History? What History?

Later this month, leaders and solons from all over the world will converge in Paris for the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, dubbed COP21. Their objective will be to achieve a new global agreement on “climate,” which really means an agreement to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions generated by human activity.

The earnestness with which the participants will act stands in direct conflict with the waning confidence level in global warming predictions. The unpredicted and ill-explained “pause” in global temperature increases is approaching 20 years in duration (and many expect it to last a lot longer), the latest research shows that the mass of the Antarctic ice cap is increasing and that the previously reported decreases in a particular region are due to volcanic activity rather than global warming, the northern polar ice cap, predicted to have disappeared entirely by now, has recovered from its earlier losses, the predicted increase in frequency and ferocity of extreme weather hasn’t happened, global famines have not happened, the polar bears are thriving, and on and on. One would hope that the failure of prognostications and predictive models would cause the world’s leaders to step back from actions that will do enormous harm to economies and lives. Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be holding true – there are reports that government agencies are revising historical data in a fashion that makes warming appear greater than before, and politicians are stepping up efforts to silence dissent and criticism (e.g. the NY Attorney General’s action against ExxonMobil, alleging that the company intentionally deceived investors by understating the threat from global warming).

But, the near-religious commitment to the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming narrative operates from a broader context, at least for some. A high level UN executive offered up a rare bit of honesty earlier this year. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, [stated][(http://www.investors.com/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/):

This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.

Setting aside the over-earnestness of this proclamation (“the history of mankind” vs “150 years”), the implications therein are staggering. The 150 years of the Industrial Revolution has done more to elevate the lot of the human race than the entirety of the history of mankind that preceded it. For millennia, most of humanity lived at a subsistence level, and average life expectancy remained essentially constant at something like 30 years. It has risen meteorically during, and more importantly because of, the industrial revolution, to 80+ years in the industrialized nations today. The benefits of the industrial revolution have touched all corners of the world, and the rise out of poverty of the poorest of today is both a direct consequence of and greatly accelerated by the fruits of the industrial revolution.

Yet, to read Ms. Figueres’ message, the economic system that fostered the industrial revolution and all that has come since is a huge problem that needs to be ended. It seems pretty obvious that she’s talking about the evils of capitalism, and her statements taken within the context of the top-down economic management approach the UN and world leaders are proposing strongly imply that the model she and her ilk will seek to impose on the world is some form of statism.

Varying degrees of statism already rampant throughout the industrial and developing world, but they’re apparently not statist enough for Ms. Figueres, nor do the trends seem to be. Nations like China, Russia, India, and even Sweden have been abandoning some statist elements of their economic systems in favor of free market approaches, and they and their people are reaping the benefits of those shifts towards capitalism. I assume this doesn’t sit well with her and the rest of the geniuses who apparently think that capitalism is the worst thing since white socks with Birkenstocks, and that the world needs much less capitalism and much more government control.

A quick look back at history is called for. A century and a half ago, a bit after the Industrial Revolution had started changing the world, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels put forth ideas that ultimately led to the rise of communism, socialism, fascism and other forms of heavy-handed government control of economies and lives. Then the 20th century rolled around, and the statist regimes born out of those ideas started racking up bodies.

Some approximate numbers, from this and other sources:

• China, 73 million dead.
• Russia/USSR, 62 million dead.
• Nazi Germany, 20 million dead.
• Vietnam/Cambodia, 4 million dead.
• North Korea, 3 million dead.

And those are just the 7-8 figure tallies. Statism in its most expansive forms led to the death of over 150 million people in the 20th century alone. Meanwhile, those statist countries lagged the freer, more capitalist countries of the world in living standards and economic output tremendously. It is only in recent decades, not coincidentally in conjunction with the incursion of capitalism into statist nations, that the poorest in those nations have started to climb out of subsistence living and approach a living standard that the poorest in industrialized nations surpassed decades ago.

Despite all this history, despite this horrific death toll, despite all the evidence that, to quote Milton Friedman:

In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.

Ms. Figueres would have us ignore all these stark and irrefutable lessons of history, and attempt yet again to make heavy-handed statism work, to undo the system that did more for the entirety of humanity than any other system ever conceived. For the purposes of imposing a solution to a problem that has not been verified, she’d risk reinstituting systems that spawned incomprehensible amounts death and suffering.

This speaks of a staggering level of arrogance coupled with a stunning level of ignorance. This combination, sadly all too common in both the best and brightest in positions of power and in those who put them in those positions of power, is one of the greatest banes that humankind has ever faced.