DENNIS CLAYSON | Posted: Sunday, January 20, 2008 12:00 am
I can understand why certain candidates push the left's version of voodoo economics, but I can't understand why anyone buys it.
The evidence against liberal economic beliefs is much stronger than the evidence for a whole host of beliefs that leftists buy into on a daily basis. The data for global warming, for example, is not nearly as strong as the evidence against leftist economics.
Suppose you have an important event coming up in a week. You check the long-range weather forecast. What is the probability that this forecast will hold up, especially during periods of unstable weather?
The forecast will probably change several times in the next seven days.
It is better than just taking a guess, but only marginally.
Weather forecasts are made with computer models. Computer modeling is also how the effects of global warming are being calculated, and how the proposition that it is human-caused is largely justified.
What the global warming people need is a true experiment, but to do this experiment, they would need a planet that no one wanted.
This situation is much different from the socialized programs that the liberal candidates keep advocating. Experiments have been done.
How about an experiment in which we take entire countries and more-or-less randomly cut them in half and install a socialized economy on one side and a relatively free market economy on the other?
This has been done. We have the dramatic example of East and West Germany. Much like the United States, the East Germans finally had to build a wall on their border to stem immigration, but with an interesting difference. Their wall was to keep their own citizens from leaving.
Some could say, "But they were Germans and Europeans, so maybe your experimental results were just a unique result of race or culture?"
OK. So let's take Korea and cut it in half. Yup. Got the same result.
One of the richest countries on one side and one of the world's poorest nations on the other, and a fence down the middle to keep the socialized citizens from escaping.
If we don't like cutting countries in half, we could look for countries that changed from one economy to another. Zimbabwe comes to mind. Its economy declined from one of the strongest in Africa to one of the world's weakest after nationalization of industry and redistribution of private land.
Then there is Ireland. Ireland's heavy industries, due to poor planning and international problems, almost disappeared by the early 1980s.
Agriculture was constrained by production quotas. There was mass unemployment and the national debt had doubled, mostly due to welfare programs and subsidies.
This changed in the mid 1990s when Ireland began to institute free market economics and lower taxes. Ireland is now ranked, by some measures, as the second wealthiest per capita country in the world.
Then there is China. The socialist policies of Mao almost destroyed one of the most long-lasting societies on the planet. Since China opened up its economy with free markets, they have achieved the second highest GNP in the world, and unless they return to socialism, they will catch up to, and perhaps, even pass the United States.
We could even conduct experiments in which one country is given all the resources except economic freedom and the other country gets almost no resources, but is given a more free market. Compare the Soviet Union with Japan.
By 1990, whose cars did you prefer to drive? Whose airline did you prefer to fly on? Who was better fed, better housed, and had better medical care, the Russians or the Japanese?
Now some of the die-hard socialists and the Roosevelt-era dinosaurs are complaining. "At least," they say, "children in socialist countries learn to read, and children get health care."
Really!
How do we know? The data which tells us that was released by socialist governments that universally believe the ends justify the means.
Just like in America's own socialized school system (the public schools), information gets exaggerated at every step in the reporting process, because stretching the truth is preferable to having one's neck stretched.
So in this election year, if you are level-headed enough to buy into global warming because of the evidence, be logical enough to look at the much better evidence that liberal economics is dangerous nonsense and then refrain from voting for the hucksters who keep trying to sell it.