In a recent press briefing given by him and his colleagues, the Deputy MD of the mission-starved IMF was positively drooling over the prospect that the next round of Climate-camouflaged tax transfers from the pockets of the developed world’s citizens will trigger a veritable host of ‘adjustment’ problems and hence offer this institutional dinosaur a whole new rationale for ill-judged economic meddling. In the Q&A which followed, one member of the audience wondered:-
You spoke about a lot of countries earning carbon credits and actually making some money out of the fact that they have tropical forests from these carbon funds. Most of these are emerging markets, you’ve got Indonesia and Africa as well.
What would you suggest that they would do with the money that they earned from those carbon funds? I mean should it be perhaps something like what oil rich countries have been doing is actually saving the money, the funds for the future. What would you say that they should be doing with that money?
The answer could not have been more clear cut: under the guise of ‘saving the planet’, Western expropriation is going to be carried out on such a scale as to swamp many such recipient countries – many of them barely functioning kleptocracies – with yet more boodles of unearned cash. Or, rather, as the IMF respondents put it:-
MR. KEEN: I think perhaps I would just say, you are right, we are talking about developing and emerging markets. But we are also talking about the developed countries as well, where proper carbon pricing schemes, whether in the form of taxation or in the form of tradable permits for which a price was charged, would have revenue implications.
MR. COLLYNS: From a macroeconomic perspective, the potential flows from payments for carbon credits could have macroeconomic implications. That is one of the things we’re going to be looking at in our chapter in our World Economic Outlook. The balance of payments implications, the exchange rate implications. One thing to be cautious about is that these revenues are well used, well directed into efficient local spending. But indeed, it’s quite possible that the best use for some of these funds will be to save them to avoid a “Dutch disease” type of problem. If you ramp up spending too quickly, it could lead to a loss of competitiveness in other parts of the economy which could have negative long term implications. So I think it is important to look at the temporal aspects of these issues when choosing how to use these funds
Don’t say you haven’t been warned: the Fabian Salemites are coming to a chimneyplace near you!
{ 32 comments }
Sean I’m unclear about what point you are arguing here. Can you be a little more clear?
Are you arguing that
a) Property owners in countries affected by climate change should not be compensated for the vandalism to their property?
or
b) Human caused climate change isn’t happening
(My hobby just happens to be climatology! And I’m convinced that the professional climatologists made a mistake. Really! Not because I find it inconvenient to my personal politics or anything…)
or
c) you just don’t like the IMF and wanted to vent a little bit
The ‘Carbosocialists’ a.k.a. ‘Watermelons’, are the old time socialists with a veneer of green. Socialism having so plainly failed, not only in Russia but also the milder versions in India and Britain, it is no longer possible for an intelligent person to think that it works.
Carbosocialism gives the adademics and administrators an excuse to soak the rich, skim off a percentage for themselves for further research and administration, and achieve social justice by distributing the residue to the deserving poor.
Like Nick, I find the evidence for Human caused climate change unconvincing. Presumably the Martian Ice caps are melting because those little green men are using their SUVs too much.
Cheers,
Harvey,
Nick is just being a pretentious socialist weener. He is a Troll and he knows all, because he has been trained in the ways of the Communist Force.
Harvey,
Nick is just being a pretentious socialist weener. He is a Troll and he knows all, because he has been trained in the ways of the Communist Force.
One thing I’ve found interesting is that in the mist of all this “climate change” debate, a new company called Nanosolar has started ramping up mass production of solar cells. They claim that it will be about half as cheap to use solar as it is coal – I hear that even Al Gore is on the board (back door deals anybody?) Anyhow, if this is true – it is huge and will be a real game changer on global energy markets.
Funny how the market seems to be delivering where an armada of state funded climate scientists and an armada of UN bureaucrats have failed and seem to screwing things up worse than ever.
Like Nick, I find the evidence for Human caused climate change unconvincing. Presumably the Martian Ice caps are melting because those little green men are using their SUVs too much.
–
Damn those academics with their ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’. Another libertarian with a minor in climatology holds forth.
Harvey I have a hard time believing that any evidence would convince you. Would ANY evidence convince you? It must be those carbosocialists scheming again. That’s why climate change HAS to be a hoax right?
Why not just have some.. intestinal fortitude and accept the facts, stand by your beliefs in libertarianism, and take your lumps? Why all the convoluted conspiracy schemes?
The price of electricity production from coal continues to be driven higher by increasing environmental requirements, of which carbon sequestration may well be the most costly. The “green” alternatives will eventually win partially because the production of electricity from coal has become so expensive. The other winner appears to be nuclear power, which produces no carbon emissions.
All this will mean much higher electricity bills for the large majority of Americans, but of course, we will have helped saved the planet from impending man-caused environmental catastrophes.
Nick, I’m not sure what your passive-aggressive troll has to do with Corrigan’s post.
I know it hurts your feelings that not everyone swallows the unfounded hysteria behind climate change, but deal with it.
I have a hard time believing that any evidence would convince you. Would ANY evidence convince you? It must be those carbosocialists scheming again. That’s why climate change HAS to be a hoax right?
I am quite sure, however, that even the scantest, most unreliable and inconclusive evidence would convince YOU, Nick, since you are apparently predisposed to accept ANY concept, idea, statement, brain-fart, propaganda or faint suggestion that capitalism ought to be restricted even further by the almighty state.
I am not a climate scientist, in my day job or as a hobby, but I do know a bit about (a) complex adaptive systems and (b) socialism.
The climate is the king-daddy of all complex systems. There are not enough molecules in the universe powerful enough to build a computer capable of predicting earth’s climate even a year or two from now, much less 100 or 1000. It’s a matter of combinatorics. There are too many factors that affect the global climate, most of which are not even capable of being measured, even if we knew which ones to measure or how they work in the global weather system.
But, the inscrutability of weather is what makes it a perfect canvas on which to project one’s pre-conceived biases and expectations. It’s why primitive people from the beginning of time have been using the weather to explain or justify their moral judgments, usually cast in the form of divine punishment for immoral acts.
Why is it the Left that has latched onto global climate change? Because they need SOMETHING to justify their agenda. What better candidate than a system as monumentally complex as the geosphere-hydrosphere-atmosphere, which is incapable of complete analysis, thus making it capable of saying whatever you want it to say?
In any event, to the extent that anthropogenic climate change is a problem, the free market and strong property rights are the solution. Government creates problems. It doesn’t solve them.
Nick, you wrote:
“”
Damn those academics with their ‘knowledge’ and ‘science’. Another libertarian with a minor in climatology holds forth.
“”
There’s nothing scientific about the notion of man-made global warming, any more than there is with eugenics and racial hygiene, which were also all the rage among the “mainstream” “scientific,” academic, “intellectual,” and political community in the Western world in the first half of the 20th century. The U.S. pioneered the eugenics programs (such as the forced sterilization of many thousands of girls and women in many U.S. states) which Hitler later adopted, citing the U.S. as the model for his own programs. Back then one would be regarded by the establishment haute monde as an unscientific, uneducated dolt and backwards troglodyte if one tried to argue against such ideas and programs.
Just as with eugenics back then, what is driving the current so-called “science” on “global warming” is government. Governments fund most of the research grants in this field, and without government grants in said field one’s prospects of being published in major scientific journals and becoming a full professer are essentially nil. (And even moreso than that, government funding is huge business for the universities, as the universities take an “overhead” charge of up to 50% on each grant, of which the actual researchers never see a dime of. Consequently, universities are strongly motivated to hire only those “scientists” who can obtain large grants.) He who pays the piper calls the tune, and the tune being called is one which governments are (quite unsurprisingly) using in order to obtain more power, funding, and control over the populace.
The Earth has been warming and cooling in cycles (including lesser cycles within larger cycles) millions of years before man ever came on the scene, and it will continue to do so, just as always. The nature of nature is change.
Although it would be an utterly blessed thing if the Earth were to warm, since carbon dioxide levels also rise *after* the Earth warms (due to the reduced solubility of CO2 in the oceans as the tempurature rises, among other factors). With the combination of increased warmth and CO2 levels, the Earth’s biosphere would be able to support much more life (and hence, more crops; more livestock; as well as more seafood, due to the increased plankton levels). Life loves a warm, CO2-rich Earth.
For the lag in CO2 levels coming 800 (+/- 200) years after warming of the Earth, see:
“Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III,” Nicolas Caillon, Jeffrey P. Severinghaus, Jean Jouzel, Jean-Marc Barnola, Jiancheng Kang, Volodya Y. Lipenkov, Science, Vol. 299, No. 5613 (March 14, 2003), pp. 1728-1731 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299/5613/1728
The following are more articles on the matter of natural climate change:
“Survey: Less Than Half of all Published Scientists Endorse Global Warming Theory,” Michael Asher, DailyTech, August 29, 2007 http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=8641
“Global Warming: The Cold, Hard Facts?,” Timothy Ball, Canada Free Press, February 5, 2007 http://www.canadafreepress.com/2007/global-warming020507.htm
“Why Politicized Science is Dangerous,” Michael Crichton, excerpted from State of Fear (New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004) http://web.archive.org/web/20060406003326/http://www.crichton-official.com/fear/index.html
“Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says,” Kate Ravilious, National Geographic News, February 28, 2007 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/070228-mars-warming.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/bigphotos/images/070228-mars-warming_big.jpg
“Global warming ‘is good and is not our fault,’” Sophie Borland, Telegraph (U.K.), September 14, 2007 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/14/nclimate114.xml
See also the below article archive:
“The Man-Made Global Warming Hoax,” Prison Planet http://www.prisonplanet.com/archives/global_warming/index.htm
The idea that apparent global warming on other planets has inherent relevance to the case for or against global warming on earth ignores some easily understood aspects of planetary behaviour.
Historically the dominant explanation for the repeated ice ages in Earth’s history has been the Milankovitch cycle theory. It posits distinct cycles in the shape of the Earth’s orbit, in the Axial tilt and precession (“wobble”) of the planet. These cycles sometimes overlap and sometimes counter-act but sometimes they coincide, reinforcing each other. That’s when ice ages result.
Presumably other bodies in the solar system have their unique sets of Milankovitch cycles too. So it should be expected to find some of them warming whilst others are cooling. There is no need to posit Martian SUVs or even the sun.
Give Sean long enough and he may eventually say something cogent on climate change, even if it isn’t particularly original and he lacks the fortitude to explore it.
As I noted on his last thread:
Even assuming that there IS something to all of the “hysteria” about AGW and to the picture that has long been painted of impacts in the developing world, which has the least wealth to deal with them (this UNDP/UNEP report breaks little new ground, but simply more “data”), we also know that the developing world is underdeveloped “because they’ve been run by corrupt tribal kleptocrats more interested in using the “state” to line their own pockets with “public” assets confiscated from others, and who oppress other tribes and anyone who might challenge their power, that people live in misery because they have limited liberty and property rights, that the lack of clear property rights both hobbles development and accelerates the destruction of “common” resources, and that Western governments and corporations are complicit in much of this.” Regardless of the AGW “hysteria”, what can we possibly do that will not simply make a bad situation worse?
In the present case, Sean’s indisputably correct statement that many recipient countries are “barely functioning kleptocracies” appears to be referring to the relatively small payments that are currently flowing to developing nations under a specific mechanism (the “Clean Development Mechanism”) that nations signing onto Kyoto have agreed to, and to possible agreements by western nations to expand that mechanism (for the purpose of “mitigating” or minimizing future climate change); on the previous thread Sean made reference to a UN report that noted what appears to be a looming need for assistance to developing nations to meet costs that actual climate will impose (“adaptation”) – even as he quickly dodged this question by implying that taxing economic activity in the west to pay for adaptation in underdevloped nations was a form of the broken window fallacy.
Whether we are discussing payments or direct infrastructure investments (or even disaster relief), transfers or expenditures for nations that have failed to develop as a consequence of inadequate legal and social infrastructure and misuse of the levers of state for kleptocracy present obvious issues.
But acknowledgment of such problems does not belie the question of whether such nations face real risks (present or future) relating to climate change and what, if anything, we can or should do about it.
Dr. Reisman directly confronted this issue two years ago when he concluded:
In other words, Dr. Reisman argues for a “tough love” approach, whereby kleptocratic elites can buy their way into western countries, while the poor who suffered under corrupt leadership can sink or swim, with only themselves to blame for allowing their powerlessness to get in the way of regime change. Well, at least Dr. Reisman addresses the matter.
In this regard, Sean does not fail to disappoint, since he choses not to consider difficult issues if development further, but to attack the IMF for raising them in the first place. This is more than a little odd, since the IMF press briefing that he links to raises such issues front and center:
While Dr. Reisman forthrightly acknowledges the possibility that AGW may produce real and serious challenges for developing nations, Sean scoffs them all away, (i) with the sleight of hand of transferring our attention from the direct issues raised in favor of noting that such issues provide “a whole new rationale for ill-judged economic meddling” by an “institutional dinosaur” and (ii) with an emotional warning that a multitude of mixed metaphors threaten us: “the Fabian Salemites are coming to a [nearby] chimneyplace!”
Corrigan again runs … the wrong way.
Tom,
You again beg the question- harm due to global warming has not even occurred yet. Sean is correctly pointing out that socialists are lining up to use the threat of catastrophe to coerce the transfer of funds from rich to poor, even though they have no clear idea how these additional funds won’t simply be stolen by the thugs running all these decrepit countries.
However, unlike Sean, I don’t really worry too much about this- it is a political loser in the US to tax Americans and send vast amounts to third world kleptocracies. The opponents of such transfer schemes will have an easy time politically destroying the proponents.
Harvey: “The ‘Carbosocialists’a.k.a.’Watermelons’”
That’s great! A perfect characterization!
Has anyone read the interviews on the internet with the founder of the Weather Channel? An experienced meterologist, he says the claim that CO2 causes GW is the world’s best hoax. He believes the mild GW we are experiencing is due to the sun and that a warmer atmosphere can hold more CO2, just as it can hold more water vapor. That explains the correlation between CO2 and warming that the data shows and why CO2 buildup lags behind warming. Very interesting interview. I didn’t save the links, though, so you’ll have to google for them.
That must be the most naive question I’ve ever heard! Is this person from Mars, or still in Junior High? Anyone who has been semi-conscious for the past two decades knows exactly what will happen with the revenues: they’ll go into the Swiss bank account of the rulers.
Yancey Ward, you wrote:
“”
However, unlike Sean, I don’t really worry too much about this- it is a political loser in the US to tax Americans and send vast amounts to third world kleptocracies. The opponents of such transfer schemes will have an easy time politically destroying the proponents.
“”
Merely being a “political loser” hasn’t stopped the government before. The Iraq war is an utter “political loser,” and the overwhelming reason the Democrats were elected to majorities in the Congress, with a clear mandate from the public to end the war. Yet the Democrats have contemptuously rebuked the public and are joyously stepping up the war.
The government’s open-borders policy and desire to grant amnesty to tens of millions of illegal aliens (while allowing them to bring in their family members still in Mexico) is exceedingly unpopular with the public (including among hispanic U.S. citizens), yet both parties are intent on not tightening the borders and are hell-bent on getting amnesty passed. (Even though a situation of de facto amnesty already exists. Indeed, illegals have more liberties than U.S. citizens, as the police are told not to touch them for most of the petty offenses that would land U.S. citizens in jail, even for such things as driving without a license and driving without insurance. And they can open up bank accounts in the U.S. with a simple unsecure Mexico-issued matricula card [of which no attempt is made to authenticate documents used to obtain the ID, and of which no major banks in Mexico will even accept as a form of ID] without having to show the types of identification that U.S. citizens are required to.)
Both parties have a seething and utter contempt for the U.S. public. The reason being is because their master isn’t the U.S. public, but the government–and as is the natural tendency of government, what it seeks is ever more power, funding, control over the populce, and centralization (with the logical end being a world government, thus the major push to dissolve the borders by hook or by crook, not just with the Americas, but as we’ve seen, also in Europe).
Such hugely unpopular self-serving government agendas are unmitigated “political losers” with the public, but the government only temporarily backs off from publicly seeking them under unavoidable pressure from the populace, while going ahead and implementing them via the back door (i.e., whether by de facto implementation, or tacking on obscure rider bills that almost no one’s seen). As far as the government’s concerned, along with the political interests which represent it, hoi polloi can just drop dead, and the sooner the better.
David C
http://www.nanosolar.com/
is the homepage of NanoSolar..
thin-film photovoltaics are great, less expensive and more versatile than Silicon ‘chip’ based PV technologies..
James,
You make good points. I probably should be less sanguine about the issue.
Correct me if I am wrong (as I hope to be) but I think the whole issue is not about manmade global warming itself.
It’s about using it as an excuse to saddle US and European citizens with yet another tax. This has nothing to do with “saving the world”: just spit out the cash and you can burn as much coal, diesel fuel and gasoline as you want. Of course the very rich and the very poor would not be hit by such a measure: the former can fork out the costs without even noticing or even make money of it (just look at Al “carbon neutral” Gore), while the latter would probably get away with many subsidies, detractions etc. The hardest hit would be anything in the between: it’s part of what my brother, without a hint of economics training, rightly calls the war on middle class. The most productive people and economic activities would be the hardest hit as usual.
Money would first have to pay the various “bureaucratic procedures”, namely more parasites here, and what’s left will be shipped to shady Third World governments or dubious corporations owned by morally ambigous characters like Mr Gore himself.
It’s the old mantra of “government sanctioned humanitarian aids” all over again. The Idi Amins, Kao Kis, Siad Barres etc of the world are rejoicing yet again at the thought of yet more stolen money coming their way.
Oh, and let’s not forget Russia. Under the current system they have enormous quotas of CO2 for sale: it would be funny to see them first selling us the oil and then milking us another little bit to use the oil we bought from them!
I personally don’t understand why global warming-related posts on this blog always degenerate into heated arguments about the existence of AGW when it’s completely beside the point. This isn’t a climate change blog…it’s a free market economics blog. It stands to reason, then, that ANY post on this blog regarding AGW is addressed to the response to the threat (real or imagined) of the potential damage that someday may be caused by AGW…not the existence of the threat itself.
The libertarian (and Austrian) objection to the AGW hysteria is the typical command-and-control mindset of its progenitors…the very notion that “society”, particularly rich capitalist societies, must either change their evil ways or have their wealth confiscated in order to force them to do so. I have yet to see a single free-market, non-statist, voluntary method suggested on this blog for dealing with the potential effects of global warming.
Ron: “I have yet to see a single free-market, non-statist, voluntary method suggested on this blog for dealing with the potential effects of global warming.”
I actually made some a few weeks ago. Inspired by an article on the FEE website, I suggested that libertarians and watermelons could work together to reduce government interference with the markets that subsidize energy usage. These include tax deductions for mortages which encourage people to build bigger houses which use more energy to heat and cool, such as Al Gore’s 20,000 sq ft mansion. I believe that electrical power generation creates far more CO2 than do cars. Also, we could stop the government subsidies of driving cars by building roads with tax money, and subsidizing flying by building airports and maintaining the air traffic control system. Privatizing these activities would force users to pay the full price and reduce demand.
We need to convince the government to abandon the strategy of protecting the lanes for shipments of oil as unnecessary. Bringing our military home would reduce its consumption of oil and emissions of CO2.
Finally, I have suggested that environmentalists quit trying to use the power of government to achieve their ends and use private property rights. Libertarians would definately join environmentalists in beefing up property protection. As the Nature Conservancy has demonstrated, private property does a far better job of protecting the environment than the gov does. In addition, environmentalists should be buying up oil, auto and electrical generating companies and operating them as they would like. If environmentalism is a popular as environmentalists claim, they should have no problem finding the money to do this.
Nick writes;
“…Harvey … Would ANY evidence convince you? It must be those carbosocialists scheming again. … Why all the convoluted conspiracy schemes?…”
Nice one Nick, setting up a weak argument I didn’t make and then knocking down the straw man.
As it happens I don’t think there is a conspiracy… academics as a group are far too arrogant to ever work together, and far too disorganised to keep it a secret if they did.
I suspect that it is simply the human worry gene at work, collectively we always feel impending doom and the need to flagellate ourselves to appease the Gods. Fortunately there are always politicians/witch doctors/environmentalists ready to fix it if only we surrender power and money to them, and those who tell them what they want to hear get to put their own noses in the trough too. No conspiracy is required, just self interest.
But Nick hasn’t answered my question of what are the Martians doing to their own ice caps… or the Jupiterians and Plutonians for that matter?
Where is Al Gore when you need him?
Cheers,
Harvey
Human carbon emmissions can be eliminated through land management. Trees are carbon. Young trees grow faster than old trees. The solution is to chop down old trees and grow more young trees, clear out underbrush in parks, and use more wood and paper. Interestingly, the government should ban all paper recycling. Since landfills have low oxygen levels, paper actually takes far longer to decompose and we can sequester carbon underground. Above ground it can be sequestered in furniture, homes, and expanded wood use. Replace coal and or oil with expanded nuclear power, and it’s really not that hard.
–
I am not a climate scientist, in my day job or as a hobby, but I do know a bit about (a) complex adaptive systems and (b) socialism.[..]
There are not enough molecules in the universe powerful enough to build a computer capable of predicting earth’s climate even a year or two from now, much less 100 or 1000. It’s a matter of combinatorics….
–
Ah the arrogance of the math major knows no bounds. He knows very little about climatology but yet he knows its impossible to model climate.
George there are people who make their living in the real world testing hypotheses and building conclusions based on data. They’re known as scientists. They have come to a consensus that AGW is happening and they aren’t brainwashed by the gummint.
The fact that yourself and other libertarians choose to disbelieve AGW in the face of overwhelming evidence will only marginalize you further.
–
a new company called Nanosolar has started ramping up mass production of solar cells. They claim that it will be about half as cheap to use solar as it is coal
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It will? That’s fantastic David C!! Ah the free market saves us again. All we have to do is notify all those silly fools who are building coal plants.
And no need to oppose meaningful action on climate change; we can all go home and rest easy.
‘George there are people who make their living in the real world testing hypotheses and building conclusions based on data. They’re known as scientists. They have come to a consensus that AGW is happening and they aren’t brainwashed by the gummint.’
Indeed, they’re just on its payroll. Oh but wait, doesn’t that make them biased? Well, only if they’re working for a corporation… governments don’t count as sources of bias, after all.
Anthony, of course everyone has their own interests, and government funding does have perverse influences on science and investment. But scientific data, interpretations and theorms all remain subject to rational analysis regardless of who generates them.
In the case of climate long-time skeptics like Pat Michaels, Christy, Lindzen, Lomborg and McKitrick all think that the IPCC process has yielded important results concerning the climate change that is already evident and what future changes can be expected, and important actors around the world are finding the information compelling enough to start changing their economic behavior.
We can doubt everyone’s motives, but their actions speak, just as well as their words.
My point is simply that it isn’t wholly unreasonable to doubt what the government says at most times. No one extends corporations (themselves, of course, in bed with the government, but this is another matter) similar courtesy, so why should we extend it to government? I do agree with you though on one thing – Austrians researching market environmentalism ought to act as though AGW were true, and submit proposals as to how the market may react, then. Ignoring the matter and then being disproven by the science will be a lost opportunity. As for whether AGW is actual fact or not, I have doubts on it and will not change my mind until having done further reading (a matter I am leaving for later on, since I have more basic stuff to cover first.)
Anthony: “Austrians researching market environmentalism ought to act as though AGW were true, and submit proposals as to how the market may react, then.”
Some have done this, but taken it one step further. They have ranked the world’s problems according to severity and cost/benefit. GW came in something like 15th. Other issues, such as Aids and malaria, are much more serious and create a much higher benefit for expenditures. Essentially, those economists have said that GW may be a problem, but not a serious one that demands immediate action.
Fundamentalist: “I actually made some a few weeks ago.”
Now that you mention it, I do remember reading those, thanks. They’re valuable suggestions.
I also agree completely with Anthony about assuming the validity of the AGW threat and providing free market solutions.
My main gripe is that those solutions are typically dismissed by the watermelons as “not good enough”, as if they had some way of measuring the exact amount of action necessary to combat AGW. They then call for government intervention to forcefully supplement voluntary, peaceful solutions with fiat mandates and control. To me, this represents prima facie anti-capitalist bias, as they’re simply unwilling to entertain the thought that the free market is better equipped to deal with such issues – a position they seem only able to defend with ever-louder proselytizing.
But that’s just me.
Yancey Ward
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… Sean is correctly pointing out that socialists are lining up to use the threat of catastrophe to coerce the transfer of funds from rich to poor, even though they have no clear idea how these additional funds won’t simply be stolen by the thugs running all these decrepit countries.
–
Interesting idea. So in your view Yancey, property can legitimately be destroyed if the owner is weak or powerless. If you were compensate the owners of property in developing countries, the money will be ‘stolen by the thugs’. Using that logic then it would be ok to rob alcoholics or drug users; they would just be wasting the money anyways, or someone might steal it from them.
How would you determine who is eligible for real property rights vs. junior property rights?
I wonder what Mises would have to say about this. I thought libertarians regarded property as sacred and the only legitimate function of government was to protect property rights.
It’s about using it as an excuse to saddle US and European citizens with yet another tax.
Mauro, this is correct – it IS about that.
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