World-class surfer of central banks' tidal wave of counterfeit capital,

Klaus Schwab, speaking to fellow surfers at his absurdly influential World 

Economic Forum. [Image credit: World Economic Forum, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

Vladimir Lenin once boasted that capitalists would sell the rope to hang themselves -- and then set about organising things to make that happen. He failed, but so-called capitalists still line up to keep trying: one latest attempt being something they call 'stakeholder capitalism,' characterised by so-called 'responsible investing.' As Dan Sanchez explains in this Guest Post, it's anything but...

"ESG" -- Capitalism's 'Great Reset'?

Guest Post by Dan Sanchez

Capitalism needs few descriptive adjectives beyond the words "laissez-faire" or "unhampered." In recent years however, so-called "stakeholder capitalism" has taken the global economy by storm. Its champions proclaim that it will save—and remake—the world. Will it live up to its hype or will it destroy capitalism in the name of reforming it?

Proponents pitch their "stakeholder capitalism" as an antidote to the excesses of so-called “shareholder capitalism,” which they condemn as too narrowly focused on maximising profits (especially short-term profits) for corporate shareholders. This, they argue, is socially irresponsible and destructive, because it disregards the interests of other stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, employees, local communities, and society in general.

"Stakeholder capitalism" [which earns every inverted comma we can muster - Ed.] is ostensibly about offering business leaders incentives to take these wider considerations into account and thus make more “sustainable” decisions. This, it is argued, is also better in the long run for businesses’ bottom lines.

The Rise and Reign of ESG

Today’s dominant strain of "stakeholder capitalism" is the doctrine known as ESG, which stands for “environmental, social, and corporate governance.” Got that? The acronym was coined in the 2004 report of Who Cares Wins, a joint initiative of elite financial institutions invited by no less than the United Nations “to develop guidelines and recommendations on how to better integrate environmental, social and corporate governance issues in asset management, securities brokerage services, and associated research functions.”

In other words, how best to make businesses throw themselves under the bus before governments do it for them.

Who Cares Wins operated under the auspices of the UN’s Global Compact, which, according to the report, “is a corporate responsibility initiative launched by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2000 with the primary goal of implementing universal principles in business.” For "universal" read "the UN's."

Much "progress" has been made toward that goal. Since 2004, ESG has evolved from talk of “guidelines and recommendations” to hard, explicit standards that hold sway over huge swathes of the global economy and billions of dollars worth of investment decisions. ESG has begun to move the world.

These standards to which businesses are all-but required to dance are set by ESG rating agencies like the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) and enforced by investment firms that manage ESG funds. One such firm is Blackrock, whose CEO Larry Fink is a leading champion of both ESG and SASB.

In December, Reuters published a report titled “How 2021 became the year of ESG investing” which stated that, “ESG funds now account for 10% of worldwide fund assets.”

And in April, Bloomberg reported that ESG, “by some estimates represents more than $40 trillion in assets. According to Morningstar, genuine ESG funds held about $2.7 trillion in managed assets at the end of the fourth quarter.”

To access any of that capital, it is no longer enough for a business to offer a good return on investment (or, sometimes, any at all). It must also report “environmental” and “social” metrics that meet ESG standards.

Is that a welcome development? Will the general public as non-owning “stakeholders” of these businesses be better off thanks to the implementation of ESG standards? Is stakeholder capitalism beginning to reform shareholder capitalism by widening its perspective and curing it of its narrow-minded fixation on profit uber alles?

Capitalism Is for Consumers

To answer that, some clarification is in order. First of all, “shareholder capitalism” is a misleading term for laissez-faire capitalism. It is true that, as Milton Friedman wrote in his 1970 critique of the “social responsibility of business” rhetoric of the time:

In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.

Since the owners of a publicly traded corporation are its shareholders, it is true that they are and ought to be the “bosses” of a corporation’s employees—including its management. It is also true that corporate executives properly have a fiduciary responsibility to maximise profits for their shareholders.

But that does not mean that shareholders reign supreme under capitalism. As the great economist Ludwig von Mises explained in his book Human Action:

The direction of all economic affairs is in the market society a task of the entrepreneurs [which, according to Mises’s technical definition includes shareholding investors]. Theirs is the control of production. They are at the helm and steer the ship. A superficial observer would believe that they are supreme. But they are not. They are bound to obey unconditionally the captain's orders. The captain is the consumer.

The “sovereign consumers,” as Mises calls them, issue their orders through “their buying and their abstention from buying.” Those orders are transmitted throughout the entire economy via the price system. Entrepreneurs and investors who correctly anticipate those orders and direct production accordingly are rewarded with profits. But if one, as Mises says, “does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt, and is thus removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him.”

Under laissez-faire capitalism therefore, the principal "stakeholders" whose preferences reign supreme are not not shareholders, but consumers. And (as Mises wrote in his paper “Profit and Loss”) shareholder profit is a measure of—and motivating reward for—success “in adjusting the course of production activities to the most urgent demand of the consumers.” 

What this means for the “stakeholder capitalism” discussion is that, to the extent that the profit-and-loss metric is discounted for the sake of competing objectives (like serving other “stakeholders”), the sovereign consumers are dethroned, disregarded, and relatively impoverished.

Now it’s at least conceivable that ESG standards are not competing, but rather complementary to the profit-and-loss metric and thus serving consumers. In fact, that’s a big part of the ESG sales pitch: that corporations who adopt and adhere to ESG standards will enjoy higher long-term profits, because breaking free of their fixation on short-term shareholder returns will enable them to embrace more “sustainable” business practices.

In a free unhampered market, whether that promise would be fulfilled or not would be for the sovereign consumers to decide, and ESG would rise or fall on its own merits.

Who Complies Wins

Unfortunately, our market economy is far from free or unhampered. The State has instead rigged capital markets for the benefit of its elite lackeys in the financial industry: like those “Who Cares Wins” fat cats who started the ESG ball rolling in 2004 under the auspices of the United Nations.

One of the prime ways the State rigs markets is through central bank policy.

The prodigious amount of newly created money that the Federal Reserve and other central banks have pumped into financial institutions in recent years has transferred vast amounts of real wealth to those institutions from the general public. As a result, those institutions—big banks and investment companies—are now much more beholden to the State and much less beholden to consumers for their wealth.

As they say, “he who pays the piper calls the tune.” So it’s no surprise that these institutions are stumbling over themselves to get on board the State’s ESG bandwagon. 

And that means that if non-financial corporations want access to the Fed’s money tap, and thus to the stream of counterfeit capital gushing out, they too have to get with the ESG program. Especially as the average consumer becomes increasingly impoverished by disastrous economic policies, the incentive for corporations to earn market profit by pleasing consumers is being progressively superseded by the incentive to gain access to the Fed’s flow of loot by meeting the State’s “social” standards.

By increasingly controlling capital flows, the State is gaining ever more control over the entire economy.

This may explain the recent willingness of so many corporations to alienate customers and sacrifice profits on the altar of “green” and “woke” politics. It's not necessarily that they embrace the nonsense themselves (though many do); it's that the governments and their well-rewarded agents have rigged businesses' financial incentives that way.

It is no coincidence that Klaus Schaub, the preeminent champion of the “Great Reset” also co-authored a book titled Stakeholder Capitalism. The upshot of "stakeholder capitalism" is that consumer is supplanted as the economy's supreme stakeholder by The State. The sick joke of stakeholder capitalism therefore is that it “reforms” capitalism by transforming it into a form of socialism. Lenin would be laughing up his sleeve.

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), editor-in-chief of FEE.org, and writer for (among others) The Mission, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, David Stockman’s Contra Corner, and many other popular web sites. He wrote a weekly column for Antiwar.com.
At the Mises Institute, Dan was editor of Mises.org and launched the Mises Academy, the first ever free-market economics online learning platform.
Dan has delivered speeches for FEE, Praxis, the Mises Institute, Liberty on the Rocks, America’s Future Foundation, and more.

A version of his post first appeared at FEE.Org.

... he had been obsessed with branding the company and lowering its carbon footprint at the expense of BP’s real business, producing and selling oil.” #QotD

“[BP CEO John] Browne was distracted by his pet issues of climate change and environmentalism, and by his flirtations with the public spotlight.... he had been obsessed with branding the company and lowering its carbon footprint at the expense of BP’s real business, producing and selling oil.” 

~ Abrahm Lustgarten, from his 2012 book Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, quoted in the post "‘Beyond Petroleum’ Now ‘Big Promises’ at BP"
.

Greens: Reciting the rail mantra while reality passes them by

The Greens constantly push public transport as the ideal transport system for every city, every passenger, every transport case.

See what I mean:

Motorists' petrol taxes should go to increasing public transport, they say.
Hang everything else and get the Auckland City Rail Link built, they say.
Scrap the Kapiti Expressway plan and build more public transport, they say.
Scrap the Puhoi-Wellsford highway, they say, and build more public transport.
Scrap Transmission Gully, they say, and build more public transport.

Their mantra, a never-ending refrain, is more rail, fewer roads—and if in doubt, get motorists to pay more.

“Rail, rail, rail, rail, rail.”

You’d think by their constant worship at the altar of rail that the environmental case for public transport was overwhelming! 

That city’s could develop no other way.

That rail really is the “highly energy-efficient means of commuter transport” the Greens website says it is.

But it’s not.   Rail is far from the most efficient means of commuter transport, as figures from the U.S. government bureau of transportation statistics figures and the U.S.Dept. of Energy Transportation Energy Data Book demonstrate.  Brad Templeton looked at the figures from these sources and produced this handy graph, below, which shows that the average passenger uses less energy to travel a mile in the average car (with an average load of 1.57 passengers) than if he travelled in a diesel bus, a trolley bus, a heavy rail train, or a light rail train—and only marginally more energy than if he travelled by jet plane.

So if the Greens’ real goal were saving energy then instead of reciting the rail mantra at every opportunity, why don’t they simply encourage more car pooling?  After all, technology makes that easier and easier with every app.

But they don’t.  Because that’s not the Greens’ real goal, is it.

Hat tip David Willmott, who says the case for roads is still sound.

New green technologies …

This is the first and probably only time I’ll be posting a ‘Dilbert’ cartoon here. But this is unusually good:

And unusually topical, given the leaking of the Government’s Energy Strategy, the first three of twelve “areas of focus” of which are these:

Just for the record, the working definition of Renewable Energy is “unreliable energy produced by means that would be uneconomic without tax breaks and subsidies.”

Discuss, with reference to this Government’s (leaked) Energy Strategy.

Ding dong, the witch is gone [update 3]

Which old witch? The Fitzsimons witch of course. 

The former Green co-person leader thingy steps down from parliament, effective immediately, having handed the party over to a new generation of communists young leaders who show all the signs of running the Fitzsimplesimons/Donald party vehicle into the ground.

We can but hope.

It’s certainly true that with the departure of Jeanette, the Greenwash is gone for good: the last real environmentalist is gone, and the Greens are down to their communist rump.

Now you’re probably wondering why I’d be calling her a witch when she’s everyone’s favourite Mrs Nice.  Fair question.  The problem is that while she cooks a mean lentil bake, and can even be great fun when she isn’t also being Mrs Worthy, the anti-industrial policies she and her party espouse will send us straight to hell. 

You wouldn’t buy an insurance policy from someone just because they smiled nicely.  You’d ask to look at their policies. So it is, or was, with Jeanette. While she smiled nicely, the policies she was pushing were always pure poison.*

It’s so much easier with the youngster replacing her in Parliament, one Gareth Hughes. It’s so much easier to ‘see the joins.’ Jeanette at least had a brain. Gareth has . . . well, see for yourself.  His CV “boasts” such accomplishments as “being arrested dressed as Ronald McDonald,” climbing buildings and “unfurling a protest banner in Tiananmen Square.” Well, one out of three ain’t bad. He has a blog.  Sort of. And he employs “Climate Campaign Interns” for Greenpeace.

Promoting himself before the last election the baby-faced Gareth Hughes told his adoring audience his “motivation for standing [for the Greens] is my new baby son.”

     "He deserves, when he is older, not to have to ask for the right to bring a child into this world."

Whatever the hell that means. Perhaps he still thought he was back in Tiananmen Square. Passing over that inanity he concludes, to canned applause,

    "In 2008, we're going to show that future generations are bigger than politics..."

And obviously bigger, too, than things like basic logic.

Oh, and just to show that Gareth’s house has the full set, you might like to know that Gareth’s wife Meghan released her own informal law and order policy at the Green Party blog before the last election, announcing that for any "proud activist ... within reasonable limits a bit of trespass, a bit of property damage, a bit of general disruption is fine. Quite fun, too."

Since one searches in vain for a law and order policy at the Greens' site, one can only assume that this is at least this is indicative of the Greens' general attitude to people and their property, if not their general approach to law and order.

It almost makes Hone Harawira look sane.

* * * *

* The oddity here is that despite their obvious lunacy, Green Party policies are now “mainstream” with every other parliamentary party.  Which just shows you how, if you run on ideas (even bad ones), you can’t but help to have a victory.

UPDATE 1: Whale Oil puts it bluntly:

    “The last real envi­ron­men­tal­ist has resigned from the Greens leav­ing the Com­mu­nist takeover of the Green part complete.”

UPDATE 2: Blunt offers a ‘tribute’ to the New Greens.

UPDATE 3: ‘Headline of the Day’ award goes to Keeping Stock for their welcome to young Gareth:

Send in the Clown

Brilliant.

Friday avo ramble, 30 October

Here’s your Friday links. Print ‘em now to read ‘em over the weekend.  :-)

• New Zealanders say "Green" is a "damaged brand"- and media saturation has led to "green fatigue." "I'd like not be made to feel guilty for making my life easier," says one.
   Kiwis suffering 'green fatigue' [hat tip Motella]
• Check out these ten unusual playgrounds from around the world. The Takino Hillside Park in Hokkaido would be my fave.
• Schwarzenegger gets cryptic.  You’d think when then California is bankrupt, it might be time for its governor to be more plain-speaking?
  Gov. Schwarzenegger's Obscene Message
• Will nannying never cease? In the Western Bay of Plenty you can now no longer legally smoke outdoors.
  Outdoor smoking ban stupid
• So will Auckland’s councils’ assets be privatised? Sadly not.
  Lies on Auckland
• Auckland’s going to be privatised?
  If only Phil Twyford were right 
• With high unemployment, especially among youth, Unite Union wants to make it worse: March for a $15 / hour minimum wage they say?  Might as well march for higher youth unemployment – since that’s what they’ll be doing.
  March for a $15 / hour minimum wage in Auckland tomorrow night and Generation Sloth.
• There’s still Maximum Confusion over Minimum Wages.  Here’s your corrective:
  Maximum Confusion over Minimum Wages
• Time to rethink superannuation, says Treasury? What about that much bigger drain on taxpayers, says Lindsay Mitchell, the ever-growing DPB?
  Treasury: DPB growth about "Young women having children"
• Here’s the information you need for the weekend:
  An Analysis of Preschool "Poo" Humor [hat tip Rational Jenn]
• A short primer for people who still don’t understand how the choices of free people achieve a spontaneous order.
  How the Free Market Works
• You’re still hearing from alleged economists that a worldwide fall in credit will lead to worldwide deflation.  Frank Shostak averts your fears
  Does a Fall in Credit Lead to Deflation?
• Gallup has done a survey in the US that should scare the ObamaMessiah followers and the GOP-mongers both.
  Libertarians at an all time high and I don't mean drugs.
• It's “High Noon” for America’s First Amendment, and the ObaMessiah means business.
  “High Noon” for the First Amendment
• Mainstream intellectuals and the mainstream media never miss a chance to smear Ayn Rand, and with two new biographies they’ve never had more opportunity.
  The Mainstream Smearing of Ayn Rand
• What more proof do you need?
   Qaddafi Endorses Obama - Surely, Proof Enough?
• What are the principles of a free society? Learn about them and declare your support!
  Principles of a Free Society
• Thomas Sowell issues a stern warning: Look at Obama's Federal Government Circus that’s about to come down your pike.
  The Federal Government Circus coming to your town soon
• Here’s the lates candidate for this year’s Darwin Awards: 
    Man dies stealing "electrical wiring from a high voltage electrical box
• Nick Smith is a pile of shit. No, look, that's precisely true. :-)
  A manure sculpture of Nick Smith
• Is the obsession with climate change turning out to be the most costly scientific delusion in history?  For just six hours UK MPs debated shutting down around 80% of the UK's industrialised economy, then they all queued up to vote for it.
  The real climate change catastrophe
• Two Rand biographies . . . & the smear jobs continue. http://www.nytimes.com/2009... (I have to ask, f they had real criticisms then why would they have to make so much stuff up?)
• From the Counter-Productive-Advertising files: So if supermodels take off their clothes when the temperature rises, shouldn’t we hope for more global warming.  Threatening us with a future of supermodels getting naked is hardly going to scare anyone into buying a Prius.
  
  

 

Thought for the day, from the Vodka Pundit:
“Too late for coffee. Too early for a cocktail. There is nothing worse than exactly 3:43PM.”

• Crikey, sane economics on Chris Laidlaw's RadioNZ show! Listen to Anton Fekete talking to Chris about gold & fiat money.
  http://bit.ly/3MctjD
• Diana Hsieh on Rationally Selfish Radio continues exploring Atlas Shrugged.  She’s now up to
    Episode #19: Explore Atlas Shrugged, Session 4
• From its inception, NZ's ACC projects was nothing but a flawed pyramid scheme. Why be surprised now?
  Roger Douglas damns Nats on ACC
• Why Objectivism is fundamentally incompatible with belief in the supernatural. Watch on ARC-TV:
  Objectivism and the Supernatural
• They made the same mistakes in the First Great Depression, you know.
  Tom Woods: How Former Presidents Revived The Economy.  Or not.
• While everyone bashes Brian, there’s a worldwide Big-Church Merger going on. Woman-fearing, gay-hating old Anglicans have been told they have a natural home in the bosom of the Catholic Church. The tea-drinking arm of the Anglican church professes to be unworried.
   A merger in the offing for Big Church?
• Milton Friedman explains why drug use should be legalised -- and why prohibition doesn't and can't work.
  
  
• Uniike most other countries, Holland is closing jails instead of opening them. How? Simple They've ended the War on Drugs. Someone tell the Treasury:
   Netherlands to Close Prisons: Not Enough Criminals 
• Tales from Money & Banking History: 5 yrs from paper money to hyperinflation to guillotining businessmen. Sobering stuff.
  Tales from the History of Money and Banking, Part II
• The “new RMA” is now online. Go and have a look at just how little has actually changed. Part II still takes away your property rights (as I’ve explained on page four of this handout), the rest of the RMA just explains how they’re taken away.
  Resource Management Act 1991 - Reprint as at 1 October 2009
  

That’s all your links for today. But don’t forget tomorrow's beer-tasting at The Castle & Galbraith's, starting at The Castle around 2:30. ?  For details, and to find out what to bring, email organon AT ihug.co.nz with LIGHT BEER or DARK BEER in title for details.

And finally, since I’ve been enjoying my old Phil Manzanera albums again (Galt, he’s good) here’s Phil playing ‘Leyenda’ while women dance the Paso Doble around him. Lucky man:

Why is this woman so happy? [updated]

She is the face of MMP, and now she's gone.

She said she would save New Zealand's children from their parents and guardians, yet still the murders continue at the rate of ten a year.  And now she has left the building.

She demonised those opposed to her as beaters, as bashers, as hitters of children – smearing good parents while doing nothing at all to protect children from bad ones. And now she’s out of there.

She all but nationalised your children, and having done all she can do there she’s now delivered her last speech in NZ's parliament.

She joined the party that carried an environmental banner – observing it was “ripe for takeover” – never once even giving lip service to the party’s raison d'être.  She used it instead to advance her own back-door agendas, and now she’s off.

“Years spent ‘proletarianising’ herself in the Progressive Youth Movement, the Workers Communist League and the Unemployed Workers Movement” (as Chris Trotter describes) were put to good use infiltrating the mung-bean eaters and effecting the reverse take-over of the Greens by the Alliance.  (More links on some of that here.) And now she’s on to other means by which to advance that same agenda – and that dear reader, is why she’s smiling.

Retired from Parliament because she says the Greens are not red enough for her. That’s enough right there to tell you her aims.

She has been unquestionably the most effective Maoist in NZ politics -- from the backbenches of the Green lists, a woman never voted in by an electorate has changed New Zealand family life for the worse. Because it was never just about smacking, you know.

She has retired from NZ central government politics, but her lust to change others’ lives, with or without their consent, is still undiminished. And I’m sorry to spoil your celebrations, but do you know what and where she has her gimlet eye set on now?

I'll give you a clue: You know the bloated bureaucracy that Rodney Hide is building up in Auckland; the "super-council" that will dominate Auckland; the megalith of power that with his recent U-turn will not be restrained to its core business but instead can range far and wide across whatever landscape it chooses, including yours? That can pick whatever pockets it wants, including yours? Yes, that council.

And guess what? Bradford's got her eye on a job as Auckland Super-City councillor, and the job deputy mayor is being discussed – playing Iago to Len Brown's Othello. 

She’s moving her boxes out of  one power-base, and wants to move them straight into another.

She’s left the front door of politics, and Rodney Hide is delivering her the vehicle to drive straight in again through the back door. He’s offering up the city on a plate, and Sue’s just the woman to eat it.

How does that work for you? Any ratepayers of Auckland care to comment?  Any supporters of the big bureaucracy like to promote it?  Any supporters of Rodney Hide like to explain themselves?

UPDATE:  Why did Sue want to effect a reverse takeover of the Greens?  Same answer to that as it is to the question, “How do you sell a shit sandwich?'”

[Thanks to ‘Blunt’ for the ‘toon.]

Greenwash.  It’ll sell anything, even the hard left.

Bye-bye Bradford [update 3]

How disappointing it is to hear that Sue Bradford is leaving Parliament in October to go “back to the grassroots,” a decision that all New Zealand families should celebrate.

Disappointing?  Hell no. It’s worth celebrating! With both her and Cindy Kiro gone from power, your children are safer now than they were yesterday – unless of course they end up at her Kotare indoctrination centre, which I imagine is the sort of thing she means by “grass roots.” (Here’s part two of Trevor Loudon’s info on the place.)

So shall we try to say something nice about her now she’s going?

Nah.  Every single thing she’s done has been an attack on your freedom. There’s nothing to respect in that.

She joined the Green Party to further her own Maoist agenda, assisting in the “reverse  take-over” of the Greens by the Alliance party’s fellow travellers – the party was was “ripe for taking over” she said (read Phil U.’s account here at Update 3 of Bradford and Catherine Delahunty, fresh from Matt McCarten’s NLP) -- and New Zealand’s electorate was ripe for the Greenwash she and her comrades were able to peddle after that take over.

Her legacy is not just her anti-smacking attack on New Zealand’s parents, but the hijack of environmentalism by the ‘watermelon’ politicians of that party, and their cementing in of that ruse.

Sadly however, her resignation doesn’t denude the Greens of MPs since there’s another loser like her in the wings, a Mr David Clendon, who’s been feeding from the RMA trough all his career -- with a CV which has him morphing from “Resource Consultant” to lecturer in the RMA, ie., from parasite to brainwasher.

Choice, huh.  “What really motivated me” to stand for the luddites said the really unmotivating Clendon at the Greens conference last year, is "the ability the Greens have, and I think it's unique, to be able to identify complex problems and to see solutions." What’s unique about the Greens, of course, is nothing more than their combination of authoritarianism and  ludditery – with a a caucus composed almost entirely of the intellectual remnants of the Socialist Workers’ Party they’re little more than a bunch of  authoritarians with a marketing wing – a problem that Clendon’s CV would indicate won’t be changing with his induction.

So farewell then, Sue Bradford.  Don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out.

And if you’re concerned that there’s no-one left in Parliament now to really despise, then don’t forget you’ve still got Keith Locke.  And Nick Smith.

UPDATE 1:  Farrar looks at the personal politics:

“It’s basically because she lost the co-leadership election to Metiria Turei. Things are obviously not that happy in the Green camp. More later. “

UPDATE 2: From Home Paddock:

Kathryn Ryan interviewed RadioNZ National’s  chief reporter Jane Patterson who said the decision was prompted by Bradford’s loss of the contest for co-leadership to Metiria Turei. The interview will be online here soon  is now online here.

UPDATE 3: “Now is the chance to get out the Green broom and sweep the Red dust out of the party,” says a Greens supporter over at the Frog Blog resignation thread.  He’s right, you know.

Quote of the day: Robert Murphy on climate change

"In the climate change debate, people often forget that under all but the most catastrophic scenarios, the future generations who will benefit from our current mitigation efforts will be much richer than we are."
                                                - Robert Murphy

As I paste that above quote into my blog writer, I have beside me a post from the Green Party’s Frog  Blog called ‘Calling names isn’t nice, especially when you’re wrong.’  It’s a doozy.  Its connection with Murphy’s point above will quickly become clear.  It begins thus:

I previously blogged about last night’s climate change target meeting in Wellington, where amongst other failings, Nick Smith accused the Green Party of only caring about the environment and having no regard for the impact on the economy.

Of  course Smith is dead wrong on this, just as he is on everything – including his decision to keep breathing. The Green Party don’t care about the natural environment.  Not in any genuine sense, they don’t. With their proven penchant for bans and big government, and a caucus composed almost entirely of the intellectual remnants of the Socialist Workers’ Party, they’re just a bunch of  authoritarians with a marketing wing – and with Jeanette Fitzsimon’s departure even their figleaf of genuine environmentalism is about to disappear with her. 

If you really want to see Greenwash in action, then the Green Party is the single most prominent contemporary example.

And it’s not true either to say that they’re unconcerned about the destructive economic impact of their regulation fetish.  They and their luminaries are only too happy to have our economic lifeblood destroyed.

Anyway, their mention of Nick Smith is distracting me from from the main point of their post, and of this one.  The post at Frog Blog continues on to its main point, saying (apparently completely without irony):

    In the spirit of economic literacy, I wanted to remind our readers of these words from a recent Australian Treasury report into the economics of climate change: “The Treasury’s modelling demonstrates that early global action is less expensive than later action.”

I say “completely without irony” because if there is any group of people for whom economic illiteracy is a watchword it is the Green Party. There is surely no higher density of economic illiterates than in the un-perfumed climes of the Green Party’s electorate offices – except perhaps in the offices of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke.

And as regards the “Treasury’s modelling,” it has about as much credence as BERL’s now thoroughly discredited report on the social costs of alcohol. Based as it is on the flawed “model” produced by Nicholas Stern at the behest of the British Treasury to justify onerous carbon taxes now to help the British Treasury later, the Australian Treasury’s modelling shares all the errors of Stern’s flawed report, including it’s utterly discreditable use of a carefully selected discount rate – a discount rate selected (like BERL’s careful rejection of the “benefits” side of their cost-benefit study) so as to give him the results his client had paid for.

As William Nordhaus (no friend of free markets) explains the resultant absurdity:

    Suppose that scientists discover a wrinkle in the climate system that will cause damages equal to 0.1 percent of net consumption starting in 2200 and continuing at that rate forever after. How large a one-time investment would be justified today to remove the wrinkle that starts only after two centuries? Using the methodology of the [Stern] Review, the answer is that we should pay up to 56 percent of one year's world consumption today to remove the wrinkle. In other words, it is worth a one-time consumption hit of approximately $30,000 billion today to fix a tiny problem that begins in 2200. [Italics in original]11

The intent of all the “modelling” carried out by the World’s Treasuries is nothing less than to justify strangling industry now (fifty percent by 2050 says our own John Key) for some unknown and unproven benefit in the future for your grandchildren – who, if we can predict anything with confidence, will probably want to know why your stupidity now has left them so poor.

Economist Robert Murphy (whose writings the Greens would do well to read if they do seriously wish to improve their economic literacy), points out in ‘The Economics of Climate Change’ that even the idea of modelling economies one-hundred years ahead is fatally flawed.

    Fans of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek—who warned against the "pretense of knowledge"—should be even more concerned about the sheer audacity of the field of climate economics. After all, it is rather absurd to argue about the impacts of present tax policies on global temperatures in the year 2150. Yet, it is precisely these projections that provide the foundation for policy recommendations.
   Many critics have raised this objection before, but it bears repeating: We have no idea what the world economy will be like in the 22nd century. Had people in 1909 adopted analogous policies to "help" us, they might have imposed a tax on buggies or a cap on manure, needlessly raising the costs of transportation while the U.S. economy switched to motor vehicles. This is not a mere joke; "serious" people were worried about population growth, and the ability of large cities to support the growing traffic from horses. Had someone told them not to worry, because Henry Ford's new Model T would soon transform personal locomotion without any central direction from D.C., these ideas would probably have been dismissed as wishful thinking. As famed physicist Freeman Dyson has mused, future generations will likely have far cheaper means of reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, if the more alarming scenarios play out.18
    In the climate change debate, people often forget that under all but the most catastrophic scenarios, the future generations who will benefit from our current mitigation efforts will be much richer than we are. For example, Nigel Lawson points out that even under one of the worst case scenarios studied by the IPCC, failure to act would simply mean that people in the developing world would be "only" 8.5 times as wealthy a century from now, compared to 9.5 times as wealthy if there were no climate change.19

To translate, this means that even if the scare-mongers were correct, they intend to strangle prosperity now – in the midst of the deepest depression in seventy years – simply so that your future generations one-hundred years from now might be able to afford an extra Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster while they orbit the planets.

May I suggest that instead of bleating about name-calling, the authors of Frog Blog instead acquaint themselves with some real economics.  And read and digest the arguments in Murphy’s ‘The Economics of Climate Change.’ It would leave them looking less embarrassed when they talk so smugly about the economic illiteracy of others.

NOT PJ: A New Species of Nonsense

This week Bernard Darnton shows you how to stay healthy and save the planet by sitting on your arse and eating ice cream.

A new species of TV has been born. This is good because I was sick of all my TVs interbreeding and leaving their bizarre mongrel offspring all over the place. Speciation will at least keep the living room a bit tidier.

This puffery is promoting the new LED televisions from Samsung, which are apparently vastly better than LCD televisions by virtue of, umm, having an E instead of a C. There may be more to it than that but it’s probably enough to get you a job on the shop floor at the sort of place that allegedly specialises in these things.

Digging deeper, the number one selling point of these new wonder-televisions is that they use less power than their now-commonplace LCD cousins. (Cousins of a different species that is. Best not to ask grandma about that one.)

So how much money are you going to save on your power bill? The LCD TV uses about 180 watts of power; the new shiny one uses 107. Even at the scandalous rates I get charged that’s a saving of one-and-three-quarter cents an hour.

But it’s not about the money; it’s about the planet isn’t it? You’re still not saving much. Even with economies of scale and using third-world slave labour you can kill bugger all polar bears for one-and-three-quarter cents.

The kicker is that, at $6499, the new 46-inch TV costs $2800 more than its technologically ever-so-slightly-challenged sibling. (Sibling of a different species of course but don’t you dare talk about its mother like that.)

So, averaging four hours of television per day – I can’t imagine why you’d watch four hours of television per day but apparently that’s the average and, hey, whatever lights your candle – watching four hours of television per day your new TV will pay for itself in power savings in 109 years. I believe the technical term for this kind of advertising is “greenwash.”

While you’re watching your new bloody great big shiny planet-saving TV you should tuck into some nice healthy ice cream and lollies. Marshmallows and those jelly snake things are 99% fat free, sugar not being fat, you see. Ice cream is calcium made fun – health food in fact.

Advertisements for chocolate biscuits now give some unlikely-sounding explanation of how chocolate contains iron and that iron is essential for children’s brain growth. And if you think that’s a good reason to eat chocolate biscuits you could probably use some brain growth.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to nag you about your food. I’m certainly not going to deny myself. When some smug little tosser in a coffee shop says that all their coffees are made with trim milk unless otherwise requested, I yell back, “Milk is just fat dissolved in water you arrogant, malnourished twat. If you take out the fat it’s just bloody water isn’t it, so what’s the point?”

Manufacturers of products that bring pleasure to people should be proud of that fact. Don’t tell us to buy chocolate because it contains however many milligrams of manganese. Tell us that it tastes good, that it feels good when it melts in your mouth, that it’s a little foil-covered nugget of joy.

Likewise, a sharper, blacker, slimmer television is a celebration of technology, a portal into humanity’s finest artistic, sporting, and scientific endeavours (and Shortland Street, but there’s no accounting for taste).

The people who make these things should be proud of their ability to improve our lives. You shouldn’t have to hide that.

* * Read Bernard Darnton’s column every Thursday here at NOT PC * *

Beer O'Clock: Beer Bits

Here's a few beer stories from around the traps.

• Convenience stores and supermarkets in the land of the free won't be allowed to sell full-strength beer.  Story here.
• A man in Florida killed his girlfriend in an argument about beer.  At least it was about something important.
• Russia's second largest brewery opens a new plant in Siberia.  Gives new meaning to the phrase "crack open a cold one."
• A visitor to London writes about "my teetotal hell in a city that likes to drink."  Fortunately, he saw the light.
• Here's the latest in nanny's politically correct edu-indoctrination:  young eskimo children learning how to use condoms with beer googles on.  True story.  Can't wait for the programme to start here.
• Just in time for Paddy's Day, here's everything you need to know to make Green Beer -- though why you'd want to do that to a glass of liquid gold, St Gob only knows.
• And finally, Dianne Bardsley from the New Zealand Dictionary Centre (yes Victoria, there really is such a place) knows all about the local language of alcohol, as she demonstrates in Pig's Eear at Beer O'Clock Anyone?:

    At the Dictionary Centre we are interested in the historical aspect of New Zealand words and usages in every domain, and alcohol is no exception . . .
    Shepherds, station hands and shearers would rush to town to "lamb down" their pay cheques, ie spend them at the nearest public house. As prohibition took hold, a unique use of the term "dry area" developed in New Zealand English. Soon words were generated for the products of illicit stilling and brewing, ranging from "bush beer", "bush whisky", "cabbage tree rum", "chain lightning", "colonial brew", "hokonui", "matai beer", "paikaka" ("it had a kick like a mule") and "tutu beer", to "sheep wash" and "Waitohi dew". Sly groggers were known in New Zealand by a variety of names, including "dropper" and "blind tiger."    Waipiro (rotten water) was an early name borrowed from te reo as a general term for alcohol, while titoki was a common borrowing for beer or shandy. Even dogs contributed to the lexis of alcohol. A "dog collar" is froth on beer, while to have "a dog tied up" was to owe money for drink. The word fence was compounded with others when alcohol was mixed with ginger beer, hence rum fence, sherry fence and "stone fence" (brandy and ginger beer).

    Beer brewing and drinking has its own vocabulary. To "chew hops" was to drink beer, or in other words, to have a "brown bomber." Too much of a good thing could produce a "beer goitre" or pot belly. Among the shearing fraternity and sorority, "beer o'clock" was the time to "knock off" work for the day. In fact, beer was often known as "shearers' joy" or "Tommy Dodd."
    Cockney rhyming slang was adopted to codify beer as "pig's ear", while too much gave one the "Joe Blakes" (the shakes). One then recovered with a "nurse" (an alcoholic pick-up drink) and the empties, or "dead marines", were collected in "bottle drives."
    Alcohol produced by amateurs usually resulted in unpalatable or potent drinks known as "green liquor", "purple death" (cheap red wine), "purge" or "panther purge." No doubt even more unpalatable was methylated spirits, known as "steam" by those in the know. Steam drinkers were likely to be "Jimmy Woodsers", to drink Jimmy Woodsers, or to "drink with the flies", all the equivalent of drinking alone.  
    An "Anzac Day dinner" was the term for a liquid lunch, perhaps with "Anzac shandy", a beer and champagne mix.
    The more New Zealanders drank, the more "mullocked", "munted", "shickered", "wasted" or "steamed" they would become.
    We left the "six o'clock swill" in the 1960s, in the attempt to make our drinking culture more "civilised". Perhaps you can sense the "Tui moments", hear the apposite response, and visualise the headshakes.|    Nevertheless, we cannot claim that alcohol has been a dry area in terms of word generation in New Zealand English.

Delightfully described, Ms Bardsley.  And now I'm off to chew some hops myself -- and in honour of Neil Miller's  Porter Story at his other blog, I'll do it with a Grafton Porter from Galbraith's, as I have so often before.

Cheers,

PC

The greenwash is wearing off

With the Greens still contemplating the female replacement for Jeannette Fitzsimplesimons, two news items this morning delivered a taste of what the future might hold for them under the new co-leadership.

We heard Comrade Bradford bleating about corporal punishment in independent schools.  She complained about the independence of independent schools (just imagine);  she demonstrated she’s still completely unable to discriminate between smacking and beating; she whinged about the inability of the Ministry to bully independent schools to do what she wants them to.

And in the wake of the superb ASEAN free trade deal –- which NBR points out “pulls back the curtain on a market of 575 million people” -- we heard Comrade Russel Norman complaining about free trade deals.  He whinged that their effect is to tie government hands; he complained that it made governments completely unable to slap on protectionist regulations; he appeared completely unaware that that is precisely the point of free trade deals.

What we heard from both was bleating for bigger government.  What we heard from both was a lust for the big stick. What we didn’t hear from either was any genuine interest in the environment – which is what the Greens are nominally about.

Oh, and what about the other candidate for the co-leadership, Metiria Turei?  From Metiria Turei we heard nothing, nothing at all – which pretty much symbolises her do-nothing parliamentary career to date, and her future profile if she does score the top job .  She’s not the most dynamic of politicians, Ms Turei -- and Lord bless her for that – and Green supporters are already well aware of that. (And for that reason and that reason alone, I reckon that’s why Green supporters are going to vote Bradford and not Turei when it comes to marking their ballot in June.)

So like I said, this morning’s news was a taster of things Green to come.  If they go for Turei, then the co-leadership will consist of an authoritarian Aussie ginga and a woman on track to be the next Judith Tizard. If they go the way I think they will in their voting, however, then we’ll get two authoritarians with nary a figleaf of interest in the environment –- two cheerleaders for big government without even the veneer of greenwash that Jeanette’s presence gave to them in the past.

In other words, we’ll see the Greens as they really are: the new Socialist Workers party.

How d’ya feel about that, Comrade?

National environmental nonsense

A POPULAR PIECE OF schoolboy doggerel when I was a youngster went as follows: "If you notice this notice, you will notice there is no notice to notice."

That was pretty much everyone's reaction when Trevor Mallard revealed National's Environment Policy had turned up on his cafe table between the baked beans and the toast last week, and then again when the Policy itself was confirmed over the weekend by National's senior liability, Nick Smith.

Fact is, there's pretty much nothing noticeable to notice. The environmental ‘vision’ outlined within is nothing of the sort. It essentially amounts to the same old state interference via continued disrespect, if not complete ignorance, of private property rights -- in other words, the same old "me too" environmentalism Smith has been peddling now for a decade-and-a-half.

• Neither abolition nor change nor even mention of National's Resource Management Act.
• No commitment to reinstating the protection of New Zealanders' property rights that the Resource Management expunged.
• No recognition that it is property rights and common law that provide the most secure environmental protection possible, and did so for most of seven-hundred years.
• A new Environmental Protection Agency to continue the job of doing over New Zealanders' property rights that the Resource Management began.
• The already announced promise to strangle the economy by 50% to half-meet the Kyoto Protocol targets National signed up to on Smith's previous watch.
• National's own Emissions Tax Scam.

Nothing new at all then, just the same authoritarian approach to "the environment" from the dripping wet Nick Smith now as he exhibited when he was a minister administering the Resource Management Act back in the nineties -- the same wet green wet dream as every other politician -- unless of course you count yet another bureaucracy that National would like to join the horde huddled around Wellington's downtown in search of ever more expensive office space: an "Environmental Protection Agency" that will no doubt emulate the expensive disaster that its American progenitor is widely recognised as being, while hoovering up over-earnest young graduates from the inexorably increasing number of environmental psuedo-science courses that are slowly taking over the educational sector, for an agency that will be inexorably doing the same to the economy.

Quite how another bureaucracy to add to Wellington's already replete list is going to lead to fewer bureaucrats rather than more (and a note to National's billboard incompetents: if you're going to lie for your living, then at least try to be grammatically correct), only either a politician or a liar would know. But I fear, dear reader, you've already spotted the repetition there. And quite how another agency with all-encompassing powers second-guessing every single productive person in the country is going to help either prosperity or freedom, only a politician would try to explain.

And they do try. Prosperity? Growth? "Environmentalism and a commitment to economic growth must go hand in hand," said Key's speech writers. "We should be wary of anyone who claims that one can or should come without the other," he read. "Let me be clear that I don't think environmental and economic objectives need always be traded off one against the other," he clarified. "Increasingly, New Zealand's environmental credentials will underpin our prosperity," he insisted. One wonders who he was trying to convince since, as this blog has made a fetish of arguing since its birth, when environmentalism by diktat is the chosen route, freedom and prosperity are the first things to disappear.

Freedom? Prosperity? Environmental values? If those three together are to mean anything, then firm clear property rights under a regime of common law were and are and always have been the only possible way to harmonise the three, and in face the only way they ever have been. Private property rights in a common law system provide the strongest possible protection for the environment and for property owners -- clear property reflect back to owners the consequences of their own actions; common law gives standing to those whose ownership rights are violated by environmental degradation.

If you really wish to improve the environment, with the additional bonus of achieving massive economic growth within a relatively short space of time, just have the guts to abolish the Resource Management Act outright. Don’t tinker; just trash it. That appalling piece of fascism allows others to control the use of one’s property. Further, it is the single biggest impediment to progress within New Zealand. When somebody owns something, they look after it to maintain its value. When the law upholds them in that protection, we all get to kick an environmental goal. In other words, if you wish to maintain the quality of the environment while giving wings to prosperity, which surely even Nick Smith must agree is urgently necessary, you can start by implementing full private property rights -- instead of promising to do them over further.

DESPITE KEY"S LIMP ATTEMPTS to link environment and economics simply by raw insistence, the link between the two fields is clear enough.

After all, economics has been defined as the science that studies infinite wants in a world of scarce resources. That must surely have something to say about things? And effective property rights under a system of common law is demonstrably the most effective method yet devised of 'internalising externalities' -- of reflecting back to owners the real environmental consequences of their activities. (See for example: "The Invisible Hand of the Market Doesn't Deliver a Sustainable Nation": True or False?)

Between them, strong property rights and real price signals are far more efficient at telling us all the real consequences of our own activities and of our own choices-- and they offer the added benefit that they're not just real rather than made-up; they're not just efficient; they're not just moral, but they're good for freedom as well.

That's not something one can say for any the silly statist schemes Smith takes to be 'green.' The biggest long-term cost of all of them is not just for the environment, it's in their cost to the human environment -- the cost to us all of shackling industry and productivity; of the time wasted in fruitless feel-good stupidity; of the larger state needed to administer all these programmes (with the various threats that implies) and in the loss of freedom to live our own lives in our own way.

As Fred L. Smith says, "The threat posed by humans to the natural environment is nothing compared to the threat to humans posed by global environmental policy."

As I've said before, when they come for you they'll be carrying a clipboard, not a gun -- and the person carrying it will probably be called Jeremy.

FURTHER READING:
If you've got this far, you probably want to know more. Since The Free Radical devoted part of an issue to Nick Smith's authoritarian greenwash two years ago, readers may download a PDF copy of that issue here, or by clicking on the cover above. And for more on the inimitable connection between environmental values and property rights, feel free to investigate some of NOT PC's writing on the subject:

• Cue Card Libertarianism: Environmentalism
• Cue Card Libertarianism: Common Law
• Cue Card Libertarianism: Property
• Cue Card Libertarianism: Rights
• Cue Card Libertarianism: Pollution
• Dirty Dairying
• "The invisible hand of the market doesn't deliver a sustainable nation." True or false?
• Market forces in the Amazon?
• There's lots to celebrate on World 'Environment' Day

And here's a more sane, sober and serious set of environmental policies that could be adopted by any party committed to rolling back statism, instead of advancing it:

• ENVIRONMENTAL JUDO: Seven Steps to Beat Back the Socialist Wildlife
  [26-page PDF]

Do NOT watch this!

Please, I beg you, do not watch this video linked to below. Please do not click the link, and do not whatever you do head to LIBZ TV to watch it -- and even if you did head there and play the YOU TUBE video, then definitely do not open it full screen to make sure you can read all of the subtitles.

In fact, if you're an MP or member of the Green Party, then I implore you to ban it -- just like you try to ban everything that brings joy or walks tall in favour of everything that slithers.

"Ban." It's your favourite word, you know. Over recent years you've wanted to ban (and in many cases have succeeded in having banned) grape imports, alcohol ads, political speech for one year in three, ferrets, TV ads for kids, ads on TVNZ, growth hormones, native wood chip exports, native logging, pig swill, xenotransplantion trials, smacking, GE, field trials for GE, chemical trespass, property rights from the Bill of Rights, quick-fire logging, logging, fishing for toothfish, commercial fishing over much of New Zealand, whaling, 'toxic timber,' set-netting, bottom trawling, feeding animal remains to farm animals, battery cages, CCA-treated timber in playgrounds, direct-to-consumer advertising of drugs, crisps and meat pies from tuck shops, "the screening of programmes which sensationalise violence or use violence," "the routine feeding of antibiotics to healthy animals," GE maize, commercial releases of genetically engineered crops, "nuclear shipments from New Zealand's exclusive economic zone," sow crates, the dry sow stall, "weapons of mass destruction," the tooth fairy, nuclear powered vessels in our waters, beef imports from Britain to other European countries, "Japanese fishing boats from New Zealand waters," "the importation of all timber and timber products not certified as sustainable," "unsustainable" biofuels, open-cast mining, driven-shaft, gold mining, coal mining, mining, human cloning, sheep cloning, food irradiation, spray drift, all ships carrying nuclear weapons, wastes and fuel from the European Economic Zone, "backyard burning of rubbish such as plastics and treated timber," fireworks, "smoking in all workplaces including bars, restaurants and offices," "new uses of coal for energy," existing uses of coal of energy, new thermal power stations, "factory farming," dairy farming around Lake Taupo, dairy farming around Rotorua lakes, dairy farming in the Waikato river basin, "project-based approvals for the development of GE organisms," "all further building of prisons," free trade with China, junk food advertising to children, "the sale and long-term lease of New Zealand property to foreign investors," "the sale of toy tobacco products to under 18s," GM wheat, "environmentally destructive fishing methods," "uranium shipments," "the use of the antibiotic avoparcin in animal feed," "imports of cars older than 7 years," amalgam use in dentistry, the incineration of unsorted waste, unsorted waste, waste, "risky anti-depressants," "import of tissue for sheep cloning," 'trade in hazardous wastes," "'super baby' selection," plastic shopping bags, shopping bags, shopping, live sheep exports, and dihydrogen monoxide.

I'm sure you'll agree that it's a fair old list. If compiling it takes some effort, and I can assure you it did, then you might expect us to understand just how much single-minded dedication it must take to promote all that prohibition.

For all that you folks from the Green Party accuse every Tom, Dick & Harry of 'Greenwash' -- that is, "advertising, PR or spin that presents a government, company or its products as more environmentally friendly than is true" -- it's clearly you yourselves, every Russel, Sue and Keith of you, who are most guilty of Greenwash.

You see, as the leading interests of all your leading political candidates clearly indicate, you're barely environmentalists at all. You're not the light, fluffy green that your candle-worshipping and Morris dancing would indicate, you're the very deepest red, and you have been ever since you quietly and slowly took over from the hippies and stoners and reinserted the mantras of Mao and Trotsky into activists' heads.

So please, don't watch the video. Just ban it.

UPDATE 1: "Does this mean the Greens should review their policy of improving our environment by implementing a totalitarian dictatorship?" asks Psycho Milt at No Minister. "No worries there," he says, "since they don't have one."

Meanwhile, as if to prove Milt wrong, a desperate Greens leader Russel 'rustle' Norman trying to keep his his party's head above the five percent line is trying to calve off some floating NZ First voters with the unveiling of his party's latest ban: a ban on foreigners from buying property. Callum McPetrie tells you all you need to know about that.