Mike Wallace Interview (1959)

Donahue Interview

And there is some commentary over at the Mises Econ Blog.

From Cato.org: In “Inconvenient Truths,” Patrick Michaels, Cato senior fellow in environmental studies, questions the science behind Gore’s film, calling it “a riveting work of science fiction.” He continues: “The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland’s 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100. Where’s the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker’s Summary from the United Nations’ much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore’s film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.”

Riveting… if you can maintain suspension of disbelief. A difficult feat to accomplish if you have a reasoning mind, a modicum of science education, and have actually looked at some of the theories and evidence on climate change.

Check out this blogpost by Stephen Carson and the ensuing discussion:

Science Fiction as a Literature of Freedom

Now, obviously not all SF writers are libertarians, even soft or quasi-libertarians, but Carson makes some interesting points as do some of the commentors.

Here is a letter to the editor that I just submitted to my college newspaper, the LSU Reveille. I’ll update soon on whether it sees print.

[Update: The letter was published in the February 22nd print issue of the paper (see it online here) almost verbatim, with one or two glaring exceptions. The main one is that they changed the clause “for strong theoretical arguments and commentary, do a search on www.mises.org” to “for strong theoretical arguments and commentary, do a search on it.” Out of hindsight, I’ve added some clarifying comments in brackets below.]

Shoddy Economic Journalism
(02-20-07)

Jimmy Garrett’s article on February 16th, 2007 attempts to put on a show of being unbiased but I’m not sure it succeeds. In any case, it is an example of shoddy economic journalism.

He does not tell us of any academic credentials (if any) that his pro-minimum wage “expert” possesses other than the fact that he, Louis Reine, is a high-level member of some pro-minwage organization. The “expert opinion” of Mr. Reine displays appalling ignorance of economic theory and history, which leads one to question the wisdom of including him as the sole pro-minwage expert in the article.

The subtitle of Garrett’s article claims that experts are unsure of the economic effect of minimum wage legislation, but this is patently false when it comes to unemployment. According to economic theory, it is not in the aggregate unemployment statistic that we should expect to find an increase in unemployment. Rather, we expect that minimum wage legislation will lead to an increase in unemployment among low- and unskilled workers, primarily the young and certain minorities. And this is exactly what mainstream economic empirical research has found to be the case. For a good discussion of the mainstream academic consensus on minimum wage effects, see Ehrenberg and Smith’s Modern Labor Economics (2003 Eighth Edition), pp. 110-120; for strong theoretical arguments and commentary, do a search on <www.mises.org>.

Mr. Reine’s argument to the effect that a business won’t [I should have written, ‘will never’] hire four workers if they need five is patently ridiculous. If a business can only afford to hire four workers, then it will only hire four workers even if it needs five. [Granted, h]iring less workers or firing some existing workers isn’t the only option for marginal businesses. They can also reduce the hours of their workers [which results in less pay for each], reduce non-wage benefits [which, for minwage jobs, if there even are any, generally aren’t much to begin with and so can’t be reduced much], substitute new machines for workers [a way of hiring less workers or letting some go], cut back on innovation and expansion, [or] go out of business.

Presenting someone as an expert who is demonstrably not one (Reine, by dint of his own words) suggests shoddy economic journalism. Journalists in general and economic journalists in particular have a responsibility to be well-versed in economics in order to avoid passing ideology and political maneuvering off as science.

***

And here is an op-ed I was invited to write for an unofficial student newspaper called Students for Reform:

Minimum Wage Legislation vs. Economic Law and Compassion
(12-04-06)

With the Democratic takeover in Congress, we are beginning to hear a renewed call for raising the minimum wage. Even the LSU Reveille has come out in favor of raising the minimum wage in two pieces published on November 29th. Since raising the minimum wage would have important ramifications for the economy nationwide, it behooves us to subject this policy proposal to close scrutiny. To state my conclusions clearly at the outset, the minimum wage and especially the notion of raising it have absolutely no moral or economic merit. Here is why:

First, it is said that raising the minimum wage is the compassionate thing to do. But are left-liberals really all that compassionate? A recent study by Arthur C. Brooks suggests that left-liberals are less compassionate than conservatives.[1] They tend to give to others on average less of their money — both in terms of dollar amounts and percentage of income — as well as time and blood. And this despite the fact that left-liberal families average around 6% higher incomes than conservative families. During the 2000 election the fact came to light that Al Gore’s charitable donations as a percentage of his income were less than the national average. The compassionate talk of left-liberals does not translate so well into compassionate deeds. Instead, they tend to prefer to coerce others into bearing the burden through government policies. (To avoid misunderstanding, I am neither a conservative nor a left-liberal; I am a classical liberal or libertarian.)

What then is the status of left-liberal public policies with regards to compassion? Well, aside from the immorality of coercing “charity” out of others by the threat or use of initiatory physical force, that depends on the actual consequences of said policies. Minimum wage legislation flies in the face of fundamental economic laws, particularly the law of demand and supply. Minimum wage legislation increases the price of labor (wages) of the least skilled and unskilled workers, thereby increasing the operating costs of businesses that employ the workers who compete for these wages. Faced with a legal minimum wage and increases in it, such businesses face hard choices. Given the increased cost of hiring and maintaining employees, such businesses might increase the prices of their goods and services to compensate. This, of course, would result in price inflation that would eventually negate any positive effect the minimum wage may have for their employees. But in a competitive market, especially for marginal businesses, raising prices is often not an option. The increased cost of labor will lead such businesses to slow down or hold off on job creation and hiring. It will also lead such businesses to cut the size of their workforce, and therefore also productivity, in order to keep operating costs down. Some will not be able to absorb the increased costs and will be forced to go out of business. So yes, all else equal, minimum wage legislation does destroy jobs and lead to coerced unemployment; for those least skilled and unskilled workers who are less productive than the minimum wage will be out-competed for jobs. Left-liberals ought to know this, and many do: even the left-liberal pro-minimum wage organization ACORN admitted this when it sued the state of California for exemption from its labor laws, arguing, “The more that ACORN must pay each individual outreach worker — either because of minimum wage or overtime requirements — the fewer outreach workers it will be able to hire.”[2]

But wait a minute, you might say, didn’t the LSU Reveille cite “studies [that] have shown that states including Oregon, Washington and Alaska who have raised their state minimum wage have not experienced an unemployment increase”?[3] Well, the writer didn’t actually cite the studies but, that troublesome failure aside, the quoted statement is misleading in any case. What it should say is that these states did not experience a significant increase in their overall unemployment rates. Clever presentation of statistics can be used in support of policy proposals even when the actual evidence does not. While the overall employment statistic might not show worrisome increases from minimum wage legis
lation, it is in the unemployment rates of the least skilled and unskilled workers that economic theory leads us to expect minimum wage legislation to have the most detrimental effect. The facts bear this out. The young and ethnic minorities are hardest hit. “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the unemployment rate for everyone over the age of 16 was 5.6% in 2005. The unemployment rate for white teens in the 16-17 age group was 17.3% in 2005. The same figures for Hispanic and black teens were 25% and 40.9% respectively.” These percentages decrease with age but still remain well above the overall rate even into the late twenties and early thirties. Moreover, studies show that raising the minimum wage has been correlated with declining employment rates for these groups. One such study concluded that “for every 10% increase in the minimum wage, employment for teenagers and young adults in general decreased by 2.5%. The decrease for teenagers themselves was 5.7%.” Another study estimated that, “following the increase from $3.35 to $3.80 in April 1990, employment for teenage males and females fell 1.5% and 2.5% respectively. When the minimum wage was again increased to $4.25 in April of 1991, employment for male and female teenagers again declined, this time by 3.1% and 5.2% respectively.”[4]

The Gallup poll cited by the Reveille article is also misleading. It is used to imply that increasing the minimum wage legislation will not have a detrimental economic effect, but all it shows are the feelings of a random sample of small business owners. Three out of four of them may think that a 10% increase in the minimum wage would have no effect on their company. Now, most people, even most poor people, in America make well above the minimum wage so it is not surprising that many small business owners do not think a 10% raise in the minimum wage will affect their business, but the Democrats’ proposed increase is on the order of 40%, from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour. Recall the estimate above that every 10% increase in the minimum wage leads to a 2.5% decrease in teen and young adult employment.

Certainly, a minimum wage income is not much to live on and even more difficult to support a family on. It is interesting, however, that advocates of minimum wage legislation do not give figures on the number of American workers who actually earn minimum wage and are actually supporting families (with children) as the sole breadwinner. “Data from the 1995 Current Population Survey reveals that of all workers who earned the minimum wage immediately preceding President Clinton’s 1996 increase, 37.6% were teenagers living with their parents, 17.1% were single adults living alone, 21.5% were adults who were married to a spouse who also worked. Only 5.5% of all minimum wage workers were single parents, and only 7.8% were married and the sole wage earner for their household, which may or may not have included children.” Moreover: “Nearly two-thirds of all minimum wage employees who continue employment are earning more than the minimum wage within a year. More than 97% of all employees in the United States move beyond the minimum wage by age 30.”[5]

It is evident then that minimum wage legislation is not only an empty gesture — for most Americans are not on minimum wage or do not remain on it for long — it is also downright harmful to those it is allegedly primarily intended to help as well as to its advocates and everyone else who suffers its effects. It purports to be a grand and virtuous and compassionate gesture but is in reality the immoral act of shirking one’s own charitable responsibilities by forcing the burden upon others while perverting the meaning of charity and being counterproductive to boot. Democrats and journalists owe it to themselves and those they want to help to gain a better understanding of economic principles. A good place to start is Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.[6]

Notes and Works Cited

[1] Arthur C. Brooks, Who Really Cares (New York: Basic Books, 2006). See also, Thomas Sowell, “Who Really Cares?” Jewish World Review (November 28, 2006).

[2] Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now vs. State of California, Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Labor Standards Enforcement, Case No. AO 69744, Appellant’s Opening Brief, in the Court of Appeal of California, First Appellate District, Division Five, August, 1995, cited in Employment Policies Institute, Q & A: Minimum Wage Employee Profile, May 1997.

[3] Garesia Randle, “Democrats to push for increased minimum wage,” LSU Reveille Vol. 111, No. 64 (Wednesday, November 29, 2006), p. 16.

[4] D.W. Mackenzie, “Mythology of the Minimum Wage,” Mises Institute Daily Article (5/3/2006). See also the sources cited therein.

[5] Shawn Ritenour, “What You Need to Know About the Minimum Wage,” Mises Institute Daily Article (9/10/2004); particularly notes six and seven for the studies referred to above.

[6] Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson (San Francisco: Laissez Faire Books, 1996 [1946]).

I submitted these to my college newspaper, the LSU Reveille. Unfortunately they were not published in the print edition, but they were posted online.

Morals legislation incompatible with Christianity and morality
(11-08-06)

In her opinion column on the separation of church and state on Wednesday, November 8th, Emily Byers makes several egregious errors. First, in a fallacious argument from authority, she argues in part that morals legislation is justified because the Founding Fathers allowed for it, but just because some, most or all of the Founding Fathers allowed for morals legislation does not make it right. They were only human after all. Second, she fallaciously moves from the correct claim that personal (im)morality affects others to the conclusion that therefore it can and should be legislated, but this does not follow automatically. Third, she seems to equate advocacy of morals legislation with Christianity and, I would guess with conservatism, and being against morals legislation with secularism and, she seems to imply, with liberalism. She seems to be entirely ignorant of the libertarian tradition which includes both Christians and non-Christians who believe that it is wrong to force your moral beliefs on others. Libertarians believe that we all have a right to liberty — to freedom from the initiation of physical force (including violence, murder, theft, and fraud) against us, which is clearly unjust and harmful to the well-being of both the aggressor and the victim. Beyond the prohibition of, and provision of restitution for, such unjust acts, it is immoral to impose our personal moral beliefs on others. It is also un-Christian. Because it prohibits freedom of choice, morals legislation can only produce correct behavior; it cannot directly produce moral behavior and personal salvation, which must be freely chosen. Morals legislation is also paternalistic, treating competent adults as children who need to be protected from themselves and bad examples, and has been proved by theory and history to be generally counterproductive. Does anyone recall the monumental failure of the Eighteenth Amendment, for example?

Clarification on Immigration
(11-16/06)

I’m afraid that I must chide my fellow political science grad student, Michael S., for making some sorely uninformed or misinformed claims in his Thursday, Nov. 16th letter to the editor. First, there is no essential similarity between the jobs of illegal immigrants in the US and legal/chattel slavery. He may view their wages as substandard but these jobs are voluntary and the wages are for them a huge improvement over the opportunities available in their home countries. As for whether illegal immigrants are a drain on our society, well if they are it is only because the social welfare state and stupid immigration policies make this possible. Abolish the welfare state and/or fix our immigration policies and this objection to immigration no longer holds water. Second, I can say as the husband of a citizen of India that he has no idea how much visas, temporary work permits, and green cards cost in money and time. My wife’s parents were forced to miss our wedding because it took them three tries, a lot of time applying and traveling to and from the American consulate each time, and a good deal of money to get a visa that allowed them to visit for a mere six months. Imagine the difficulty for poorer immigrants. Temporary work permits cost over one hundred dollars and several months minimum of wait-time. And green cards cost at least one thousand dollars and take a year or more to get. The Department of Homeland Security and its Citizenship and Immigration Services (which used to be part of INS) are a big political and bureaucratic mess. I too have visited China and had no trouble getting a Chinese visa and a 10-year visa for India, but it is much more difficult for foreigners to get a US visa than for a US citizen to get a foreign visa. Finally, I want to encourage the Reveille to print more often columns and letters that express views other than typical left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, Democrat vs. Republican talking points and dogmas.

Last of the old MySpace blogposts:

In Ancient Fossils, Seeds of a New Debate on Warming

Some interesting excerpts:

Some argue that CO2 fluctuations over the Phanerozoic follow climate trends fairly well, supporting a causal relationship between high gas levels and high temperatures. “The geologic record over the past 550 million years indicates a good correlation,” said Robert A. Berner, a Yale geologist and pioneer of paleoclimate analysis. “There are other factors at work here. But in general, global warming is due to CO2. It was in the past and is now.”

Other experts say that is an oversimplification of a complex picture of natural variation. The fluctuations in the gas levels, they say, often fall out of step with the planet’s hot and cold cycles, undermining the claimed supremacy of carbon dioxide.

“It’s too simplistic to say low CO2 was the only cause of the glacial periods” on time scales of millions of years, said Robert Giegengack, a geologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies past atmospheres. “The record violates that one-to-one correspondence.”

He and other doubters say the planet is clearly warming today, as it has repeatedly done, but insist that no one knows exactly why. Other possible causes, they say, include changes in sea currents, Sun cycles and cosmic rays that bombard the planet.

“More and more data,” Jan Veizer, an expert on Phanerozoic climates at the University of Ottawa, said, “point to the Sun and stars as the dominant driver.”

Highlighting the gap, the two sides clash on how much the Earth would warm today if carbon dioxide concentrations double from preindustrial levels, as scientists expect. Many climatologists see an increase of as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit. The skeptics, drawing on Phanerozoic data, tend to see far less, perhaps 2 or 3 degrees.

The Phanerozoic dispute, fought mainly in scholarly journals and scientific meetings, has occurred in isolation from the public debate on global warming. Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth” makes no mention of it.

Some mainstream scientists familiar with the Phanerozoic evidence call it too sketchy for public consumption and government policy, if not expert deliberations.

Skeptics say CO2 crusaders simply find the Phanerozoic data embarrassing and irreconcilable with public alarms. “People come to me and say, ‘Stop talking like this, you’re hurting the cause,’ ” said Dr. Giegengack of Penn.

—

So much for Al Gore’s scientific “consensus” on global warming.

It also bears pointing out that even if the evidence gathered from earth’s distant past is too sketchy for public debate, that only makes data from the more recent past and present an even less solid foundation for determining public policy. Why? Because it means we don’t know all of the factors causing global warming and how they interact, how much temperatures will change, what effects this will have, and so forth. Theories and models based on data from only the past few hundred years at most have too short a time horizon to be useful for telling us what the long term trends are and whether and to what extent human beings may be responsible. It is the height of hubris and irresponsibility to enact government policies that will have significant negative economic consequences and harm the well-being of countless people based on shaky statistical correlations and even shakier computer models. The cost of such policies is all too likely to outweigh the negative consequences of global warming.

It’s also interesting that leftist ideologues in the scientific and political community attempt to discourage less biased scientists from talking about evidence that contradicts the environmental alarmists’ public claims. Hurts the cause they say. Well, perhaps the cause is out of step with reality, eh?

Along these lines, here’s another interesting excerpt:

“Some climatologists view the Phanerozoic debate as irrelevant. They say the evidence of a tie between carbon dioxide and planetary warming over the last few centuries is so compelling that any long-term evidence to the contrary must somehow be tainted. They also say greenhouse gases are increasing faster than at any other time in Earth history, making the past immaterial.”

It’s interesting that alarmists insist on interpreting evidence from the distant past in light of evidence from the more recent past rather than interpreting any given period in light of evidence from the overall historical record. Anything inconsistent with their ideology and evidence from the recent past must be wrong. They then go on to claim that greenhouse cases are increasing faster now than at any other time in Earth’s history, but what evidence do they have for this? There is little enough data from the planet’s distant past, and much of it contradicts their alarmist claims. Indeed, sudden climate shifts are natural and not uncommon. Alarmist claims are clearly ideologically driven and based on evidence with too limited of a time horizon. They make unsupported generalizations from limited data and ignore or attempt to suppress contradictory evidence.

Be sure to check out the whole article, there are a lot more juicy tidbits.

Old MySpace Blogpost:

Is the Sky Really Falling? A Review of Recent Global Warming Scare Stories
by Patrick J. Michaels

Author Bio: Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and professor of natural resources at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and an author of the 2003 climate science Paper of the Year selected by the Association of American Geographers. His research has been published in major scientific journals, including Climate Research, Climatic Change, Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Climate, Nature, and Science. He received his Ph.D. in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1979. His most recent book is Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.

Executive Summary

In the last two years, a remarkable amount of disturbing news has been published concerning global warming, largely concentrating on melting of polar ice, tropical storms and hurricanes, and mass extinctions. The sheer volume of these stories appears to be moving the American political process toward some type of policy restricting emissions of carbon dioxide.

It is highly improbable, in a statistical sense, that new information added to any existing forecast is almost always bad or good; rather, each new finding has an equal probability of making a forecast worse or better. Consequently, the preponderance of bad news almost certainly means that something is missing, both in the process of science itself and in the reporting of science. This paper examines in detail both recent scientific reports on climate change and the communication of those reports.

Needless to say, the unreported information is usually counter to the bad news. Reports of rapid disintegration of Greenland’s ice ignore the fact that the region was warmer than it is now for several decades in the early 20th century, before humans could have had much influence on climate. Similar stories concerning Antarctica neglect the fact that the net temperature trend in recent decades is negative, or that warming the surrounding ocean can serve only to enhance snowfall, resulting in a gain in ice. Global warming affects hurricanes in both positive and negative fashions, and there is no relationship between the severity of storms and ocean-surface temperature, once a commonly exceeded threshold temperature is reached. Reports of massive species extinction also turn out to be impressively flawed.

This constellation of half-truths and misstatements is a predictable consequence of the way that science is now conducted, where issues compete with each other for public support. Unfortunately, this creates a culture of negativity that is reflected in the recent spate of global warming reports.