Flora Faun, "Hermes" Edition

So the editors at the Taipei Times printed another letter by Flora Faun, she of the forests of errors, peaks of presumption and steep valleys of abject ignorance.

"When your grandchildren ask one day: “What happened to all the tigers and orangutans?” you can answer them: “They were turned into Hermes bags and Lamborghinis.”..."

You've got it the wrong way round Flora - it was the tigers that were transformed into growling Murcielagos; the orangutans were the ones who ended up swinging from fat old ladies' shoulders. Don't they teach you anything up there at NTU? Aren't they supposed to have the best engineering graduates in the country?

"While I do not want to delve into the emotionally stunted lives of people who acquire Hermes bag after Hermes bag..."

Oh you do really though, don't you? C'mon: what have you got to lose except your word limit?

"I want to make the point that if we want to save any of the commons... we must realize that an economic model based solely on individual choices runs counter to society’s need for sustainable activity."

That's absolutely true. Because what you call "society" will be nothing more than a ruling regime of arbitrarian power, and what you call "sustainable activity" already exists throughout the world today and is known by the somewhat less glamorous names of grinding poverty and early death. So yes, an "economic model" based on individual choice - on individual and universal freedom - runs precisely counter to that.

"One example is climate change, which is “the greatest example of market failure we have ever seen,” according to the World Bank’s Nicholas Stern..."

Actually Flora, there is a strong empirical case to be made that climate change is driven by the earth's recovery from the last ice age, and that the man-made catalyst for rising temperatures, CO2, is likely to have only a small effect. So the notion that climate change is a market failure depends on three presuppositions none of which are warranted. First of all it depends on having achieved certainty that climate change is mostly due to CO2; second, that climate change will result "on net" in negative consequences (e.g. catastrophic ones); and third, that everybody shares the same opinion that preventing climate change is a public good. The first presupposition is no longer trumpeted with certainty even by the top scientists on your own "side" of the debate; the second presupposition is brutally childish in its' one-sided simplicity: add up all possible negative externalities, ignore all positive externalities (e.g. the increased area of arable land) and then shout and scream that it's the end of the world; the third presupposition likewise depends on ignoring the drastic economic consequences of implementing even something as "moderate" as the Kyoto protocol. Stern's claim that climate change is a market failure is risible nonsense.

"Well, actually, our entire economic system is a market failure because it does not include the external costs of resource extraction and pollution."

The "system" does not attempt to price those costs not only because they do not fit geographical property rights, but because they are inherently uncertain - forecasted as they are on the basis of mathematical models with a history of being proved wrong. But why is it that for someone so apparently concerned with "externalities" Flora, you and your eco-ilk seem uninterested in berating the "system" for not attempting to price the negative externality costs of government and its excesses?

"The total wealth of many of the world’s poorest nations is actually declining because of the destruction of their natural capital (eg, rainforests)."

"Wealth" is not something that can be produced by a "nation" or any other arbitrary collective Flora, it is something produced by individual people through specific acts of ramified social cooperation (or, to use the technical jargon: "trade"). The destruction of rainforests, whilst unfortunate, occurs for two reasons: firstly because "ownership" of them is simply arrogated by the very collectivist institution you would have run everyone's lives, and second because the laws passed to protect the rainforests depend for their implementation on the very people in government who have a vested interest in the short-term economic benefit of cutting the trees down.

"Paul Hawken in The Ecology of Commerce proposes an entirely different economic model... Taxes would be levied not against “goods,” such as earnings or investments, but against “bads,” such as resource extraction and pollution. In a free-market system regulated by “green” taxes, businesses would quickly adopt sustainable practices and the most sustainable products would win out."

This really is playschool-and-crayons stuff isn't it? Flora, "goods" is the economic term for material products - not in distinction to "bads", but in distinction to both material and abstract services. Those "bads" which you cite Hawken as listing - resource extraction and pollution - first depend upon whole chains of both goods and services, which themselves presuppose earnings and investment that you apparently would not want to punish. So some of your "goods" would themselves also be "bads" or contribute to the production of "bads". But irrespective of that, the argument Hawken is advancing is yet one more variation on the Left's constant yearning for the power to go full-Stalin on central planning. A system of green taxes with which politician-kings could then "direct" the economy would not be a "free market" system, it would be the wet dream of a Michael Turton or a Bruno Walther. Most accurately, it would have to be called a system of ecofascism. Such a system would very quickly lead to mass economic privation for one overriding reason: it would drive up the cost of energy in the short term and stymie the production of future energy sources (and yes, that necessarily means fossil fuels) over the medium to long term.

"However, in a last gasp of economic insanity, we seem to be hell-bent to convert whatever natural beauty is left in this world into pointless status symbols for the super-rich, thanks to all those economists who are still stuck in the world of two centuries ago, when the free market was surrounded by unlimited resources."

Flora, the whole point of the free-market from the very beginning is that it deals only with finite goods and services premised upon finite resources, the foremost among which being intellect, time and labour - of which you evidently have too much of the latter two and not anything like enough of the first one.

You know I am tempted to blame the teaching staff at NTU - how is it a girl can enter an economics course there and have that grotesque misrepresentation thrown to her unchallenged? I mean you'd think they'd all graduated from commie school in New York or Kalifornia or something.