there are only two of the Commandments that are consistent with capitalism. There are 8 Commandments which have nothing remotely to do with capitalism! You can covet someone else's stuff and still be a capitalist. Commit adultery, make graven images of God, take His name in vain, not honor your mother and father, ignore the Sabbath, have beliefs in other deities, not acknowledge God. seriously, you're stretching it here on a post that has nothing to do with Christianity!

The 10 commandments have almost nothing to with Capitalism. Christianity does not believe you own yourself, you are a slave to god and christianity explicitly supports slavery. Christianity gave us the dark ages. Reason and science are not part of christianity, but they are part of capitalism. The ethics of capitalism is from Locke and it all starts with logic, evidence and ownership of one's self.

I will agree that St. Augustine and Aquinas were influential in getting the church to re explore greek philosophy. But there is no way I agree that "sanctity of the individual" is important to Catholicism. Although reasons why most Catholics did not read the bible prior to the late middle ages is understandable, the persistence of Catholics only studying scripture out of context until the mid 20th century is baffling. It's as if the catholic needed to be sheltered from anti-catholic sentiment in different biblical versions-an individual can discern that for themselves. The whole concept of original sin is anti-human and anti-reason and anti-individual. It's a flawed Ethics.
I'm not sure how religion made its way to this post, but if we are going to say Aquinas was as instrumental as Locke to Capitalism-that's not true. We might as well say Islam should be credited with Capitalism since they preserved the Greek and roman texts which are the basis of the Renaissance at a time when the Christians were burning every text they could get their hands which did not agree with their philosophy-including that very library in Alexandria.

lucky, can you give an example of secrecy promoting progress?

MM. I am an admirer of Matt Ridley's blogs and have yet another comment.
The shooting down of green/carbonista propaganda is one of my pet topics (you may have noticed).

" Just for instance, shopping for locally produced food more often results in less efficient use of petroleum; and, of course, it penalizes farmers in poor countries."

On the RebirthOfReason site there is discussion of Ridley's example of the time spent on lighting for reading. The right way to put together capital and operating costs is not always apparent, it was not to Ridley, but the theme is still correct. I was pleased to see your comment joshed (as we call it).

The big theme is the improvement in the human condition over time. Is it due to capitalism or to technology? When did trade, and the conscious storing of items of value, start? It was very early in human development, in fact animals store. When did technology start? Tool use has been seen in animals. So without having to choose one or the other, do technology and capitalism enhance each other? This theme is developed at length here by DBH. I suggest, yes, and there are other human characteristics and behavior that promote progress, some of these appear to be contradictory like cooperation and secrecy.

"For our children and children’s children."
I love this phrase, at one time I was going to use it myself in a presentation but wisely left it out.
What it suggests is 'Consider future generations'. Sounds legit.

What it really means is, 'Do as I say as
I know what is best for future generations.
I know what is best for you,
and you do not'.

The temperature hockey stick was invented by Michael Mann, prof at Penn State U, Al Gore promoted it. Mann is a frequent user of legal threats to silence dissent. His refusal to publish the data that he used and that he had available is contrary to (mainstream) common practice in academic work. It is held that he selected data to get the result he wanted. Just about all (mainstream) science historians have found very different results. His statistical analysis, which is public, arouses interest and doubt in that it produces a hockey stick when fed with random numbers. He choice of proxies (substitutes for temperature data) has been criticized, notably the use of bristle cone pines, this has been described by the world expert on pines as a poor indicator of temperature. A Russian science institute said his sampling of Russian tree data was biased to show the result he wanted. Penn State produced a report which cleared him of wrong doing, I understand that the report was written by Mann. It goes on from there.

Perhaps of more direct relevance to the interests of this site are the political statements of the founders and supporters of the global warming carbon change movement, some are quoted in DBH's long post. There are many more, some are acknowledged with pride, they should be retracted with shame.

To say that environmental science is mainstream in science is not a good statement. The current carbon global climate fad is not science at all but politics. It is mainstream in current political thinking by the current government class, he who pays the piper calls the tune.
An obvious formula for success-
unless governments get more power, raise more taxes, spend on do-goody but useless projects, lets a rich idle class of guilt ridden looters and parasites feel good,
there will be disasters etc.

I agree it was an excellent book, but has two flaws. One is a sort of deterministic idea that things will always improve. I have the same problem with Ray Kurzweil's Singularity. The second is that it is marred by an open source, anti- intellectual property bias. My full review is at http://hallingblog.com/the-rational-opti...

I will post of the IP errors separately.

No its a fact. Environmentalists don't care about evidence or logic. They consistently lie, from the millions of lies in AWG to Rachel Carson's lies. They don't care that CO2 increases after there has been a warming period, for example. That makes it a religion. A religion that is responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people in the last century. How many people will have to die before this evil human hating religion dies?

DBHalling:
Reason/Rationality is the hallmark of Ayn Rand's philosophy. That's what this listserv is about.
Environmental Science is mainstream issues in Science. Check that out in any College/University Science library. Additionally, your written opinions about human population are outrageously irrational
Your written assertion that "Environmentalism is a religion--and that religion is anti-human" is irrational/unreasonable.
Why are you on this listserv being irrational/unreasoning?

Harry M

10) He also implies that patents are top down solution to encouraging invention. Nothing could be further from the truth. All a patent system does is provide property rights to inventors for their inventions. This is similar to property rights for land, which is a bottom up way to increase the productivity of farming for instance. Just giving pseudo property rights to peasants in the USSR and China caused enormous increases in farm production. Property rights are a bottom up solution, not a top down solution. In fact, the genius of the United States patent system (as opposed to Britain’s) is that it was accessible to all people, including women and slaves that had no property rights under their state laws. This encouraged a torrent of inventive activity in the U.S. that propelled it from a backward farming country to an economic and technological powerhouse in the world in less than 60 years. For more information see the excellent book by B. Zorina Kahn, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development, 1790-1920.

Open Source

I am convinced that Mr. Ridley’s poor research on patents and intellectual property is due to his infatuation with the open source movement. On page 356 he opines that genetic research will soon go open source. He is so excited about open source that he eventually suggests a Marxist’s open source utopia – “Thanks to the internet, each is giving according to his ability to each according to his needs, to a degree that never happen in Marxism.” P. 356

The open source movement has been a dismal failure. Its biggest success has been to extend UNIX (LINUX) to personal computers, other platforms, and add new features. Open source has mainly extended existing technologies, much like the incremental invention that can be expected from large companies. The open source movement deludes itself into believing they are fighting some sort of David versus Goliath battle against large corporations and the patent system. The reality is that open source developers are giving large corporations, such as IBM, their efforts for free and weakening the bargaining power of technical personnel. The open source movement plays right into the hands of large corporations and other large institutions, by weakening the property rights of developers in their work. It should be no surprise that open source has been an abysmal failure, since this exactly the situation most of the world lived under until 1800. Before modern patent systems, new inventions were rare and the return for the invention was often controlled by a trade guild. The members of the trade guild profited equally, meaning there was little incentive for the inventor to spend time creating. Per capita income of the world before 1800 had been stagnant for millennia. Where modern patent laws were adopted around 1800, incredible increases in per capita income occurred. Mr. Ridley trumpets this progress throughout his book. In areas without patent systems, we see stagnant growth in per capita income. For instance, Japan’s per capita income does not take off until they copy the US patent system in the 1860s.

It is unfortunate that this excellent book is disfigured by the author’s irrational infatuation with the open source movement. This infatuation causes the author to embrace the logical contradiction that increases in population density increase economic growth and also causes the Malthusian trap (decreases in economic growth). It also causes him to reject the solution to the Malthusian trap, which is the recognition of property rights in inventions.

The AGW is based on lies, lies like Al Gore's Hockey stick curve. Environmentalist hate people.

Global Warming

Man made global warming or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is the latest hoax being thrust upon us by Environmentalists, who I have already shown, have a very poor track record.

Deaths Caused by Global Warming Hoax

The United States is spending about $10 billion a year on Global Warming research. http://frontpagemag.com/2011/01/28/the-b... I think it is safe to say that at least $100 billion has been spent worldwide on Global Warming over the last decade. It costs about $20 to provide infrastructure for clean water for one person. According to WHO, 30,000 deaths occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions. Most of these deaths are children under five years old. That is over 600,000 deaths per year because of poor water infrastructure. If the $10 billion being wasted on Global Warming research were instead applied to water infrastructure, this could save 50 million lives. The Global Warming Hoax has cost the lives of at 6 million people.?

How AGW Advocates Have Lied

“The latest data released by the Met Office, based on readings from 30,000 measuring stations, confirms there has been no global warming for 15 years.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...

It is well known that the main driver of the temperature on Earth are the variations in the amount of solar energy the Earth receives. “Experiments at the CERN laboratory in Geneva have supported the theory of Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark that the sun — not man-made CO2 — is the biggest driver of climate change.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...

The biggest greenhouse gas is water vapor – over 95%, but you never hear about this from AGW advocates. http://www.creators.com/opinion/walter-w...

“Natural wetlands produce more greenhouse gas contributions annually than all human sources combined.” http://www.creators.com/opinion/walter-w...

Below, IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -UN) Experts comment on the IPCC, which is the group at the UN that has been saying a consensus of scientist s “believe” in Global Warming http://ukipscotland.wordpress.com/2011/1...

Dr Vincent Gray: “The (IPCC) climate change statement is an orchestrated litany of lies.”

Dr. Lucka Bogataj: “Rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide don’t cause global temperatures to rise…. temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.”

Dr Richard Courtney: “The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong.”

Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen: “The IPCC refused to consider the sun’s effect on the Earth’s climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change.”

Goal of AGW

The goal of AGW is to kill capitalism and as a result kill millions of people. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace explained.

(Environmentalism today is) more about globalism and anti-capitalism than it is about science or ecology….



The Environmental Movement is Anti-Human – Pure Evil



“Ultimately, no problem may be more threatening to the Earth’s environment than the proliferation of the human species.”
— Anastasia Toufexis, “Overpopulation: Too Many Mouths,” article in Time’s special “Planet of the Year” edition, January 2, 1989. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/geoffrey-di...





“Today, life on Earth is disappearing faster than the days when dinosaurs breathed their last, but for a very different reason….Us homo sapiens are turning out to be as destructive a force as any asteroid. Earth’s intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot. Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives….The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us, and we consume way too much, especially here at home….It will take a massive global effort to make things right, but the solutions are not a secret: control population, recycle, reduce consumption, develop green technologies.”
— NBC’s Matt Lauer hosting Countdown to Doomsday, a two-hour June 14, 2006 Sci-Fi Channel special. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/geoffrey-di...
“My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guyana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” http://jiminmontana.wordpress.com/2012/0...



Dr. Charles Wurster, one of the major opponents of DDT, is reported to have said,



“People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this (referring to malaria deaths) is as good a way as any.” http://jiminmontana.wordpress.com/2012/0...



“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal,” Turner stated in 1996.[1]



A leading environmentalist, Dr. Eric R. Pianka advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth’s population by airborne Ebola in front of few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science who rose to their feet, and gave him a standing ovation.[2] Dr. Pianka attempted to deny this, but the evidence was overwhelming including his student evaluations.





Environmentalism is a Religion – and that religion is anti-human

Optimism is a nice idea. Being real/reasoning/rational about the facts of an issue is a better exercise.
The earth has a definite mass. That means there’s a finite limit to resources. Additionally, we are at about 8 billion on the planet, and increasing.
It’s been well documented that there’s a correlation between increased industrial activity, the increase in Global CO2 concentrations, increase in Global Warming, and associated effects.
Indeed, technology can mitigate factors. But there's still the fact of finite limits.
Ayn Rand chose to be unreasonable and not safe about the correlation between smoking and lung cancer. She paid with that unreasonableness with her life.
We have only one Space Ship Earth. Best to play it safe with this asset. For our children and children’s children.

Harry M