---

---

Jobs or global warming?

by Greg Krehbiel on 3 November 2008

Drudge links to a video where Obama mentions the likely effect of his carbon-cap proposals on coal-fired plants.

This reminds me of a rather silly book I read a long time ago about Martin Luther. I think it was called Young Man Luther. It was an attempt to psychoanalyze him at a distance.

The one thing that has stuck with me over the years from that book was the section explaining Luther’s penchant for “dirty” language — by which I mean talking about dirt and manure and pig’s farts and things like that. (He was rather remarkably crude.)

According to the author, people who grow up in industrial towns have a different view of dirt. Dirt means jobs. Dirt means Daddy’s working, and there’s dinner on the table, and you might get the ice skates for Christmas. Clean means the mill has shut down, Daddy’s always grumpy, gets drunk at night and fights with Mom about money.

I’m reminded of this every time I go to Steubenville, Ohio, which is an old steel town. It’s dirty, but cleaner than it used to be. Now the dirt is just a leftover. The mills don’t run. It’s a reminder of better days gone by.

This is the kind of calculus that seems to be missing from the global warming debate.

Nothing comes for free. If you want to clean the air, you’re going to have to close down coal plants. Men are going to lose their jobs. Kids won’t get braces. Towns will blow away.

And maybe they should. I don’t think any of us regret the loss of jobs based on the whaling industry. We don’t have as many people handling horses these days (or sweeping up horse poop), and that’s okay. People move on and get other jobs.

But this is complicated business. Who can tell if carbon caps are going to help or hurt? Who can say that the benefits are worth the risks? Who can make the spreasheet large enough to calculate all the possibilities?

This is the arrogance of the central planner. He thinks he’s genius enough to figure all this out and fix the world.

What if we impose carbon caps, cause a deeper recession, kill the coal industry, and then, oops, discover a good way to convert goal into clean fuel?

I don’t believe in government’s ability to foresee all the options and navigate us through. When governments mess with wages, prices or supply they almost inevitably mess things up. Nobody is smart enough to do this.

Taxing carbon might spur development of clean technologies, or it might just kill the coal industry and send business overseas to India, where you can still build a powerplant without so much regulation. Do you trust government’s ability to see all the options and plot a path?

I don’t.

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, there’s this drug called “spice” that gives certain people a limited amount of prescience. Based on their drug-induced projections they plot elaborate schemes to mold the future. And it usually doesn’t work out the way they expect.

There is no “spice.” There are no navigators, or Bene Gesserit, or Kwisatch Hadderack to plot the way. And even if there were, they would still mess it up.

All we have are lawyers who couldn’t make a living in law or business so they decided to mind other people’s lives by going into government. They’re individually useless and collectively a laughing stock, but we’ve carefully set up a government with checks and balances to make sure they don’t do too much harm.

Somewhere along the way we’ve lost our diligence at keeping their grubby fingers out of the purse and off the reins of power, and now they’re making Big Plans about things they don’t understand. And McCain is just as bad as Obama!

The invisible hand of the market doesn’t do everything right, but it’s far more likely to get it right than a bunch of self-deluded central planners.

There are definite problems with the free market, but the way to fix that is to mollify the bad effects of the market with various “safety nets” — not to start predicting the future or doing what only the market can do, i.e., set wages and prices, pick winning technologies, etc.

The elite will get upset at Pennsylvania coal workers because they don’t have the foresight to see how losing their coal-based jobs is in the best interest of humanity, the world and Donovan.

But those silly, working-Joe Pennsylvanians who look out for their own best interests are the engine that drives the invisible hand of the market, and that invisible hand will win out in the end. The only question is how much stupidity we’ll have to endure in the meanwhile as the elite peer out of their ivory towers and tell us all to learn Esperanto.

2008-11-03  »  Greg Krehbiel