual sodium hydroxide, and not some drain-opening concoction. I should have known that some “War on ________” was pulling such a useful and basic chemical off the shelves.
Also, I don’t see where composting is a step backwards. It’s simply a different choice depending on your need for the stuff. Obviously, if you don’t garden or farm, you probably don’t need to bother with it (enviro-maniacs to the contrary). But for those who do, it is out of practical need, not a longing for primitivism.
Dust Off is another product under suspicion for the fact that the substance in it is used as an inhalant (and it sounds like bloody nasty stuff to inhale if you read the product description.) Still, the idea that something must be banned because someone somewhere might do something stupid with it, or heaven forbid, try get high on it, is the worst drug of them all.
I knew it was removed from shelves a few years ago. The brand I’m thinking of is Red Devil lye. While we’re at it, have you heard whether spray paint is restricted or people are not selling handkerchiefs because gangs wear them as head gear? Was glue reformulated just because kids sniffed it?
More than forty years ago (this I am sure of) there was an article in Fortune magazine blowing the phosphate argument apart. People were saying Lake Erie’s damage could not be reversed. It was as good as dead, due to eutrophication (sp?) due to phosphates in laundry products. Eutrophication can only occur in still bodies of water, and Lake Erie is not dead. In Chicago, a series of locks keep our river from flowing into Lake Michigan. Nevertheless, phosphates were banned. I used to go to distant suburbs to buy TSP. This is just dragging an old, rickety bandwagon out of a long ignored garage. Ten years from now, headline on time Magazine’s cover, probably showing that Quaker dude in a coffin, “Oat Bran: the Silent Killer.”
If it isn’t your ass, it’s your elbow.
It is encouraging, at least, to read the comments inspired by the time’s Ice-maker article. My mind, now motivated to be as anti-pc and anti-enviro feel-good ist as possible, conjures up a memory of some documentary of precious little sea turtles hatching on a pristine remote beach and making their way to the ocean surf… only to be ravaged en mass by a horde of crabs and gulls and other creature who gathered round for the feast like a high school football team at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Mr. Kluger’s article fared about as well as those sea-turtles.
Market and Morals/Religion cannot function without an elelment of ‘the other’ in each of them.
When moralizing gets overdone… they are reminded that ‘there wont be any buyers’ of their view.
And similarly when the market overadvances itself sans any morality,, there again ‘no buyers’ for them either. … leave it ti Nature .. and ofcourse wiser are those who do not take either their morals or their markets too far ahead !
Google translate can really get lost in translation
I would be useful to you to understand the article as well. Is there a mises.in you could look into?
I don’t really have a clear idea of what Vedapushpa is saying, but if I had to guess, it would be that Misesian consumer sovereignty means that (absent coercive interference) the ‘quality’ of a market is only as good as the consumers who reign supreme over it. (Or, in other words, a market is only as good as the people it is made up of.)
If these hypothetical consumers have a time preference of X (I use X not as a number or quantity, just an indicator), and the products they buy are all keeping this is mind, those are the sort of products they will get. If, for instance, all consumers prefer a good which is slightly cheaper but much lower in quality – presume there is a known technological innovation which increases the cost by 10% but increases the serviceability/effective lifetime of the good by 10 times, and also increases the quality of services similarly tenfold – then they will live in a society with the lower quality good, even though this situation seems to us absurd. This is not, of course, an argument for intervention, merely an elaboration of the consequences of consumer sovereignty. (Practically, of course, the unhampered market has different classes of consumers with different time preferences, and often technological innovations costing much more and providing a much lower benefit are bought by those who have a HIGH time preference, as they want that good NOW – thus providing early profits and economies of scale that make it possible to lower the cost of that innovation until it is affordable by the majority. Case in point: computer gaming equipment, and in general the higher-end segments of almost all consumer products. On the other hand, those who have lower time preference save and purchase the more ‘permanent’ variety of goods, thus enabling greater saving later, in a virtuous cycle.)
An interesting corollary of this is that if the consumer does not demand moral behaviour from those who supply his goods, he will not get it. I do not refer to the employment of force or fraudulent practices, but of everything else that falls within the sphere of ethics and morality, such as for example the treatment of animals that are slaughtered for food, or the working conditions of employees, or the sourcing (from other countries or corporations in other countries) of raw materials and labour. If the consumer prefers goods whose raw material inputs he knows are made with, say, slave labour (to take an extreme example) in some country that allows it, and from where they are sourced (this indirection introduced to absolve the producer of legal culpability in the home country), that is what he will get.
Consumer sovereignty imposes a moral duty on the consumer of supporting that which he likes and opposing that which he does not; in matters of goods produced with foreign inputs, this duty takes the form just outlined (ref. slave labour), and in goods produced domestically (if I may draw such an artificial distinction) of other ethical and moral problems (the treatment of animals, etc.).
The conclusion, of course, is that if the consumers are immoral and command the market accordingly, immorality is what they will get. This, at least, is what I think he may have been saying. The dichotomy between a society and its market it seems he draws is of course fallacious, but the point – that the market gives us what we want (as indicated by our actions in the form of purchasing decisions), not what we think we should want, or what we want to want, is of course completely true.
This is, IMO, a good thing – the market becomes a force for brutal honesty, and forces society/the consumer to face himself and the consequences of his choices. The state and its interventions, on the other hand, blunt and atrophy the moral sense of a people, and this decay and abdication of responsibility can lead to a society complete collapse (if the state didn’t manage it first).
Good point, Vedapushpa
Thanks Andy for appreciating my ‘off beat’ and in fact it was the ‘highway rule’ till recently– on the topic of Market-and Morals tussel.
As a contractor, I have used TSP many times. TSP + bleach + power washer = a clean house and provides an excellent substrate for finishing. My business reputation depends on providing a quality service at a reasonable cost. They’ve already reformulated oil-based paints to be more “environmentally friendly” (VOC regulations), and the prices have gone up, and the finished product is far inferior. The government is destroying my reputation and my business.
Are you talking about America?
Are you talking about Americans, admired for their ingenuity, inventiveness and intelligence?
I just hope more and more Americans take these wake-up calls at heart, and noy just as anecdotes, or ironic analyses. I have heard also about the smelt issue in California, or the poisonous gaz de schiste plants all throughout the country, or the Obamacare, or about your golfer Liar in Chief and his money-fabric and fraudulent schemes…
I just pray you won’t believe in him anymore, and that he won’t be reelected. Be more astute than him!
Sadly, America is in a very bad shape.
Talking about phosphates and lye is not the same as using ironic analysis. But you probably meant ironic analogy. We love our bronze lady in the harbor and our purple mountain majeties and we are still the best of all. And we f****ing know it. And WTF is gaz de schiste? Something imported no doubt.
Jeffrey, you really are missing the dynamic that drives big, stupid, meddlesome government and those nasty enviros.
Hint: it has something to do with governments setting up risk-shifting and influence-peddling by corporations:
The Cliff Notes version of my stilted enviro-fascist view of corporations and government – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/9oBkC7
Best,
TT
My wife wanted to do the laundry, but her rock broke.
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