Against Bruno Walther (March 2011 Edition)

Names are important - they allow us to identify and differentiate subject and aspect. Well.. it turns out "Pommie" was right: the eco-fascist has indeed written a letter against me, and the Taipei Times have published it.

"What is wrong with these arguments is that they are based not on what kind of world we want to live in..."

What is wrong with Walther's arguments, is his presumptuous arrogation of other people's lives and decisions to his own moral dictate under that royal "we". Look: my life and the lives of other people are not your fucking property Walther - how dare you presume otherwise.

His faults do not end there though... observe his spluttering attempts at unqualified defence of the anti-nuclear environmentalists from criticism:

"Are we morally justified in creating dangerous global warming and acidic oceans, leading to collapsed ecosystems?"

... and ...

"Do we really want to burden the coming generations with thousands of tonnes of the most toxic and dangerous waste for hundreds of thousands of years?"

There is no sense of measure to such hyperfault verbal terrorism at all. If there is something to the AGW hypothesis (and I'm far from certain that there is) then it would be more accurate to say that global warming is catalysed by human activity, not "created". As for acidic oceans and collapsed ecosystems - I'll take, for the moment, the line that any claim asserted without argument may be dismissed without argument. On radioactive waste: the radioactivity of nuclear waste decays significantly over that time scale and in the case of deep storage of such waste it is in any case heavily shielded and removed as far as possible from human habitation with the utmost precaution. Whilst it is not risk-free, the people working in the nuclear industry take pains to ensure those risks are scrutinized, rationally understood and minimized as far as possible.

Nonetheless, there is a part of Walther's spluttering, semi-literate rant that does need to be taken seriously - which is his raising of the problem of externalities:

"Energy production via fossil fuels and nuclear fission produces lots of external effects, such as air pollution, global warming or cancer, some of which can be economically calculated, but some of which cannot (how do you value a lost human life?)."

On his outrageous* question of how to weigh the value of a lost human life into economic calculation, the simple answer is you don't. What must be "weighed" or considered carefully are the risks to human lives.

On the more general problem, it is true that many externalities can be somewhat captured by economic calculation, but what is prerequisite to that, and which Walther fails to mention, is a legal system(s) which recognizes private property rights. Only under a system of private property rights is there any possibility of identifying polluters and of holding them responsible for the pollution they may cause. Further, whether this can be effectively done essentially depends on the structure of behavioural incentives for all concerned parties. For instance, it may often be attractive to the politicial or civil leadership of a State regulatory agency to accept kickbacks from polluters in return for failing to enforce rules; or even worse, an agency might intentionally set out extremely strict rules and harsh enforcement policies for no other reason than to coerce bribe money out of a given industry. Moreover, there are also many cases where the State itself, via its monopoly control of certain things creates enormous externalities that are almost never challenged: the year-on-year corrosive effect of inflationary monetary policy on price-formation and savings, for instance, is just one of those most egregious externalities. And since the State in many countries often directly owns and manages (or is at least intimately involved with) big businesses such as those in the energy industry - sometimes to the chagrin of the businessmen themselves - we must not overlook the little matter of when the State itself is the largest polluter... (but perhaps in a world run according to Walther's political prescriptions there would never be any more pollution...).

Generally however, and I accept that in some cases there may be no perfect answers, the best way to deal with externality issues is to act on three fronts. The first of those is to seek the gradual removal of the largest aggravator, and often the largest source, of externalities - the State itself with its oughtistic presumption of authority to play God with other people's lives. The second of those action fronts is the chief prerogative of technologists and entrepreneurs who, by thoughtfully considering externality cases in sufficient detail, may be able to produce new technological solutions to market and thereby help to not only solve the externality problem, but to create jobs and further economic opportunity. Finally, a third action front would be to tackle reform of the legal system in terms of the coherence of law to underlying principle, as well as those institutional design factors which sometimes work to distort the consistency of its application.

The remainder of Walther's outrageous claims are not befitting an intelligent response. I submit that the continued publication of Walther's ignorati gibberish is an externality upon the sphere of public debate - but at least readers may know that it is he who is responsible for it.


*My initial reaction to reading the way he phrased this question was ...unprintable.

I have a feeling that if I put these remarks into a letter to the TT, they wouldn't print it.
Just my gut feeling.