I was recently invited to hear a talk on peak oil by a local university professor in Humboldt County, California. But the meeting wasn't about peak oil. Instead, I'd inadvertently fallen in with a group of political activists who'd been persuaded that something has to be done about global warming. According to these folks, sinister corporations have to be restrained. Americans use too much oil and gas. Scandalously, they drive cars and heat their homes. Someone has to put a stop to this, and quickly. The entire world is threatened by America's hunger for energy. From the activist's perspective, America is unnecessarily antagonizing the Muslim world because of our addiction to oil. As it happens, one of the meeting's participants felt the chill of an early fall in the building and rose to adjust the thermostat. "It's freezing in here," she declared. Yes, an early fall had begun and the imperative to stay warm suddenly trumped ideology. But the irony was lost on the assembled activists. They were busy throwing out ideas on how to cripple California's economy with another round of legislation aimed at oil companies and consumers. Already the California legislature has adopted a plan to cut carbon dioxide emissions 25 percent by 2020. The plan will raise energy costs and drive energy-intensive businesses out of the state.
There were few, if any, Republicans or conservatives among the assembled activists. Such are mostly socialists with time on their hands. Here in Humboldt County, California, where the timber industry has been effectively crushed, the next logical step is to crush the California economy as a whole. Concern for the spotted oil, concern for birds and small rodents and wetlands was only a modest beginning. A more ambitious scheme has emerged, concerned with global temperatures. A former logger recently pointed out that lumber trucks headed for Humboldt County mills were hauling trees cut in Canada. Meanwhile, millions of uncut acres burn out of control in fires because of environmental legislation that prevents the clearing of combustible material from the forests. (Better to let a tree burn than build a house.) The demand for lumber remains, and so does the demand for energy. The lady of the house will reach for the thermostat when she feels the cold, and houses are still being made with wood. The population of the state of California continues to grow. People need houses and they will want to heat their houses. They also want jobs that pay decent wages, as well as gasoline for commuting. But socialists are leading the state in another direction entirely.
Academic socialism is, of course, at the root of radical environmental activism. If there were no socialists in Humboldt County the local timber industry would still be thriving. And if there were no universities in California there would hardly be any socialists. It is the university that manufactures socialists, and the more that are made the greater the encumbrance to the economy. And there can be no question that full socialism, consistently advocated and faithfully practiced, would stop whatever environmental damage is being caused by the functioning of our modern economy. It was the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, who pointed out the environmental benefits of socialism more than 70 years ago. "All efforts to realize Socialism lead only to the destruction of society," Mises explained. "Factories, mines, and railways will come to a standstill, towns will be deserted. The population of the industrial territories will die out or migrate elsewhere. The farmer will return to the self-sufficiency of the closed, domestic economy. Without private ownership in the means to production there is, in the long run, no production other than hand-to-mouth production for one's own needs."
No outcome could be more environmentally friendly. Right? With all factories shut down, and all modern production brought to a halt, most of the polluters will die out, making way for healthier and happier whales, spotted owls, etc. The modern, productive economy is the only reason more than 6 billion people can be sustained on planet earth, along with an output of 6 billion tons per year of carbon emissions (that have supposedly caused a +.06 degrees shift in average global temperatures). The promised catastrophe of a warmer planet, with higher sea levels, is said to threaten us with destruction. Therefore the socialists counter this danger with their own plan of destruction. It is the destructionism of socialist legislation. "Socialism is not in the least what it pretends to be," explained Mises. "It is not the pioneer of a better and finer world, but the spoiler of what thousands of years of civilization have created. It does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it. It produces nothing, it only consumes what the social order based on private ownership in the means of production has created. Since a socialist order of society cannot exist, unless it be a fragment of Socialism within an economic order resting otherwise on private property, each step leading towards Socialism must exhaust itself in the destruction of what already exists."
Environmental-minded socialists believe they are saving California, just as they saved Humboldt County. To save the environment their plan amounts to the destruction of the capitalist economy. And this is not only a practical goal. It is a moral ideal. Capitalism's disregard for the environment proves the wickedness of a system based on profit. As they oppose the profit motive, they imagine they are saving the planet and promoting world peace. They believe that the War on Terror is a predatory war launched by large corporations against a billion innocent Muslims. The truth, however, is that the socialist countries (i.e., the old Soviet bloc) have damaged the environment far more seriously than capitalism; and it is socialism and not capitalism that threatens to trigger another world war. As Mises explained, "Let those who wish to eliminate ... enterprise understand quite clearly that they are proposing to undermine the foundations of our well-being. That in 1914 the earth nourished far more human beings than ever before, and that they all lived far better than their ancestors, was due entirely to the acquisitive instinct. If the diligence of modern industry were replaced by the contemplative life of the past, unnumbered millions would be doomed to death by starvation."
The free market teaches men to love peace, while the miserable circumstances of socialist decline teach men the necessity of predatory warfare. According to Mises, the market's love of peace "does not spring from philanthropic considerations" but depends on a proper appreciation of economic self-interest. Those who believe in profit and the free market reject war because war signifies the destruction of property. Wars are not initiated by corporate greed. Wars are initiated by backward cults who seek a return to medieval conditions. World revolution is the cry of the militant socialists, the Marxist-Leninists of the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and the KGB clique that presently governs the "former" Soviet Union. To understand world events properly we must understand the distinction between socialist and free market economies. Dictatorship and war belong to the sphere of socialism and economic controls (or restrictions). Freedom means the freedom to buy and sell, to build and create. Once you allow a mob of political activists to legislate against the free market - in accordance with moral or environmental pleas - your economic decline is foreordained. Instead of a society guided by environmental angels, you will have a society guided by distorted madmen who (in the words of Mises) "do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are. For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people."
Socialism did not die after 1989. The partisans of socialism remain in control of the East, and they continue their machinations in the West. Anti-capitalist ideas continue to proliferate in Europe and Asia and California. Despite the victory of the market over the grotesque socialism of Mao and Stalin, a craftier and subtler socialism has come in their place. It is the socialism of the environmentalist, and the socialism of dictators who use capitalism in an effort to defeat capitalism. It must be understood, that those who hate capitalism will not change their goal. But they have changed their tactics. "The man who clings to Socialism," wrote Mises, "will continue to ascribe all the world's evil to private property and to expect salvation from Socialism. Socialists ascribe the failures of Russian Bolshevism to every circumstance except the inadequacy of the system. From the socialist point of view, Capitalism alone is responsible for all the misery the world has had to endure in recent years. Socialists see only what they want to see and are blind to anything that might contradict their theory."
