Thoughts Du Jour

Winning in a democracy is based less on facts than on the perception of facts by an ignorant or greedy constituency exemplified by the likes of me. Nor is there any incentive to know all the economic and environmental facts when survival is perceived to require only the comprehension of sound bites entailing more subsidies and regulations.

Why are constituents ignorant? How can they be otherwise when government intervention in the form of subsidies, laws, and wrongheaded taxation has metastasized so virulently from those days when our imperial empire was a mere constitutional republic. Not that the republic had its policies regarding equity, economy, and ecology right by any means. It was simply that we were more free to take care of ourselves, each other, and the land that we worked. Now we work directly or indirectly for Caesar and only at his permission or through loopholes we  ferret out in his imperial decrees.

Anybody can vote for one more law to protect the environment. But as you imply, without funding, this is one more law to protect the status quo. Not many are going to vote for more taxes to fund enforcement, even if those taxes are environmental taxes that would decrease the need for that one more law in the first place. Why? It is not just corporations who do not want to pay for nature’s free services. It is also an uneducated citizenry that is biased against a free economy.

So why are constituents ignorant of the facts, beyond the simple fact that the government command-and-control economy operates from a bloated database that even Big Brother cannot comprehend? I contend that these same constituents, in a free economy, could comprehend and utilize facts much more effectively than Big Brother ever will, even with supercomputers in 2084. I conjecture that government schools initially instil a bias against the free market, at most, and impart little understanding of economics, at least. This is fatal, because while the economy is only a subset of the ecology, it is the economy through which we need to interact in a sustainable and just way with the environment and with each other. I see no understanding of either sustainability or justice in government policy regarding this economy within ecology. For example, no amount of unenforceable and incomprehensible regulation is likely to compensate for underpriced water, minerals, and pollution.