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A Clear Choice
Putting aside for a moment the temporary disruption caused by the coronavirus and the panic associated with it, the world has been growing, and continues to grow, less poor. A smaller percentage of mankind is malnourished than at any time in history. Food production has never been greater, nor the sustainable yield per acre of farmland higher. More people are free now than ever before, fewer live under authoritarian regimes, and the world no longer faces the credible threat of nuclear destruction that characterized the old Cold War.
While we in America fret about problems that are increasingly marginal and contrived – racism, police brutality, gender identity, climate crisis, and the so-called failures of free markets – the world is on a broad upward trajectory.
The population growth rate peaked decades ago; the global population will never exceed sustainable limits. In no developed country – and in very few underdeveloped ones – is the prospect of having too many people a great concern; in several, the challenge will be having too few people to sustain economic growth.
The greatest environmental and humanitarian challenges of the underdeveloped world can be addressed with affordable energy – fossil fuels, hydroelectric – and agricultural technology already common elsewhere. What holds these countries back is a combination of incompetent and corrupt governments and misguided foreign aid organizations that work to prevent, rather than encourage, development of the infrastructure we in the first world take for granted.
The actual science about climate change is far less alarming than hyperbolic reporting and politically motivated spin would suggest.
Globally, the loss of life to weather is now a small percentage of what it was a century ago. Despite hyperbolic concerns about climate apocalypse, the actual trend has been toward a climate more conducive to human thriving, a substantially greener world thanks to increased carbon dioxide.
In the developed world the environment is dramatically cleaner and more protected than it was when I was born. Forests are expanding, the lakes and rivers are cleaner, and in most of America the air is purer than at any time since the boom of the American industrial revolution.
Thanks to technological innovation, clean energy in the form of natural gas is both affordable and plentiful. America is no longer dependent on foreign suppliers of dubious character; we are now an energy superpower with vast undeveloped resources, capable of exporting our surpluses to the world.
In America there are no longer legal distinctions based on race, and the vast majority of people are almost comically vigilant about appearing bigoted or biased. Ours is a race-sensitive culture unlike any other, a country that almost tore itself apart in its effort to end slavery at a time when slavery was common around the world, and that continues to almost obsessively examine itself and seek to extinguish the vestiges of racism from society.
The greatest threat we face is panic and the mistakes that accompany it. Schadenfreude reaches apotheosis in apocalyptic prognostication, and there are a great many intelligent people who seem to find purpose and meaning – perhaps because they have rejected the traditional sources of those things in religion and parenting (though I’m only speculating) – in alarmism, and in the righteous condemnation of our wildly successful country and the values and practices that made it so.
So they call for environmentally destructive and economically unsound alternative energy development, when we have clean and abundant choices (notably natural gas and nuclear) readily available. They cite statistically unsound claims of bigotry and oppression to support the riots and mayhem that rend our cities and our communities in tatters and further impoverish our most vulnerable. They praise the most destructive single idea in human history, that of economic central planning (socialism, communism, fascism), as an alternative to the free markets that brought America unparalleled wealth, security, and prosperity. They ignore the real crises in our urban communities, of broken homes and failed educational institutions and ineffective law enforcement, because acknowledging these would suggest a return to traditional norms as the sensible way to improve the lives of America’s most challenged, rather than the radical transformation they seek. And they sell a myth of America as an evil, malevolent place founded in hate, rather than the example of freedom and prosperity it aspires to be and largely succeeds at realizing.
There are serious problems in the world. A billion people continue to live without clean water. Hundreds of millions more depend on wood burning for their heating and cooking, living without reliable electricity, refrigeration, or basic services. Millions contract malaria and tuberculosis and other diseases that it is within our power to prevent or treat. Millions live under despotic governments, cut off from the global flow of information, trade, and opportunity.
What the world needs is what America has: freedom, the rule of law, free markets, reliable and affordable energy, better agricultural technology, dams and fresh water and improved irrigation. It is ironic that every single one of these things is opposed by America’s disaster-obsessed doomsayers, by a progressive left that promises to drag the country – and the world – away from security and prosperity, away from things that we know work because we’ve seen them demonstrated time and again. Today we can see the left’s contempt for the rule of law in the riots and chaos in our cities. We can see its embrace of boutique and economically untenable energy in its pursuit of environmentally destructive wind and solar power. We can see its distrust of free expression and the market of ideas in its growing speech codes and filters and proposals to limit what we can say and think. We can see its rejection of the most successful economic model in history in its ignorant calls for collectivism and economic central planning. And we can see its awful divisiveness, its focus on the trivial things that divide us (if we let them), rather than on the deep values and shared concerns that have historically united us, in its emphasis on every imaginable form of identitarian politics and victimization-obsessed hand-wringing.
Above all, we can see the fear, pessimism, contempt, anger, intolerance, and even violence of the progressive left growing.
The world has never been better poised to prosper. America, and hence the world, has never faced such a clear choice of paths ahead: one of continuing the tradition of Constitutional law, free speech, free markets, egalitarianism, optimism, and prosperity; the other of embracing environmental panic, socialism and collectivism, an explosion of fanciful injustices, an ever-growing hierarchy of privileged victim groups and alleged oppressors, and a worldview that sees mankind as an unhealthy growth that must be pared back and made to live smaller, more constrained, and poorer lives of constant self-censorship and self-flagellation.
It’s a serious choice. It shouldn’t be a difficult one. And November is coming.
Good post.
Welcome back!
Also, we beat polio.
Henry, I was planning to vote for Biden, but your post turned me around. I’m kidding, of course, but you make the case so well for voting for Trump that it’s hard to see anyone resisting the force of your argument. Ha ha. Of course the Left will resist. They are blinded by their ideology and frozen by their biases.
This.
Is there something in some people that makes them adopt a worldview where people around them are evil, where doom is just around the corner – not to mention deserved because of nebulous ‘sinfulness’ – and where they deny themselves pleasures and comforts, looking askance with an admixture of contempt and envy at those who don’t?
Because this all seems like something out of the Middle Ages as seen in film.
Ditto and ditto.
“Globally, the loss of life to weather is now a small percentage of what it was a century ago.”
Do you perchance have a handy link on that?….would be very useful for an argument I’m now having with sometody.
@davidfoster Maybe able to pull something from this:
https://fee.org/articles/climate-related-deaths-are-at-historic-lows-data-show/
From last year, but given the time frame considered should still be valid.
Thanks…should help with my consciousness-raising efforts with this individual.
I think Affirmative Action is still on the books.
Of course, capitalism sucks.
There is, and it is often when people feel terrible about themselves. Accusing others of being worse is a moment of respite.
But they don’t deny themselves pleasures and comforts, they just would deny it to others, to feel better about themselves.
I don’t know. It’s all just weird.
Well said, Henry, from the first word to the last. As a side note, I have always maintained that we could durably solve our immigration problem if we managed to export our values, respect for law and liberty, to the world, rather than importing refugees from lands without them operative. But too many Americans no longer believe in those values themselves, or have lost confidence in our way of life. And some foolishly consider our most valuable export to be something wrong to “impose” on others. As if setting a shining example to the nations is a morally suspect imposition. We are the last best hope for the world, and I do not care if that sounds like a cliche now.
100%.
Imperialist Capitalist swine!
I wonder @henryracette, is the progressive left really growing? Or is it just getting louder because it is actually weaker? For the first time in a while the left has come up against a leader, brash and combative, that does not kowtow to the immature, self-indulgent, and, quite frankly ignorant progressive. Sometimes I feel gloomy as I look around and see the left seemingly in charge of all the megaphones. But with all the wattage to which they have access, what they end up saying is so weak and worthless that it blows away like a puff of smoke. In frustration they burn, so as to create what they think is enough smoke upon which to create a foundation. But the more they burn, the weaker they get. And looky here, suddenly someone woke up in the opposition camp and said whoa Nellie, we let the animals run freely, and now they are coming to eat our own lunch. But it may be too late to put these irritating children back in their rooms. Those of us major majority who have actually worked for our own sustenance will allow these children their tantrum only so long before the punishment for their misbehavior becomes much greater than just a pat on the butt.
@exjon or @bethanymandel or Max or… okay, I don’t know who’s in charge of promoting things to the Main Feed. But could someone fix the formatting on this post? It rendered correctly when it was on the Member Feed, but now that it’s been promoted the paragraph spacing is gone.
I’d fix it myself, but I’m afraid that might take it off the main feed and put it back in the queue. (Is that how it works?)
By the way, do we have a Ricochet org chart?
— Hank
Hmm, that’s funny. I went into the editor that moderators can use and it shows the paragraph breaks there. I deleted the blank lines and put in the breaks again in the first two paragraphs. No difference. Even putting in two blank lines doesn’t do anything. I’m going to try one more thing so don’t panic if it looks weird while I try this.
OK, that worked.
Great essay. Yet we’ve accumulated a gigantic Federal bureaucracy, well targeted federal money and complexities in the tax code, the media, and one of the parties, and almost all of the radicals, so that another eight years of who ever runs that side of things could mean death. If we don’t return to robust ground up growth and strong military the Chinese may fix us the way they choose before we learn to fix ourselves. If there isn’t wide spread fraud, Trump will win and we’ll continue to fix matters, but we need the Democrats to change because 4 years isn’t enough and they’re getting worse not better. We need at least 12 years.
Randy,
Thank you so much!
Hank
Well said, HR, but it is only ironic for those naive American progressives who don’t know any better. To America’s progressive careerists (AOC, Pelosi, Harris, et.al), dragging the country “away from things that we know work” is the whole point, because the things that work–freedom, the rule of law, free markets, reliable and affordable energy, etc.–are the very things that will put the progressive careerist out of job.
Beautiful.
Good Post Henry.
“The world has never been better poised to prosper. America, and hence the world, has never faced such a clear choice of paths ahead: one of continuing the tradition of Constitutional law, free speech, free markets, egalitarianism, optimism, and prosperity; the other of embracing environmental panic, socialism and collectivism, an explosion of fanciful injustices, an ever-growing hierarchy of privileged victim groups and alleged oppressors, and a worldview that sees mankind as an unhealthy growth that must be pared back and made to live smaller, more constrained, and poorer lives of constant self-censorship and self-flagellation.”
A. Per the studies of Economist Chris Hamilton, the 0-65 year old high consuming cohort of the High Consuming nations which consume 90% of the world’s good was already set to grow only 0.4% for this entire coming decade and then sharply decline. Now with the devastation wrought by COVID, one should think that growth will be pared pack sharply no matter what. Hamilton thought this was going to be a major problem in the coming decades because shrinking economies even with less people are going to experience much pain with over capacity industries anxiously pursuing dwindling populations and thus dwindling potential consumers. A real dog eat dog world ensues with some big potential losers for those nations that do not keep up.
B. America was prior to COVID poised to prosper, but arguably it was not prospering due to the combined and intertwined efforts of the so very woke and hungry for power Bureaucratic Administrative State and the ravenous and thoroughly Corporatist Corporate Giants.
The young adult cohort over the last 12 years has taken a shellacking. The young are just not getting “breadwinner” jobs that will support productive lives. Marriage rates have fallen sharply. The real Cost of Living has risen sharply while wages have largely stagnated. Heavy Drug use is way up, as in suicide and many young men are dropping out of society. Over 17 million people dropped out of the workforce in the Obama Administration. Over 50% more young women are getting college degrees that young men. Almost 50% more young women are accepted to colleges than men. Women aren’t marrying too many men who don’t make over $40,000 a year which is hard in this economy for the young. The website Sugar Daddy dot.com ( yes there is such a thing) is booming because young women can seen that there are a paucity of potential husbands who will make it in the world. When you have a social situation where eligible women greater outnumber social disaster reins.
C. If there is a silver lining in the chaos brought about by the Marxist Pandemic Lockdowns and the BLM riots, is that many people can now see that the Left has thoroughly jumped the shark with it’s radical Police State agenda and hopefully this coming “clear choice” will overwhelmingly elect sufficient number of conservatives to right America’s ship.
This paragraph highlights the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the ‘green new deal’.