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Feb. 16, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:17
104 Environmentalism Part 2: State Destruction

So long, and thanks for all the fish! (...with all due respect to the late, great Douglas Adams!)

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Good morning everybody.
freedomain.blogspot.com.
It's Stefan Molyneux.
It's 8.38 on Thursday the 16th of February 2006.
We're on environmentalism part two.
Now we're going to talk about CART this morning as an excellent example of what happens when you put a resource into the public sector why the government is subject to all the same problems of the commons as we talked about last time.
So let's talk about CART.
Okay, what happened?
Well, this is just off Newfoundland, which is an island and a province of Canada, on the east coast, where when the card were first discovered about 400 years ago, they were so thick, it seemed, that the first person who reported them said that you could almost walk to shore, they were teeming so thickly.
And they were funded perfectly fine, and dealt with perfectly fine, and harvested perfectly fine in the private sector.
Then a number of things happened in sequence, until 1977.
Just about any vessel could fish just about anywhere off the coast of Newfoundland, and so they all tended to undercatch because they didn't know what each other was catching.
In 1977, the UN Law of the Sea Convention, it set this 200-mile exclusive fishing zones around any nations, of course including Canada and Newfoundland, So, foreign vessels, you couldn't fish inside the 200 mile limit.
So, of course, what happened?
Well, the number of Canadian vessels just increased to pick up the surplus.
So, that didn't work out so well.
And, since 1977, the government of Canada became the management of the fisheries.
So, instead of fish being a resource available to anyone with the means to catch it, they became state property, the rights to which were delegated in the management plans.
So, this was not so good.
There was a classification system, so part-time fishermen were only allowed to fish for ground fish such as cod.
So, of course, they started catching like crazy.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans set this Total Allowable Catch, or the TAC.
It was based upon the models of the cod stocks that its own scientists developed and employed.
And it turned out there was a grievous mathematical error, and there was under-reporting from the fishermen, and it was all just a complete mess.
And, of course, if they had decided to, in 1989, they decided they needed to cut the total allowable catch by about 50%, but, you know, the drastic cuts in the tech Required for conservation of the cod stocks would have caused a massive economic upheaval in a pretty depressed region to begin with and would have been just blatant political suicide.
So of course nobody did anything about it and that was pretty bad.
The only other thing was the Newfoundland provincial government itself owned some fisheries plants and so of course made money from them.
So it didn't want to cut the stocks because that would have cut the amount of money that it made from that.
So the So, that's sort of the basic facts of the situation.
And what happened, of course, in the long run, was that in 1994, the cod stocks turned out to be about 5% of their 1990 levels.
So, in the space of about a dozen years, the government had turned a resource that was fully sustainable and renewable by a large fishing community, 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 fishermen, ...and had completely decimated it, and it has never returned.
There is just no possibility of it ever coming back.
It's still gone, and when they say 5%, what they mean is zero.
You can't conceivably measure 5% fish population in the sea, and so it is just not possible that it's ever going to return.
So, what does this tell us?
Well, it tells us a number of things.
First of all, one of the things that you need in order to create and sustain productive negotiations, and I'm talking in this case negotiations about how many fish get caught, is you really need a lot of unknowns.
You really need a lot of unknowns, therefore you're going to overcompensate for it.
So, for instance, one of the things that you don't want to know, if you want to make everybody frightened of catching too many fish, the very important thing for them to know is not how many fish to catch, sort of in a semi-objective fashion.
So, one of the things... I mean, I spent a summer in Newfoundland with a marine biologist who was a friend of my father's.
I spent a summer in Newfoundland when I was 16 or 17 and learned a little bit about this, so I'll just touch on it briefly.
But how is it possible that with no property rights, sort of no individual harvesting property rights and no property rights to the sea or to the fish, that this catch was sustainable for so many years?
You had people fishing offshore, you had people fishing from Newfoundland, you had full-timers, you had part-timers, you had all of the complications in the world that should have, according to the theory of the commons, caused an intense decimation in the cardstocks, but it never happened.
The cardstocks were a completely renewable resource that were kept perfectly hunky-dory for 400 years, and with all of the changes in technology and community and sociology and government, increasing government power and Newfoundland became a province, I think, in 1949.
So all of the changes in political power and socioeconomic status and mobility and education and all of that, the cod stocks remained constant.
Well, how is that possible?
How could that happen?
Well, the reason that it happened was because nobody knew how much everybody else was fishing.
So because nobody knew how much everybody else was fishing, clearly what had to happen was people had to fish less than they wanted, because the risk that some other person was fishing more was too great.
And if all you've ever been is a cod fisherman, if you lose that capacity, as we talked about in another podcast, the last of one's career is an economic catastrophe, especially later on in life.
So, these people all knew very well that if the cod stocks were overfished, that the entire communities would be destroyed.
So, this is something that, because everybody thinks that the free market is just about maximizing profit and so on, in the short run, then they miss this kind of sophisticated stuff.
So, I spent some time in a small fishing village in Newfoundland, and this is sort of what I saw.
There was a great hostility.
Hostility is probably not the right word.
There was a great contempt for ostentation.
There was a very leveling social mechanism at work in that if you were perceived as sort of putting on airs, as being bigger than your station, as throwing your money around and so on, then you were ostracized.
You were pretty much Anybody who showed any sign of this was almost immediately put down as being too big for their britches and, you know, presuming too much and so on.
Now, is this just small-town, you know, horrible small-town social conservatism?
Well, sure it is, but it also serves a very powerful economic purpose.
So, if you are living next... you're a cod fisherman and you're living next to another cod fisherman and that other cod fisherman suddenly buys a Mercedes and adds... puts an addition on his car...
And so on, then, well, what's happened?
Well, it's pretty clear that he's been overfishing, right?
Or he's been fish-taking more than his fair share of fish.
And so you can't... Why would you bother with the money without spending it?
You wouldn't keep it in a crate, right?
So you'd want to spend it.
And these are pretty small communities, and so they all kept an eye on each other.
And anytime that anybody showed a large surplus of spending, Then they would be sort of socially attacked and would either have to leave town or Or sort of prove in some manner that they'd maybe come into an inheritance or something, or just proof that they weren't taking more than was socially acceptable from the common pot of fish.
So this kind of regulation is very important.
The fog of... I don't exactly know what to call it, but it's like the fog of negotiations.
It's sort of a derivation of the fog of war, which is a concept that you can't... you don't know what your enemy's doing and you can't see for the most part, so...
Knowing where they're going to attack or what their plans are is pretty unknown, and that's the great difficulty of war, as the French found out with the Mezzanot Line with the Germans in 1940.
So, the fog of negotiation is a concept which helps us understand that if one party knows a fact, or believes they know a fact about the other party, then negotiation really can't occur.
And that is a pretty important aspect of negotiation.
If one person, like if you know, down to the exact fact, down to the exact dollar, how much your car dealership is willing to sell a car for, then that's going to be something that you're going to use to your advantage.
I mean, it's actually not even really going to be a negotiation.
So, for instance, I'm negotiating with a group at the moment.
I know that they have a fairly chunky sum of money to spend, and they have to spend it before March 31st, but I don't know how much money that is.
Now, of course, if I did know how much money that was, Then, by golly, I would simply say, well, you know what the price of that is?
The price of the software is in that minus one dollar.
And they won't tell me.
I have been so bold as to ask, but they won't tell me.
The same way that when you're responding to a request for a proposal to sell a service or a product, they won't tell you how much money they expect to spend or how much money they have in the budget.
Because otherwise, people won't compete.
So if they tell everyone, hey, you know what, we have a quarter million dollars, then, you know, I'm sure you can guess what the price of that will come in.
Minus a little bit, because people will compete to a small degree.
But if nobody knows what the budget is, or how much they have to spend, then they are going to have a very different approach to putting their figures in.
And I've seen figures in the same RFPs range anywhere from a hundred thousand to a million dollars.
So that's another important aspect, to not know how much is on the other side of the table.
And there's this phrase in business, I'm sure if you're in business you've heard of it, you know, did you leave some money on the table?
In other words, if you say the price of the software is $200,000 and the guy says done, you've obviously, he would have spent a lot more and you've left some money on the table and walked away.
Now that may not be the end of the world because It's all a refinement, right?
I mean, if you keep selling your software for 50 bucks and everyone reaches into their pocket, gives you cash and runs away laughing, and on the bulletin boards you read, can you believe this guy selling XYZ software for 50 bucks?
Go call him!
It's incredible!
Then you may have some indications that you're undercharging.
However, if you're charging, you know, $5,000 and nobody's buying, then that may be an indication that you're overcharging.
So, finding the right price in the market is a constant trial-and-error situation, and it's constantly changing.
It's not like you get a price and then it's just fixed until the end of time.
So, not knowing what the consumer is willing to pay, not knowing what popular tastes are, not knowing what business value is, not knowing what the competition is doing, and so on, all contribute to this problem of the fog of negotiations.
The fact that it's a problem is why negotiations work.
Why there's this constant refinement for finding optimal solutions.
So, interestingly enough, this occurred between the cod fishermen in Newfoundland and those trawlers who were fishing offshore.
The trawlers themselves did not know how much the cod fishermen were fishing as well.
Now, the trawlers offshore, they really wanted to come back every year too.
There was no point building, I don't know, 20 million dollar fishing vessel and then go fishing for one season.
You want to make sure that you can pay off that investment over the span of the vessel, like 40-50 years, so you're not going to want to just go and dynamite all the fish out of the water and then go home with a big catch that can never be replenished.
So not only did the cod fishermen in Newfoundland not know exactly how much each other were catching, but could only read social indicators like wealth, The offshore fishermen, and he didn't even speak the same language, they didn't ever have any communication with these people, but they were very careful to monitor the cod stocks and there was sort of an unwritten mutually assured destruction rule in place.
So, for instance, If I am an offshore fisherman, I'm going to have to assume, obviously I'm going to assume that the people who've got their houses in the fishing village are interested in keeping the start of the cart around for the long term.
So I'm going to make sure that that I'm aware of that, and I have some idea of how much they're fishing.
I can do that through sonar or whatever.
Or I could pay some local guy to tell me what the general mood of the village is, or the group of villagers, to find out what kind of fishing is available.
Now, what is definitely the case with the offshore fishermen and the onshore fishermen off Newfoundland is that they had a sort of mutually assured destruction in place.
And so far, As the fact that if one of them, if one group of them, suddenly decided to overfish, the other group would also decide to overfish.
And that would very much... I mean, as it took two years, 1990 the fish stocks were at a certain level, two years later there was a moratorium, and two years after that there was only 5% or, you know, basically zero cod left.
Those 400-year resources went up in a puff of smoke, never to be replenished.
And the reason that that occurred was that once people realized that there was overfishing without consequences, once the control of overfishing had passed into the public realm and there was overfishing without consequences, then everybody is going to overfish like mad.
Then all the trawlers are going to do this, sort of, they're going to throw their nets in and they're going to just drag it along the bottom and grab everything because they know that next year there's going to be no fish.
So they're just going to grab everything that they conceivably can and What's called the bycatch.
I mean, the whole ecosystem was destroyed.
It wasn't just the cod.
And the reason for that is these trawlers would just drag their nets along the bottom.
Of course, that would completely mess up the ecosystem on the bottom of the ocean.
But it would also just... it caught everything.
So the bycatch, which is the fish that you're not allowed to catch or that you don't want, you just throw those over the water dead.
And that may be good for the algae, but it ain't gonna be too good for the ecosystem.
So that particular fact, that as soon as there's any indication of overfishing, then everybody's going to overfish like crazy, is very important.
So the level of social control, of technological control, the fog of negotiations, the not knowing what the other person was fishing, The fact that many people are using the same resource made everybody very, very, very careful to ensure that there was no such thing as overfishing.
And it works beautifully!
I mean, you had all of these trawlers offshore.
You had tons of people, all of whom individually had the benefit of overfishing, none of whom overfished.
I mean, when you think about it, it's a wonderfully complex model.
And, of course, there's no government intervention in this.
There's certainly no government intervention between the local fishermen and the offshore fishermen.
Sometimes you'd get complaints, but it didn't really matter.
Well, what happened?
Well, of course in 1977 the fabulous UN, you know, decides to pass this law.
I don't know much about the history of it, but I'm sure it was based on political pressure from local seafaring government communities.
It passed this law which said you couldn't fish 200 kilometers close to any sort of landmass.
Well, what happens?
Well, that takes one factor out of the equation for the cod fishermen.
So, they now no longer have to worry about foreign fishing.
Well, so they think.
I don't know, but I would be very surprised if everybody immediately went, oh, 200 kilometers, no problem, I won't come any closer than that or fish any closer than that.
So, immediately you have this situation where the fish are sort of wide open, right?
A major factor of competition has now been erased and therefore the perception is that we can start fishing more and more and more.
So they start doing that.
And even so, even so, it would not have been an unsustainable situation.
These people know how to maintain a cod stock.
Their ancestors and themselves have been doing it for 400 years.
And so it didn't seem very likely that they were just going to immediately overfish.
So a major competitor had been reduced, which meant that they could fish more, but it didn't seem very likely that they would then overfish.
But what happened then was, of course, the federal government took over the owns, began owning the cod, right?
So it would give you licenses, and it would give you this total allowable catch, this TAC, and it basically would tell you how much to catch.
And the scientists and all this and that were determined based on renewal and fishing and so on.
So there was this attempt to put in place scientific management, or what would be called, quote, scientific management, and have it replace traditional methods of resource allocation, which had worked beautifully for 400 years.
And, as you can imagine, it was a complete disaster.
I mean, some guy in Ottawa whose livelihood does not depend upon the accuracy of his numbers may have a Cray computer to run his models with, but he's just not going to have the same incentive for getting the numbers right, as if his entire family's livelihood and his traditions and his community and everything rests upon the accuracy of his numbers.
So, they put this model together, and they said, okay, well, how much are you catching?
Okay, well, based on a renewable level of such and such, and that, and this and the other, and these annual temperatures of the ocean, and these currents, and that, I mean, they put this fantastically complicated model together to predict what the card stocks were going to be over time.
And, you know, I mean, if you look at a weather forecast two days out, you can have some sense of how Accurate these numbers are going to be.
It's going to be a complete load of nonsense that nobody's going to... It's going to be just a mess.
It's going to be just made up.
And of course it is going to be heavily subject to political factors.
And so one of the things that the Newfoundland politicians want to do in order to get re-elected is they want to raise the income of the communities.
And one of the things that the federal government wants to do is to raise the income of Newfoundland as a whole.
Newfoundland is one of these provinces that occasionally mutters, like Alberta and to a much larger degree Quebec, mutters about separation because they're not so particularly convinced that joining Canada was such a great idea and economically, I mean, they're entirely correct.
There's two provinces, I think it may be even down to, there's two provinces out of the ten that contribute to the income redistribution schemes that Canada is so proud of, and it used to be three, but then BC went through a socialist brain fart and destroyed their economy, so now there's two who still contribute, and those who are receiving the money all goes to the government.
Some of it trickles down and paralyzes the population with sort of welfare.
And there is a Newfoundland...
A lot of 642 is one of the lotteries in Canada, which is run by the government, because the government is moral enough to run lotteries without corrupting the money, whereas private individuals aren't.
So there's this lot of 642, and in Newfoundland, the joke was that you could go on to Pogibuy.
You could go on unemployment insurance, and it was called winning lotto 1042.
And the reason that it was called 1042 was because you would work for 10 weeks, and then you would get 42 weeks of unemployment insurance.
And the reason for this was that a lot of work in Newfoundland is seasonal work.
So, if the fisheries is somewhat seasonal, agriculture, of course, seasonal.
And so, you would have this seasonal work, which would go for, you know, 10 weeks or so on, and then you would get this unemployment insurance, which would let you sit on your, you know, chunky Newfoundland behind and eat herring and watch beachcombers for the rest of the year, which have completely destroyed people's personalities, initiative and desire for education, contributed to a culture of rampant abuse and destruction and alcoholism.
I mean, it's just The same thing that you would see on the native reserves throughout North America, that when you pay for people, you destroy their lives.
Personalities are, you know, basically they are what develops out of resistance, and integrity is what develops out of resistance, and when you take resistance away, what happens to the personality is exactly what happens to your muscles in a hospital bed when you're not moved.
They simply decompose.
So, there's some real questions about whether this was beneficial.
So, of course, they want to, in the federal level, to sort of quiet any signs that Newfoundland might leave the Union or the Confederation.
They're constantly hurling more money at it, and this is one of the ways that they did it, was just to artificially raise these card stocks.
Are these totally allowable catches?
So then everybody's swimming in money.
Everybody's happy.
Everybody's doing well.
And, of course, there are far more fishermen than there would be.
This is sort of another thing that has occurred.
And this has occurred since the 60s, but escalated quite a bit in the 70s and 80s in particular.
This idea that you can work for 10 weeks a year and then get unemployment insurance and live comfortably for the remaining 42 weeks a year means that the natural decline in the numbers of fishermen that always occur with improved technology doesn't occur.
It's also very, very important.
So, as you probably know, or may know, the numbers of people involved in farming At the turn of the 20th century, so in the year 1900, 75 or 80% of people were involved in farming in North America, and as of the 90s, it was like 3%.
Well, why did the numbers go down?
Because technology improved.
And because technology improved, you just needed far fewer people to be farmers, which is good, because being a farmer is a dull, thankless, brain-dead task.
At least it was in 1900, for sure.
And the same thing, of course, would be occurring, because people say, well, the technology improved to find the fish and so on, and that's all fine, no problem, right?
The technology improved for farming as well, but you don't see nothing but dust bowls where the farms used to be.
The reason for that is as the technology improves and the amount of labor goes down, then people lose their jobs, and because they lose their jobs, they leave.
But if the technology gets better and people are able to find the fish better, and the government then subsidizes the lifestyle of these part-time inshore fishermen, then you have a combination of increased technology and subsidized part-time fishing locally.
What that does is it puts a double burden on the card stocks, which wouldn't occur otherwise.
You simply couldn't survive as a part-time fisherman when the technology is picking up the card further out to sea.
You couldn't survive as a part-time inshore fisherman, so you'd leave and you'd go to the city, or you'd start a craft shop, or you'd set up parasailing lessons or something.
So, but you simply, you couldn't survive.
So, the fact that you could survive because of government subsidies meant, again, you're just vastly overfishing, and this is exactly what happens.
Now, can you imagine what it would be like to be a politician, either in the federal government or in Newfoundland, and say to these fishermen, oh listen, we're going to get rid of your subsidies, you're no longer going to be able to live in your ancestral home, you're no longer going to be able to fish like your forefathers did, and I don't care if you're 50 years old, you're going to have to go to the city and learn a new occupation.
Well, I mean, if there was a free market, people would just do this without complaint, the same way that computer programmers took the downturn in 2003, which lasted for a couple of years, without rioting and without, you know, calling upon the politicians, because programmers have some pride because they're in the free market, and also because there's no particular avenue to deal with this stuff from a political standpoint.
So, if you tried that, you would simply have a revolution on your hands and you would then have, you know, massive threats that Newfoundland was going to leave the Union and so on.
And why do politicians care about that?
Because they care about Newfoundland?
Because they care about the idea of Canada?
No, of course not.
The reason that they don't want They don't want Newfoundland to leave Canada is twofold.
One is that the population, because they're raised on this sentimental view of the unity of all things, a Canadian would throw them out of office as, oh, they failed, they broke up Canada, people would be crying as if their dog had died, and all that had happened was that a map had changed color, and who cares, right?
And also we've got one parasitical, leech-like government of Newfoundland off our necks, because Newfoundland is just an incredible net receiver of all of our tax money.
But only that's a partly sentimental reason.
The reason that they don't let it occur is because Newfoundland is a great excuse to steal money from the rest of Canada.
And then it passes through the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, they keep a good chunk of it, and very little of it ends up In the poor.
So when the government of Newfoundland says that we're going to leave, they're just joking, right?
They're just playing to the galleries because they're simply not going to give up that amount of money.
I mean, where are they going to get their transfer payments from if they leave the country?
How are they going to get to steal billions of dollars from the rest of Canada if they leave Canada?
I mean, it's lunatic.
And of course, everybody in Newfoundland knows this, that if they left Canada, that they would not be able to sit around and collect unemployment insurance all the time.
I'm not saying that's true of all Newfoundlanders, so if you're in Newfoundland, please forgive me.
I don't blame you, I blame the system.
Okay, I blame you a little.
But if you're in Newfoundland, the idea that you're going to leave Canada is hilarious.
It's a joke.
It's just something that's used to threaten people.
There's no way that politicians and bureaucrats are going to let those billions of dollars slip away for any kind of principle.
I mean, if they had principles to begin with, they wouldn't be where they are.
So I think that's just kind of funny.
That's just like a joke.
So, let's go back to these fish stocks.
So, what happens is the government puts this total allowable catch together, it puts all these calculations together, and in the 70s, too, the provincial government of Newfoundland takes over all of these fish plants, these processing plants for fish.
So, they get a lot of money from the federal government to do this.
I mean, there's just lunatic amounts of money thrown at Newfoundland and other of the, sort of, quote, poorer, the have-not provinces.
It's like, have-not?
How about have-not your hand in my pocket?
But they just threw ridiculous amounts of money at Newfoundland to try and stimulate the economy, right?
Like, they couldn't do that just by lowering taxes like Ireland did.
Ireland, the birthplace of many Newfoundlanders, many long in the past.
And so they had, I mean it was lunatic, at one point they had a cucumber growing factory, or a series of greenhouses.
Like they were going to grow cucumbers in Newfoundland and make a fortune.
And there's been this oil, drilling for oil, that's just been going on and on, not producing a damn thing.
And I mean this just sort of goes on and on, it's constant subsidies, and it's nothing to do with fixing the economy, it's all to do with just Creating a need that the gullible voting population will buy.
Oh, we've got to help those poor people.
They should become self-sustainable.
These poor, sad-looking, chunky fishermen in galoshes, they need to have a place to work!
So everybody gets sympathetic and then they just use that to pray.
I mean, false sympathy is the cancer of North American, of Western society.
You know, false sentimental sympathy is just what brings our society down.
Because, and it's not a question of tough love, it's just a question of, well, you idiots!
Why did you overfish so much?
Why did you listen to the government?
But then, of course, it's hard to have nothing but blame for these people, and I'll get to sort of the blame question at the end, because they're in a situation where everybody else is doing it, and therefore, if I don't, I'm going to lose out.
They're in a genuine problem of the commons that is created through The government, which itself is subject to the problem of the Commons, as we talked about yesterday.
So, the Newfoundland government has all these fish plants that were created and expanded based on federal subsidies that were taken from all the other taxpayers in Ontario and from the taxpayers in Newfoundland, of course.
The taxpayer.
Sorry, taxpayer in Newfoundland.
I think that's just one.
So, they have all these fish plants, so naturally they want all the fish in the world to come their way, so that they don't end up with idle fish plants, which is going to be a sort of national joke.
And so the provincial government puts a lot of pressure on the federal government.
The federal government, because it has increased the total allowable catch, has drawn a lot of people to become fishermen.
It's like, I can catch that?
By Jesus, that's great!
And so they have all of these fishermen, and these fishermen are just fishing like crazy, and I bet you that the offshore fishing is still occurring just under the cover of night, and it can't even be open anymore, so nobody can tell, right?
So they can't openly go and fish out there.
They can only fish surreptitiously, so of course it's very hard to tell exactly what they're doing.
They, of course, are perfectly aware of what's happening to the fish stocks, and they're perfectly aware of the overfishing that's occurring, and so they're going to overfish like crazy as well.
It's perfectly, perfectly predictable.
And the federal government and the provincial government get involved in other tasty ways of dealing with these cod stocks.
They begin to subsidize the fishermen directly.
I mean, not even through unemployment insurance or through this increase in total allowable catch.
They actually begin shoveling bucket loads of money at people to become fishermen.
So, I mean, it's just amazing!
So, they start funding to the tune of $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, anybody who wants to buy a fishing boat and go and become a fisherman.
Because they have this, I don't know, the cover story is, let's make them self-sufficient and get them off the pogey or whatever.
Of course, like all government programs, the idea that you're going to get rid of people who are dependent on the government by giving them money from the government is just another sort of sick joke.
So they wanted to get people off the pogey and then so what they do is they destroy the remnants of the local economy, thus making everybody dependent on the government.
So they start subsidizing the fishermen.
They're subsidizing their lifestyle.
They're subsidizing their fishing equipment.
They're subsidizing their boats.
They're subsidizing their houses.
I mean, there's just nothing but money being shoveled at this.
And what happens is it becomes a... I don't know what you would call it.
It's an asymptotic wildfire escalation of need, demand, corruption, and destruction.
Is there a good acronym for that?
Let's see.
That could be catchy.
It becomes a wildfire.
It starts to burn out of control.
It becomes a firestorm.
Because what happens is, as you begin to draw more and more people into this lifestyle through subsidies, then they begin to organize themselves as a coherent political unit.
And they do that because the jobs have been created through the government, so they know that they have to lobby the government.
The reason the programmers don't lobby the government is the government doesn't create programming jobs or software jobs.
I mean, other than hiring people in the public sector, but there's not a big, you know, agency of Department of Computers and Software which creates and manages all of the software jobs and that's why there's no Software Job Political Association.
There's no software union.
I mean, corruption breeds corruption, right?
Force breeds force.
And collectivism breeds collectivism.
So what happens is, as you begin to subsidize all of these fishermen, then they begin to organize themselves into political units.
And obviously, right?
Because they know that they're entirely dependent upon the whims of bureaucrats.
In St.
John's, Newfoundland and Ottawa, Canada for all of their income.
So they know that they have to start clustering around the halls of power and they have to start sending representatives to yell and scream and kick in the doors in Ottawa.
And they actually did some of this.
They got pretty violent because, you know, when you're involved in a corrupt scheme of money transferring and money laundering and inflation-based money printing, If you're pillaging the public purse and you're entirely dependent upon the whims of bureaucrats, you are entirely full of piss, vinegar, and self-hatred.
You're going to become a wet bag of virulent self-loathing.
So you're going to take that out.
You're going to project all of that onto society.
You're going to get needy.
You're going to get entitled.
You're going to get angry.
You're going to get bitter.
You're going to get, I'm owed everything.
This is how you deal with the fact that you're stealing.
You just say, I'm owed it.
You just make up all these rules by which you're allowed to pillage other people, and then you go and... If they don't give it to you, or they're not going to give it to you, then by golly, you're going to go kick in the doors of some bureaucrat's place in Ottawa, and you're going to start screaming at people because you're just owed it.
And, I mean, this is how sort of free money destroys the human personality and renders it sort of filthy and corrupt.
So, now you have, once you start to subsidize these people's lifestyles, you breed These political organizations whose sole purpose, whose sole focus is to get more and more and more money from the government.
And this is the sort of firestorm that I'm talking about.
The more you subsidize, the more you generate political organizations that survive on subsidization.
That's why the moment you start to subsidize something, it gets asymptotic.
It's like a snowball rolling down a hill.
It gets larger and larger until it self-destructs.
So, the result of all of this was that the card were completely, utterly, and totally destroyed.
This resource that had lasted for 400 years without any state intervention and with primitive technology and with social controls Which had survived every single change in technology and trawler-based overfishing from other countries that came to fish off Newfoundland.
Every conceivable alteration in market conditions.
This resource had survived the Industrial Revolution and World Wars and everything.
...within the span of a dozen years was completely destroyed once the government began to manage it.
Again, all of it completely predictable, all of it completely understandable.
There's no conceivable way that any other outcome could occur from state management of resources.
And this is something that environmentalists simply won't talk about.
They simply won't talk about it.
And environmentalists, or environmentalism and environmentalists as a personality, is something which we'll deal with in another podcast.
But it is instructive.
It is very instructive to understand what it is that environmentalists talk about and what it is that they won't talk about.
Clearly, if they were interested in sustaining resources, the destruction of one of the world's major fisheries would be something that they would really focus on.
Now, did you hear anything about this from the Sierra Club?
Well, of course not!
Did you hear anything about it?
Were there any Greenpeace dinghies out there trying to stop this overfishing?
Was Bono getting involved in trying to lobby the government to figure out the spreadsheet errors it had in its calculations of what could be caught?
Well, of course not!
The reasons for that are both complicated and simple.
We'll get into the complications another time.
The simple fact of it, of course, is that these people are paid by the government and they are beholden to the government.
And so, like everybody else who's paid by the government, all they do is talk about capitalism.
Believe it or not, in an essay that I read about this, it was capitalism that was blamed for the destruction of these card stocks.
And I can only assume, with great charity towards the writer, that capitalism The term capitalism, by that he meant the law of supply and demand, rather than the free market.
So the law of supply and demand and the free market are two very different things.
The law of supply and demand covers government predations, and we've been talking about the law of supply and demand, and, you know, if you supply subsidies to fishermen, you will increase the demand for fishermen.
I mean, if you supply, if you subsidize or supply extra money to fishers, to people who fish, then you will end up With them demanding more fish from the ocean.
I mean, supply and demand works perfectly well within a government situation, but it's not the free market.
So those sort of two concepts are very important to distinguish, and nobody does, right?
They just talk about, well, you know, if I subsidize people and they end up overfishing, then supply and demand, and therefore capitalism has destroyed the fish stocks.
Which is funny, but sad, you know, that people use these terms without any comprehension, and with no idea that they have no idea what they're talking about.
Sort of like me ambling up to somebody who's got stomach pains and whipping out a butter knife and saying, hey, I've seen a couple of Scrubs episodes in one ER, maybe I can be your surgeon.
Or I can be your surgeon with no doubt or hesitation.
The idea that you can talk about capitalism or the free market and so on without years and years of study is just kind of funny.
It wouldn't need years of study if we were taught anything intelligent about it to begin with, but of course that's never the case.
So, what can we glean from this terrible, terrible, terrible tale of the destruction of one of the world's great natural resources?
In one twentieth of the time it took for them to be sustained in the free market to a large degree, perfectly well over many generations and many changes in social and technological standards.
What can we learn?
Well, of course we can learn that environmentalists are complete hypocrites, that they only talk about The private sector, and they only talk about loggers, and they only talk about the capitalists.
And why?
Well, because the government pays them, and because they hope to get nice tasty jobs in government, and because if they can get government regulations up, then they can be consultants.
Environmentalism is a business.
It's a state-run business.
It's got nothing to do with the free market, because the free market handles pollution perfectly well.
I mean, if you take the basic fact that human beings don't like to breathe soot, And that we like blue skies and we like a clean environment.
If you take that as a given, then the free market will provide it.
And if you don't take that as a given, then environmentalism, it doesn't matter.
Like, then environmentalism wouldn't exist as a movement.
The very success of the environmental movement, aside from the fact that it's all programmed into children very early on, the very success of it proves that people do care about the environment and will try And do things as cleanly as possible.
But, you know, when this sort of satanic mills, as they're called, these black smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution, and the fog and the soot and so on, that plagues London and other major industrial cities, that this is sort of put out as a, oh my heavens, capitalism is so dirty, this is what happens when people end up with the power or the freedom to pollute the skies and so on.
And this is all nonsense.
I mean, as I've mentioned on my blog, and I'll just touch on it briefly here, the air pollution of the Industrial Revolution was directly the result of state corruption.
So, for instance, there were lots of apple farmers with orchards in London because, of course, it wasn't that polluted in the early 19th century.
And, when the smokestacks began to go up, well, what happened?
Of course, the smoke poured into the sky, and the wind took it over the orchards of the farmers, and the farmers' orchards were not completely destroyed, but I bet you the apples didn't taste too good.
A Granny Smith sooty?
Would you like any of that?
Yummy!
So, what happened was, the farmers, citing a long-term common law precedence, took the capitalists, or the factory owners, to court.
Which is exactly what you'd expect.
If I destroy your property, you have the right to take me to court for restitution.
And it was pretty easy to figure out which factories were doing it, because they were sort of two doors away from the farmers.
So it was pretty easy to figure out what was going on.
And of course, the first couple of factories, it was very easy to figure out what was going on.
Once there were 150, it was sort of too late.
But by then, what had occurred had occurred, and it was impossible to go back in time.
So, the problem was that the orchard farmers, the orchard owners, took the factory owners to court saying, you guys are dumping all this crap on my orchards and you've got to fix it, you've got to deal with it, you've got to put some kind of scrubbers in, you've got to move your factories, or at the very least you have to pay me for the pollution that you're putting in.
And what happened?
The capitalists went to the state, went to the judges, and bribed them.
It's pretty simple, right?
I mean, if you are a factory owner, and we're just looking at the purely economic advantage of it, is it cheaper for you to clean up your factories, is it cheaper for you to buy out all of the orchard farmers, or is it cheaper for you to bribe a judge?
Now, this is not a DRO situation, so don't tell me that this is going to work in the free market as well, in a purely private society.
If you have any questions about that, have a look at the DRO articles that are either on my website, freedomain.blogspot.com, or on lurockwell.com, and I think that's fairly well explained, that that wouldn't occur under dispute resolution organizations or private agencies for mediating conflict.
But in a state-run system, you know, it's always cheaper to bribe the judges than it is to restore property damage, if the property damage is significant enough.
So the air pollution of the 19th century was entirely the fault of the corrupt state system of mediating disputes.
So this, of course, is something that's never talked about.
So, are the environmentalists interested in saving the environment?
Well, if they were interested in saving the environment, then they would do a heck of a lot more work in figuring out how to create a system wherein the environment would be protected.
They would do a market analysis.
They would get economists on board.
They would actually figure out how to deal with the problems of the environment.
So, for instance, with the Amazonian rainforest, they would look at it and say, well, that seems kind of unusual that people would buy property and then despoil it to that degree, that they would just clear-cut it and then leave it as a sort of smoking rubble of nothing.
Because that's sort of not what happens.
It's not what farmers do.
It's not what logging companies that actually get to own the land rather than just harvesting the timber rights.
So why would this be the case?
And then they would say, well, okay, so the problem is that the government in Colombia and Brazil and so on, and all these places where the rainforest is, that these governments simply have bad laws in place.
So they're putting the wrong sort of supply and demand incentives in place, which is causing people to destroy the environment.
If they were interested in the card stocks, then they would sadly, which they didn't do, they would figure out what happened and then they would look at other state management programs and oppose those violently, knowing with certainty that those state programs were going to result in the destruction of the environment.
But they don't do that.
What they do is they sit around chanting and they lobby the government and they get lots of tax money and they get lots of money from the government.
And they get lots of, you know, tax breaks and so on, and so they get to live their sort of granola, self-satisfied, smug lives, participating enormously in the destruction of the environment.
I mean, this is what is so ironic about the environmental movement, that they are participating enormously and blindly, let's hope blindly, because, well, you know, you can't really call it blindly, because they certainly have, the information is very available for them to figure out why environmental destruction occurs.
So, they are completely witting participants in the destruction of the environment, and they are the moral cover that the government so desperately needs in order to pray upon the taxpayers and to pray upon the resources and spend themselves into oblivion.
They need the moral cover, and the environmental movement provides that.
And you'll never ever see the environmental movement ever talk about property rights.
You will never see the environmental movement as a whole.
I'm sure there are pockets of it, but they will never talk about the need for the free market to deal with these issues.
They will never talk about the privatization.
...of land or resources.
All they ever talk about is more government programs.
And the statistics are completely clear.
The EPA has done nothing to improve the quality of the environment.
And, in fact, the taxes that go to the EPA could conceivably be used for cleaning up the environment or for making sure that people polluted less in the environment.
So all of that would be perfectly possible.
But the environmentalists are really uninterested in that.
They're not interested in the environment.
The environment is a means to an end.
I mean, they have all of these, you know, I'm-so-natural, I'm-so-granola attitudes, but they're not at all interested in saving the environment.
And of course, the other thing they could do, like if you look at this Alaskan situation, the other thing that they could do where, sorry, for those who are not in North America, the Alaskan situation is where there's lots of oil up in Alaska, but there's like two polar bears and four caribou, and so they don't want to have any drilling up there because it's pristine wilderness and blah blah blah blah blah.
Well, it's pretty simple.
All they would have to do is buy the land.
Just go buy the land.
Buy the land.
Buy the buy the buy the land.
And wouldn't you know it, your property rights will then cause you to be able to deny anybody who wants to come and drill all over that nice lovely tundra and through that, you know, 90 foot thick ice.
You will simply be able to buy it and then you can keep it and you don't have to worry About anybody coming and drilling on it.
But no, they don't want to do that.
Oh, that would cost money!
That would cost our money!
No, no, no, no.
See, the way we want to work it is we want to go to the government and get laws passed.
We want to lobby the government so that nobody else can use the land.
We don't actually want to buy it ourselves because that's kind of expensive.
And we'd rather keep the money for ourselves.
I mean, the environmental movement is a pretty rich group of people.
They're not doing too badly at all.
They're getting, you know, tons and tons of donations.
They get, as mentioned before, tax breaks, subsidies.
They get massive amounts of preferential legislation.
And they get to propagandize all of the children in the world.
And they get to be Pompous, self-aggrandizing moralists who are all about, we care about the environment and you don't, and boy aren't they just the most annoying people in the world.
And I've met a fair number of them in my work experience in the environmental area that I worked in, in software, and also when I worked up north there were lots of sort of people who were into the environment and very granola-based.
And it's just a pack of nonsense.
It is just a complete pack of nonsense.
The preservation of resources is a very complicated and economically challenging area.
You don't just get to put on a pair of Birkenstocks, hug a tree, read a bunch of socialist literature and say that you've solved the problem.
If you look at things like environmental legislation as well, Russia had the most environmental legislation on the books of just about any country in the world when it was under the Soviet regime.
And it was the worst environmental polluter in the world.
So environmental regulation has no correlation to pollution whatsoever.
So that's all pretty clear.
The government is by far the worst polluter of the environment than any private organization you could ever imagine.
Which of course is also entirely predictable.
People in the government don't own the land, so they're not going to benefit from maintaining its value or increasing its value.
So they can just prey on it, strip off all the resources, and they're gone anyway.
Or even if they're not gone, they don't personally pay for it.
If I buy a chunk of land that I want to put a fishing lodge on, and I end up cutting down all the trees so nobody wants to come to my fishing lodge, then it's my investment, it's my money that has gone to waste.
And that's fairly important to understand.
So that's why people are pretty careful when it's their own money, as I'm sure you're aware.
But when it's the government, yeah, whoever got fired for the disappearance of these cardstocks?
Well, nobody.
The consequences are all shifted to the taxpayer.
And nobody got fired.
Nobody lost their job.
What is it Bill Moyer said about Iraq...
He said there's something kind of wrong when the only person to lose his job for terrorism is me.
But it's very true.
You can never find anybody who's responsible.
In the government, because they're all hiding behind this black fog of violence, and so there's just no way to reach through that and find anybody who's responsible.
So we'll talk about responsibility in another podcast, because it is quite fascinating, the dilution of responsibility that's in the public sector.
So the environmental destruction that occurs at the hands of the government is just unparalleled.
You just don't hear about it.
And the reason you don't hear about it, of course, is because the environmentalists are paid by the government.
So just a bunch of propagandists who are part of... And the government pays them so that the government can increase its power, right?
The same way that the kings used to pay the priests so that the priests would tell everybody how the king was put there by God and you should never disobey him.
The government pays environmentalists so that the environmentalists can whip up scare stories about the free market, which provides excuses for greater government control and power and intervention and violence and so on.
So it's exactly why the government pays the intellectuals and the school teachers.
It's just so it can increase its power.
There's a great Sopranos episode.
I don't watch the Sopranos anymore because I found it just too violent, but I found it a very instructive lesson in political power, where one of the Sopranos episodes, or a couple of them, This guy who owns a sports store gets involved with Tony Soprano in gambling and he ends up running up this huge gambling debt and Tony Soprano says, well, no problem.
You don't have to pay off the debt.
You just have to, you know, write some checks on your store and you have to let us sell off some of your merchandise and you have to falsify your invoices and so on.
So they end up living in his store, they end up basically destroying this man's credit rating, his business, they make a small fortune off his good business history and his existing stock and inventory, and they sublease without telling anybody, and they just get into all of these financial shenanigans that end up completely destroying his store, his credit rating, his entire career.
And at one point he's just exasperated and frustrated and crazed and upset and he's like, well you people are just, you come in here, you're like termites.
You just come in and destroy everything.
And Tony Soprano's like, yeah, that's kind of what we do.
I mean, didn't you know that?
We're the bad guys.
I mean, that's pretty clear.
That's our job.
We come in and we destroy things.
That's what we do.
Now, of course, it's not something that a Mafia guy would ever say, but it is something that's very instructive, but not in regards to the Mafia.
Of course, it's very instructive regarding the state.
This is what the state does.
It comes in and it destroys things, because violence destroys things.
And it destroys the people who are doing the destroying as well.
So it destroys the bureaucrats, and it destroys the people who are in charge, and it destroys the policemen who enforce it, and it destroys all of it.
The only people who survive are people like us who speak out against it.
The only people who make it out of this black maze of hell that is government power is those of us who speak out against it.
We can retain our souls and our integrity and our happiness and our joy and our Capacity to love and be loved and all of those good things.
Everyone else just completely rolls into this woodchipper of violence and gets blended into nothing.
And you see these sort of very foolish things that occur like the calculation thing is just The calculation problem is constant in environmentalism.
So, for instance, if you want to read an entertaining view of this, there's a book... Boy, can I remember the name of it?
State of Fear, which is a book that has come out by Michael Crichton, which is interesting because it's actually anti-environmental, and it's well worth a listen.
Or if you like audiobooks, there's a website called audible.com that I enjoy.
So, have a look at that.
But, you know, they're talking about these projections of temperature.
Well, it's all a lie.
It's all a complete lie.
And it's very much a lie, like, they had all these cardstock calculations in Newfoundland, in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, about how much can you catch.
And of course, it was based on two erroneous assumptions.
One is that there won't be any pressure to create an artificial increase in the amount of card that people are allowed to catch, A. And B, people will accurately report their card, knowing that if they do accurately report their card or under-report their card, they'll get to make more money.
And if they don't do it, then everybody else will under-report their card and get to make all the money they could have made.
That that's going to result in accurate self-reporting of the amount of cod that has been caught.
Well, of course, that's not going to happen at all.
There's going to be enormous political pressure.
You're going to submit these numbers and they're going to say, oh, no, no, no, they've got to be higher than that.
We simply can't publish those.
And if you do want to publish those, you know, we'll fire you, we'll find some problem, we'll audit you.
Don't underestimate the threats that would be levied against people who would want to put out accurate numbers for this total allocated catch number.
And those would be numbers calculated from the existing self-reporting that comes out of the card fisherman, which also is complete nonsense and has nothing to do with reality, because they're paid to under-report, right?
I mean, this is directly paid to under-report.
So I doubt very much that there was an error in the calculations.
I think they just didn't want to say, well, there were these situations or circumstances which were completely predictable, under which the model was never going to work.
They didn't want to say that because that's just so obvious a screw-up that it might make people somewhat hesitant about trusting the government with these kinds of incredibly sensitive numbers.
And also they would have to say, well, we set up a situation wherein self-interest, which we can always count on, would guarantee that the card stocks would be destroyed.
Well, who set that up?
Blah blah blah.
There would actually be some blame there.
So what they do is they blame, you know, a calculation in an algorithm somewhere that nobody's ever seen, no one can ever verify, and, you know, it's probably a lie.
But even if it's not a lie, that it all comes down to one calculation from some guy in Ottawa who's going to face no negative consequences for any kind of errors, well, of course, even if you accept all the rest of it, this is the kind of stuff that you're relying on.
And they say it took a couple of years to figure out that there was an error?
Come on, please!
I mean, how stupid do you think we are?
Of course it didn't take a couple of years to figure out that there was an error.
Even if you accept all of the self-interest stuff, I mean, the idea that, oh, it's just an error, it didn't take a couple of years, oh... I mean, it's just stories that people put out in order to make people go shrug and go, ugh.
You know, when somebody lies just so openly, nobody wants to bother dealing with them, and that's the entire purpose.
The government puts out these ridiculous lies just so you go, oh, forget it.
I mean, where do I even start with you?
I mean, if somebody says, I was late for work because I was abducted by space aliens, And they say it sort of perfectly calmly, you know, I was abducted by space aliens.
I mean, do you dig in?
Do you really try and figure out?
Well, no, of course not.
You're just like, okay, well, I guess you've put out enough ink.
You're a squid that I've grabbed that's put out enough ink that I'm just gonna let you go because I don't even want to start dealing with what on earth is going on in your brain.
And that's the same thing where you say, oh, we've destroyed this 400 year old resource because there was an error in our calculations.
That's just kind of like a joke, right?
That's just kind of like...
Okay, it's just such a stupid lie that we just hope you're going to throw up your hands in despair and give up.
And, of course, that's what people do because they know they can't ever find out the truth.
And even if they did, they wouldn't be able to affect anything because, again, the government hides behind this thick, blazing moat of violence and nobody can cross over.
I mean, this is what is the problem with people trying to figure out the truth about 9-11 as well.
So, one last example that I'll give you of government mismanagement is Yellowstone National Park.
That Yellowstone National Park had too many bears, so they introduced wolves, and then there were too many wolves, so they introduced this, and they've just been constantly mangling the ecosystem in the Yellowstone National Park and in all of the other parks that they deal with.
And the amount of destruction that goes on through government mismanagement of resources in this kind is also enormously underreported.
The government has care, custody and control over these resources and that these resources are constantly facing problems is just ridiculous.
So have a look into the history of that too if you like.
And then the last calculation thing that I'll talk about is of course this calculation based on global warming.
Global warming is a very complicated topic and I won't be able to deal with it now.
To any degree of justice, but what I will say is that the numbers are false.
The numbers are purely false.
This hockey stick projection, which is where they say, oh, the temperature for the last couple of hundred years has been going up radically.
So this hockey stick, this sort of being a projection that goes up slowly and then very quickly, which unscrupulous software sales managers always put into the last quarter of a company's sales projections to get investors to invest.
But this problem of hockey stick projections in the global warming scenario is enormous, and it's a completely falsified thing.
And so, this guy had these projections, I can't remember, some academic had these projections where he said, well, the temperature of the world was such and such for so long, and now it's just suddenly risen enormously, catastrophically, oh my god, and this is what got the whole global warming movement started.
I mean, this is what the entire basis of the whole thing And then it came to light, I think six or eight months ago, that these projections were all false.
That this guy had a, quote, error in his model.
So they fed in random numbers, and they got a hockey stick projection.
They fed in numbers which were the opposite of a hockey stick projection, and they got, yes, you guessed it, a hockey stick projection.
So, no matter what numbers you fed in, you always got exactly the same results.
So then, you know, technically you would just call it bullcrap, right?
I mean, it's just a load of nonsense that is completely falsified.
And so, of course, you would then naturally expect that people would go, oh man, you mean we base this whole global warming thing on an error?
Well, let's stop!
let's stop all of this billions of dollars of funding and legislation and bureaucratic jobs and all of that stuff that the global warming movement has engendered.
So we'll just back out.
We'll apologize.
We'll also refund all of the money that has been spent on asking people to conform with Kyoto standards.
Well, of course not.
I mean, the numbers don't matter anymore.
What matters now is people are going to keep their bureaucratic jobs and their academic training and their magazines and their websites and their funding.
I mean, it just doesn't matter.
I mean, the original facts don't matter at all, and that's the most important thing to understand about the environmentalism movement.
And it's not the environmentalism movement in particular, it's just government subsidized things in general.
They have no interest in the facts whatsoever.
All they're interested in is grabbing tall tales and projecting them as violently and aggressively as possible into the public sphere so that they can maintain and increase their funding.
So it's exactly the same as the welfare state.
A welfare state uses the poor to gain funding.
They have no interest in getting rid of poverty, as you can see by the statistics.
And the environmentalist movement is interested in using environmentalist scares to gain access to public funding.
They have no interest in improving the environment whatsoever.
And you can see that statistically.
This isn't sort of my prejudice.
Just look at the numbers.
The environmentalist movement has done nothing to improve the quality of the environment.
That's all been the result of increased technology and improved technology in the private sector.
Because environmental waste is a cost that people want to get rid of, even cost to the air.
So we'll talk a little bit more about the economics of waste this afternoon.
Thanks so much for listening, as always, and I hope you're doing well.
Good Lord, it was an hour drive, so we have an hour podcast.
It was quite a long way from my home because it was snowy.
Thanks so much for listening.
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