Their conflict is with Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the Founding Fathers, not with me
People complain if we don’t use energy sources like fossil fuels we’ll collapse or return to the Stone Age. That’s a failure of their imaginations, but more.
Do we need to grow?
Milton Friedman hardly promoted regulating markets. He said:
“We have no desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow, and those are quite different. I believe that the level of growth in this country ought to be whatever people want it to be. If the people at large—if each and every person separately was satisfied with where he is and didn’t want to grow, fine. I have no objection. I don’t want to impose growth on anyone. I want people to be free to pursue their own objective.”
Should we regulate emission?
Friedman also said:
“About pollution… there is a case for the government to do something about it. Because there’s always a case for the government to some extent when what two people do affects a third party. There’s no case for the government whatsoever in mandating air bags because air bags protect people inside the car. That’s my business. If I want to protect myself, I should do it at my expense. But there is a case for the government protecting third parties, protecting people who have not voluntarily agreed to enter. So there’s more of a case, for example, for emissions control than there is for air bags.”
Friedrich Hayek said:
“The harmful effects of deforestation or of the smoke of factories cannot be confined to the owner of the property in question . . . these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.”
and
“If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.”
Do we need fossil fuels?
Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations in 1776. He wrote:
“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.”
What does Smith mean by “justice”?
“There is, however, another virtue, of which the observance is not left to the freedom of our own wills, which may be extorted by force, and of which the violation exposes to resentment, and consequently to punishment. This virtue is justice: the violation of justice is injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons, from motives which are naturally disapproved of. It is, therefore, the proper object of resentment, and of punishment, which is the natural consequence of resentment.”
In other words, Smith’s “justice” is protection from extortion by force—that is, coercion.
Also in 1776, the Declaration of Independence created a government to secure the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Soon after the Constitution created a government to protect from being “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” which were to create a “more perfect union,” and “Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Why I specify 1776
1776 also saw the first installation of Watt’s steam engine. Virtually no coal was burned in all of human history by the writing of The Wealth of Nations, the US Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution
Therefore, Adam Smith’s “highest degree of opulence” and the US Founding Fathers’ “pursuit of happiness,” “more perfect union,” and “Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” require no fossil fuels or energy sources beyond plants, wind, and water.
Those who claim energy sources beyond plants, wind, and water are necessary for life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, or the highest degree of opulence conflict not with me but with Adam Smith, the Founding Fathers, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and their peers.
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