Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom (17 page)

It’s pretty sad when President Obama can justify massively expanding the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan and justify his actions by referencing Christian just-war theory, the greatness of Gandhi, and the nonviolent approach of Martin Luther King, Jr. Fear, war, lies, all melted into a policy that expands the state while destroying our economy and liberties.

President George W. Bush constantly preached war while couching all his speeches in freedom-loving language. It was always because we were free and prosperous that Muslim radicals wanted to kill us. The real reason was never hinted at: that it was a reflection of our failed foreign policy. According to President Bush, everything that he did was to protect freedom. Yet he was selling everything through fear. Those who disagreed were immediately labeled enemies of freedom and
friends of the radicals. We were either with him or against him. This is nothing new.

His conclusion was exactly the opposite of that of James Madison, who said correctly that “war was the most dreaded enemy of liberty.” The President would have us believe that preventive war was the best friend of freedom. For him and his successor, war is peace. It is disgraceful that President Obama, whom many believed to be the candidate of peace, could be handed the Nobel Peace Prize while carrying on senseless wars based on lies and continually expanding the war machine. It’s almost hard to believe.

The American people seem overly willing to accept war, economic sacrifice, and loss of liberty as long as the President, whether FDR, Bush, or Obama, claims his actions are well intentioned and are done to protect our freedoms. Any disagreement means that one does not share a love of freedom. And that is exactly how fear works.

Flynn, John T. 1944.
As We Go Marching
. New York: Doubleday.

Flynn, John T. [1955] 2008.
The Roosevelt Myth
. Auburn, AL: Mises Institute.

Y
ou can count me among the global-warming skeptics. I gather that my ranks have grown enough so that the fear of global warming is now replaced with a more generalized fear of “climate change,” covering all empirical contingencies.

But regardless of whether one believes global warming is real, I seriously doubt the capacity of a global body made up of bureaucrats and scientists on the public payroll, when given the power to attempt a global climate manipulation, to cook up a workable plan with effects that cannot be discerned for twenty or more years. I’ve seen how government programs work. They aren’t designed to last more than a single election cycle. The idea that government can plan weather patterns for decades strikes me as the height of absurdity.

Crucial to this whole scheme has been the voice of radical environmentalism. Many of the people in this movement simply do not desire economic progress. They loathe the internal combustion engine. They are against pesticides, asphalt, oil, cars, meat, and modernity in all its forms. They long for a simpler time when there were only 500 million people living
on earth because that is all that the food supply would sustain. This attitude is creepy and dangerous, an unserious, intellectual luxury that, in fact, if taken to its logical conclusion, could unravel economic progress and lead to suffering and death.

Building up fear and manipulating people into demanding that government save us is how radical environmentalists operate. Artificial fear not only generates support but demands that we pursue war policies, no matter how dangerous and ill-advised they may be. We saw how fear worked to build the state in 2008 and the following years. Bailouts for huge banks and corporations were rushed through Congress and assisted by the Federal Reserve after the people, and even members of Congress, become convinced that an economic Armageddon was at our doorstep.

The same type of fear propaganda has been raised to the extreme by the environmental movement determined to socialize our nation and deindustrialize it, seemingly on purpose.

Radical environmentalism has systematically undermined the defense of free markets for decades, but especially in the past twenty years. Everything from early public school indoctrination to our media and Hollywood have created such a poisoned atmosphere of political correctness that any questioning or dissent on the science used to support the radical environmentalist position is ridiculed and written off as crazy talk. Even reputable scientists who question the assumption and data used are not afforded the slightest respect regardless of the authenticity of their challenges.

The whole movement is energized by pumping up fear and nonverifiable propaganda. This radical environmental
movement evolved from the antinuclear hysteria that stopped all nuclear plant development for the past thirty years, causing a severe price to be paid by our economic system. Some have estimated that the loss of efficiency resulting from this policy of obstructing development of nuclear power has cost us an estimated ten trillion dollars. Hysterical resistance to nuclear power also forced an increase in the rise of less environmentally friendly alternatives.

Instead, these same individual groups promote government-subsidized wind power. I’m sympathetic to the idea of wind power, and in the right circumstances, it’s quite practical. I happen to own a windmill attached to a well pump. It may cut my electric bill a couple of dollars, but the truth is, wind power is not competitive, nor is it a good environmental alternative. To replace one nuclear power generator you need windmills to cover an area the size of Connecticut. Sensible green environmentalists are becoming aware of this and are taking a second look at nuclear power.

The other incentive for the extremists to propagandize against technology and free markets has been the obvious failure of socialism in the twentieth century after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet that is when the world recognized the total failure of socialism. It had been predicted many years before by Ludwig von Mises. Tactics changed and great emphasis was placed on “saving the planet” as the excuse needed for government takeover of economic activity. Defending socialism openly was no longer good political strategy, but its failure in the twentieth century did not diminish the desire of many to pursue the same goals but with a varied strategy and different terminology.

Actually, the precise type of socialism changed as well. The Soviet and Chinese communist type of socialism is no longer the ideal they strive for. Government intervention that works with corporations—a form of corporatism—is now an acceptable form of socialism, sometimes referred to as fascism. Unfortunately, if left unchecked it leads to outright military fascism of the worst kind. The medical care takeover by government demonstrates this. Even with the massive government takeover of health care by the Obama administration, the drug companies, insurance companies, health management companies, large hospitals, and even the American Medical Association are all bidding for a piece of the pie. Corporations thrive, the patients suffer, and the free market deteriorates further.

The radicalization of the country by the environmentalists pursues the same strategy. Cap and trade legislation will introduce a whole new product of CO
₂
permits that will be created and traded by the big financial interests bailed out after the crash, such as Goldman Sachs. Control over industrial production will be achieved, which is the socialist goal, and the corporations and certain Wall Street financial firms will be big players and beneficiaries in the process.

How does all this come about? Why do so many fall for propaganda and the pseudoscience that this whole movement spews out? It’s out of fear. It took quite a few years to convince the majority of Americans to accept the idea that CO
₂
was a poison whose production caused global warming of crisis proportion. Public school indoctrination cannot be dismissed as being a major contributor to this gross misunderstanding.

The real message that underlies the goal of the radical
environmentalists is to blame modern man for every change in nature. They
have
avoided blaming volcanic eruptions as man caused—so far. Nature itself is a cause of atmospheric pollution, and this source is gigantic and comparable to all the man-made ills one can name. Calling attention to the comparison is something the CO
₂
police are not interested in.

As one sided as the debate over global warming has been for decades, common sense and true science have begun to have an impact. Not only have the scientific arguments against global warming alarmists been challenged, but evidence now points to ulterior motivations and manipulation of pseudoscience as proof of global warming being a consequence of industrial manufacturing.
¹
The availability of e-mails written by promoters of global warming documented much of what many suspected. Statistics were biased, and evidence was destroyed. The environmental globalists lost a lot of credibility, but the debate is far from over. Washington, DC, and our major universities and media all pump up the fear that an environmental catastrophe awaits us. To challenge this in public is equivalent to being the archenemy of the people, un-American, and unpatriotic.

Most Americans have been bamboozled into believing that all reputable scientists believe in global warming and that CO
₂
emissions are a major problem. The truth is there are just as many and even more qualified scientists refuting the sketchy and questionable evidence regarding global warming.
The evidence presented was chosen to support a predetermined conclusion.

Supporters of global warming theories vary. Some truly believe, some are brainwashed, some join to keep an academic career going, others know it is politically correct, but the real philosophic motivation came from the authoritarians who sought more power and resented progress. Some are also neo-Malthusians who see a grave danger in an unwanted pregnancy and population growth that compounds the threat to the environment. They do not understand how industrial growth in a free market is the only solution to poverty and hunger. There was a time when I did not choose to take on the radical environmentalists, giving them the benefit of the doubt for their good intentions. And there are many who have been influenced by the false science. Only good science can refute this. In the past, I stuck with some neutralizing advice since so few extreme environmentalists are open minded, pleading with them that they at least study both sides of the argument. This is still good advice for some, but beware, the Al Gores of the world won’t be yielding to this advice anytime soon.

The greatest challenge to those who believe man is not guilty could be the charge that they don’t care about the environment. The truth is that if the CO
₂
hysteria is a hoax, new regulations not only will hurt the environment but will massively increase poverty and hunger in the world. Evidence is strong that cap and trade type legislation not only undermines productivity and wealth, many believe it increases CO
₂
emissions. This results from factories leaving more efficient conditions and being pushed into third world countries where the cheapest form of fossil fuel is used.

The charge that defenders of the free market don’t care about the environment is obviously false. Polluting one’s neighbor’s property, air, or water is contrary to market ethics and law. Trading permits to pollute would not be considered. Only central economic planners come up with schemes like this.

If this were just an academic discussion it wouldn’t matter that much, but it has major ramifications; if the extremists are not refuted we will pay dearly for it and compound the economic crisis that we’ve already brought on ourselves.

Once the radicals realized that the decades-old rant on global warming was losing credibility because evidence was showing that temperatures may well be falling, they shifted their propaganda language to “climate change.” Climate change has been going on for millions of years, but now it’s all the fault of man’s operating in a free market economy. And it’s become just another excuse for more government—global in scope—to deal with the “impending disaster.”

Man, over the centuries, became more civilized and, with technology, advanced and learned how to harness energy to protect us from the elements and at the same time raised our standard of living. By using energy placed on the earth for a purpose, we overcame the deadly natural elements of weather—heat and cold, wind and rain, floods and droughts. People conquered the difficulties of persistent and unpredictable climate change, and now we’re told that we caused the very problem we have so successfully been able to overcome to a large degree.