Means to an End: The market and unlimited resources vs centralized
distribution and limited resources
Climate change and its effects on the
modern world have been highly disputed in the political realm. Liberals say climate change is bad while conservative will be likely to say climate change is mostly political hype. There are some liberals, however, who say that climate change
causes terrorism. President Obama, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and
others have made this claim. It is a completely absurd idea. Climate change
does not cause terrorism. The only exception of this are perhaps the environmentalists.
Greenpeace, one of the most well-known environmentalist groups has been
designated as a terrorist organization by the UN and is an anti-climate change
organization that has gone to extreme measures to promote their cause.
Considering the fact that there have been more terrorist attacks committed by
environmentalist groups than actual terrorists on US soil, then I guess climate
change does cause terrorism.
No, climate change does not cause
real terrorism. I’m not saying the environmentalists do not commit real acts of
terror, it’s just that they are the JV squad when it comes to murder and
mayhem. I also do not intend to marginalize anyone who has been the victim of
an environmentalist group, let’s just be real, it is hard to equate evil
hippies to a jihadist with a bomb pack strapped on his back. Real terrorism is
not caused by climate change.
This
analysis is not going to go into exactly why climate change cannot cause
terrorism. In fact, we are not even assuming, like so many other people, that
climate change even exists. We are moving forward while considering the fact
that the data on climate change is shaky at best. What we will be exploring is
the idealism behind why liberals can believe in such a thing and how exactly it
fits into their worldview and not the worldview of a conservative. In fact,
most conservatives should find the idea of climate change causing terrorism an
absurd idea. But why is that? The liberals are rational in believing what they
believe. In the liberal mind, climate change is a perfectly reasonable
explanation for what is happening in the middle east. Conservatives also are
rational in believing what we believe. The conservative mind is built such that
climate change does not cause terrorism. It is the underlying assumptions of the liberals that lead them to believe such an absurd thing.
When you start looking at the
underlying assumptions and reasons for a worldview, things do get interesting. The
interesting thing is that most people have no idea this is the way they think.
The objective here is to arrive at the base assumptions of each liberals and
conservatives. We are looking for the underlying worldview that each group uses
in arriving to their conclusions on this subject. That most basic worldview,
you will see, is reason for much of the divide in our country today. Most
political issues come down to this difference in worldview. This is the ideological
war that
is currently being
waged between the left and the right. When you hear that term, ideological war,
it speaks to the worldview that liberals and conservatives use when arriving at
conclusions on a given topic.
We will start with the liberal mind
and how they can believe such an absurd thing and then move on to the
conservative mind. The liberal argument for climate change causing terrorism is
rather simple. They say climate change causes the earth to lose resources
through weather pattern shifts, temperature shifts and the like. We don’t need
to go into the specifics of how they say it happens, it is only important that
liberals believe that there are some areas of the world that are
disproportionately and negatively affected by changes in the earth’s climate. The thing here is where those negative changes
occur. Due to the global placement of most of the
poorer nations, poor nations in the middle east would hypothetically be disproportionately affected
by climate change.
If the middle east is
disproportionately affected by climate change, this would clearly be a
legitimate area of consternation for poor people in the middle east. The environmentalists
all say that the west is causing climate change. If this is true, then the
middle east is paying the price for the west causing climate change. Because
the people in the middle east are oppressed by the western world, that is a motivation to turn to terrorism. Under the worldview of limited
resources, terrorism is a legitimate opinion under the face of the evil
capitalists.
One of the
most basic worldviews that liberals have is that the government is the most
capable entity of making good decisions. They also believe the government has
the authority and even calling to do this through a national
self-determination. While these principles will be expanded upon later, basically national self-determination provides the justification for government to be the
ultimate determiner in what is right and wrong in the world. As this turns the
focus on utilizing current resources in the most equal way, the liberal will
naturally focus on the distributing the earth’s limited resources in an equal
manner. The liberal believes there are limited resources on the earth and that
it is the job of the government to make sure everyone gets an equal share of
those limited resources.
When liberals
talk about what is fair, they mean equality, they are talking about how some
people have more than other people and that is unequal and therefore bad. When
liberals say climate change causes terrorism, what they are really saying is
that the (alleged) change in climate is caused by western civilization taking
resources, namely oil, and expending them. When the climate changes, this
disproportionately affects middle eastern nations who then do not have enough
resources to go around. When they discover that they do not have enough
resources to go around, the people, in their now justified hate and rage, turn
to terrorism against the US who created the climate change. Liberals, using
this thought process, can honestly say they believe that these terrorists have
nothing better to do than blow things up for a living because there are now no
longer the resources in their nation to sustain the population. Liberals truly
believe that their jihad is justified against the US because the liberals truly
believe that the US caused all the problems in the middle east.
There are
some real problems with this. A man named Louis Blanc coined the term
capitalism. He used it as a dirty word. There is no difficulty is seeing why he
thought capitalism was bad. Blanc was a liberal who thought that the government
was the only entity capable of making good economic decisions. Capitalism,
Blanc believed, was where certain people took more resources than they actually
needed to the exclusion of others. So there was inequality of resources. The
suggestion is that the capitalist nations effectively took resources from the
middle east and that is unfair.
Socialism is the champion of limited
resources and the antithesis of capitalism. Actually, the most basic premise of
socialism is that there are limited resources and the government must stop the
evil capitalists from stealing all the limited resources. It is explicitly said
in socialism, and is a basic premise of liberal thought, that each person is
currently working at their maximum capacity; that the current resources are
equal to total possible resources. “From each according to his ability, to each
according to his need.” Is a phrase usually attributed to Karl Marx, but was
also coined by Louis Blanc. While this phrase is not always associated with
socialism, it certainly applies. The phrase above clearly indicates that each
person has a maximum potential, his ability, and that each person is actually
producing at that maximum capacity. This is central to the teachings of
socialism, that each person will be compelled by the greater good to work to
their fullest potential. The second half of the phrase indicates that the
resources created are sufficient for everyone to benefit equally to their need.
The issue with this reasoning is that everyone will not work at their fullest
potential unless there is an incentive to do so. The liberal world provides no
incentive to work at one’s fullest potential.
As humanity progresses we increase
our understanding of the various things that create surplus. The point of
developing the various theories is to figure out a system that makes society
better faster. While liberals believe equality is what makes society better,
and their worldview reflects that, conservatives must believe that progress
makes society better. Progress can only be achieved when there are surplus
resources. Essentially, what the word surplus means is that there is more stuff
to go around. A thousand years ago there was less surplus than there is today.
Surplus is a good and desirable thing. If there was no surplus, then every
action a person took would be centered on producing something for survival. To
understand the idea of surplus it is important to think about what is necessary
for survival. In a zero surplus world, each person would work until they
created enough food to sustain themselves for a day and it would take them
exactly 1 day to produce enough food (and any other necessities such as sleep
or warm clothing) for 1 day. There would be no action taken for any other reason
than to produce something that was needed for the next day. This is a zero
surplus world. There would be nothing put back for later, nothing created or
done for any other reason than to sustain one’s self.
A zero surplus world be very bland
and a bad place to live because there would be nothing to live for except your
own being. While it is good to live for yourself, most people would find life
to be rather pointless if there was nothing else to live for. In a zero surplus
world nobody would have children, because to raise a child you must have a
surplus of resources to take care of the child. If each person is only
producing what they need then there would not be enough resources to care for
children. There would also be no holidays, because a big thanksgiving meal
requires a surplus of food, and no new ideas or inventions because it takes a
surplus of time and other resources to develop a new idea or invention. If
there is no surplus of time or resources with which to develop the new idea or
invention, then there will be no new ideas or inventions. Basically, a zero
surplus society results in zero progress. Zero progress means that everything
will stay the same. Nothing will get better.
Surplus and progress are in a
symbiotic relationship. When there is
progress, there is more surplus and when there is more surplus there is more
progress. Thousands of years ago, when fire was the greatest technology known
to man, there was little progress and little surplus. The next greatest
technology after fire, perhaps iron, was not developed for many hundreds of
years after fire was developed. That is because the people at the time had very
little surplus resources to use to develop iron. Most of their resources were
used for survival. This was clearly not a zero surplus society, but an almost
zero surplus society. Once iron was developed, that made life easier for
people. The iron could be used to make a plow to make farming faster which
opened up more surplus time for farmers to develop other farming technologies.
Farming gets easier and easier, nowadays it only takes one person to harvest
thousands of acres, more and more people go from working on things that are
necessary for survival to working on things that create progress. The faster
society is able to fill its needs, the more it can focus on using its surplus
resources to develop more progress. When a society has a lot of surplus, it can
do some pretty cool things. In 1492, Spain found itself with enough surplus to
fund a sea voyage that discovered America. Hundreds of years later, America had
enough surplus resources to fund a space voyage to the moon. Several decades
after that, the first voyage to Mars was funded. A couple of years later, the
first space ship landed on an asteroid. At this point in time, society is far
from zero surplus. In fact, the western world is mostly a surplus society. Most
of what people do is related to surplus not survival.
This is where the difference between
the liberal and conservative views becomes important. The liberal view is anti-market.
A market is undeniably the most effective way at creating more surplus and more
progress. The conservative view is pro-market. There is a good reason why the
liberal view does not place any importance on progress or surplus, the liberals
believe in equality of outcome. In other words, it does not matter how well off
society is, it only matters to them that every person in society is allotted an
equal amount of resources. The conservative worldview is focused on ensuring
that society is progressing. The idea is that, the faster society progresses,
the fewer problems people will have. As society progresses, there is more
surplus. If there is more surplus, then people will be able to use that surplus
to be able to solve their problems. More surplus equals fewer problems.
Liberals would argue that there is no
point in increasing resources if those resources are not going to be equally
distributed. This is what the word capitalism was developed for, to point out
that people at the top get all the newly created resources. Despite the fact
that economics, history and every other metric would say that a properly
regulated market ensures that resources are distributed so that each person
gets the resources that are best able to help them create the most surplus, the
liberals insist that there is an unfair distribution of newly created
resources. In fact, considering the increasing access to resources over time,
markets will bring the people at the bottom up faster than any other economic
system. Capitalism, when used as a dirty word, is a very misleading term. A
market ensures that the money goes where it will be best used as determined by
all the people who participate in the market. If a person is not participating
in the market then they cannot justly complain about that system and if a
person is simply not worth expending resources on then they should not demand
that someone else give them a share that would create an inefficiency that
would result in less progress for society. In fact, it is seen as the duty of
those conservatives who participate in the market to be as efficient as
possible.
Because there are not enough
resources to go around in the middle east, some evil capitalist must have taken
an unfair share of the resources. This comes from one of the basic premises all
liberal thought comes from, that all resources are limited and it is because of
this limited nature that it is important to monitor how resources are
distributed. When the resources in the middle east are taken and moved to the
US, people are driven to terrorism.
Contrasted with the conservative
viewpoint, this theory sounds a little nutty. Conservatives approach the
problem from an entirely different viewpoint. In the conservative mind, there
is no such thing as limited resources. While there is literally a finite amount
of resources on this earth and even in the galaxy, functionally, the actual limit
of resources does not matter. This is because conservatives rely on a free
market worldview whereas the liberals use a centrally planned or governmentally
controlled market worldview. This matters because depending on the system you
use to interpret the world, the finite resources may or may not matter. When a
conservative says there are finite resources, the conservative is talking about
physical resources such as there is only a finite amount of oil on the planet.
When the liberal talks about limited resources, it is from the perspective of
access. The liberal does not really care about how much of something there is.
If oil runs out, that is okay. What matters is that everyone equally has access
to these resources. The common denominator or the thing you most want, for a
conservative, is high quality of life. For a liberal, that common denominator
is equal access to a particular quality of life. That particular quality of
life will necessarily be lower than it would otherwise be because the focus is
taken off producing and put on redistributing.
This is why a liberal, when they
analyze the problem in the middle ease, calculates total resources. The liberal
wants those current resources to be equally distributed among all current
people. The conservative does not look at total resources. That is why, to
the conservative, it does not actually matter how much of something there is.
Essentially, the conservative does not believe that the problem is with lack of
access to resources, but a lack of physical resources. Now this sounds like a
contradiction, earlier I wrote that conservatives do not care about the number
of resources so essentially assume there are infinite resources. This is true,
what I am writing about here is now not physically how much oil (or any other
resource there is), we have moved beyond that, what I am writing about here is
why the middle east does not have as much as the west has. It is not a problem
with lack of total resources as suggested by the liberal (climate change
decreases total earthly resources and so then there are fewer resources to go
around and the west consumes much of what little there is left), it is a
problem with increasing current resources. The problem is that the middle
east has not focused their efforts on progressing past where they are as much
as the west has. While there are areas in the middle east that have progressed
far, think Dubai, the majority of the middle east live just about the same as
they did several hundred years ago. The west has expended considerable
resources to progressing as a society and so the west have developed more than
the middle east, it’s that simple. If the world was centrally planned, then
that redistribution of current total resources would be rational, but that is
not how it works, the free markets are the best force to control what we have.
Looking at the problem through the free market lens, the conservative arrives
at their basic assumption or most basic worldview. That what matters is
increasing surplus and progress, not redistributing what we already have. It is
a simple premise that (this is important because obviously there are limited
resources in a literal sense) does not look to the present, but looks to the
future. If every producing thing is used to its maximum potential, then that is
our limit. We will never reach that limit because of inefficiency. This is
another important thing to know. The free market is specifically designed, and
perfectly designed when nobody is breaking the rules, to achieve high
efficiency. A centrally planned bureaucracy can never achieve even a moderate
level of efficiency which creates little surplus or progress. When it comes
down to it, the conservative believes that the middle east is not successful
because they are working at a very low efficiency. War tends to do that. It is
a sad thing. These people are being held back from militant groups, oppressive
government and a history of being unstable. The road to having high quality of
life is not compatible with much of what the middle east is and until they
start building a group of nations committed to what the west is committed, they
will never achieve what the west has.
So this is the contrast, the liberal
viewpoint blames strife in the middle east on limited resources and limited
resources on climate change and the conservative viewpoint blames the strife in
the middle east on lack of resources and a lack of resources on inefficient
production. The ideological war continues. It is essentially the metric that
each side uses that differ. The right measures resources using potential. So
they ask what a group’s potential is. If there are X people in the middle east,
their potential would be Y. If a group of people uses the market and works on
increasing their efficiency then they will not have to worry about taking what
other people have, they will have enough themselves.
The left uses the metric of limited
resources. They ask how the limited resources on the planet should be
distributed among its various inhabitants. Under this theory, if there are X
amount of resources, then each person should have a Y sized portion of these
resources. This theory necessitates resources being taken from the west in the
form of both money to combat climate change and in money to be redistributed to
the middle east to compensate them for the wrong the west has done to them. It
is only because of a wrong or injustice that the limited resources of this
planet be distributed in such a way that not everyone would have what they need
under the liberal theory, that is the excuse they use to redistribute. If the
focus is on limited resources then it is not on producing more so we do not
have to worry about limited resources. Time is spent on figuring out how to
best apportion what we have which makes producing more inefficient.
And that is the difference. Liberals
want to redistribute because they belief there are limited resources that the
evil capitalists want to hoard for themselves. They believe the market is a bad
thing because in their fictional land the market is bad for poor people and
good for rich people. Because the market is bad for poor people, the liberals
take it upon themselves to redistribute the wealth from the rich to the poor.
The conservatives take a more factually accurate approach and believe that
people should be allowed to participate in the market. This is because the
market is the most efficient tool for creating surplus and progress. The
conservatives want efficiency in their production because the more efficient
the system is the more surplus there will be. The more surplus there is the
more society will progress to be better than it was before and all people, rich and poor, will increase their standard of living faster than under the liberal system. The conservatives
believe the market can do this because it can access and process more
information than a centrally planned system and the more information you use
and process the better decisions you will make.
