Category Archives: Economics

Has wind power REALLY saved the UK £104 billion?

In a word, no.

Article by Kit Knightly.

Excerpts:

I’m sure it seems the height of egotism to quote myself perpetually, but I’m going to do it anyway:

“The Science” is a self-sustaining industry of academics who need jobs and owe favours.

An ongoing quid pro quo relationship between the researchers – who want honors and knighthoods and tenure and book deals and research grants and to be the popular talking head explaining complex ideas to the multitudes on television – and the corporations, governments and “charitable foundations” who have all of those things in their gift.

This system doesn’t produce research intended to be read, it creates headlines for celebrities to tweet, links for “journalists” to embed, sources for other researchers to cite.

An illusion of solid substantiation that comes apart the moment you actually read the words, examine the methodology or analyse the data.

Self-reporting surveys, manipulated data, “modelling studies” that spit-out pre-ordained results. Affiliated-authors paid by the state or corporate interests to provide “evidence” that supports highly profitable or politically convenient assumptions.

…Interlacing layers of nothing designed to create the impression of something.

This pro-mask “study” is why you should NEVER “Trust the Science”

So, is the claim true? It doesn’t matter. That is entirely beside the point. The paper has already done its job by generating headlines like this, [. . .]

This study is just a single tile in mosaic of bullshit. It helps create an image and sell a story.

In this case, the hope is that enough dodgy studies in conflict with observable reality will override people’s awareness that their energy bills are getting bigger and their bank balances smaller.

Good luck with that.

Why Banks Needed World War I to Survive

And why they still need crises to continue to survive: It’s due to the fractional reserve system, which allows banks to lend more money than they have. It incentivises them to go just a little beyond what is prudent. If enough of them do (as is inevitable), the system will collapse – UNLESS the the bad loans and unredeemable securities are dumped onto someone else. That someone was the banks governments and thus, ultimately, the tax payers.

Why didn’t the governments refuse to accept this white elephant? Because they were in the midst of a crisis where they desperately needed the banks. What a convenient coincidence for the banks. Interestingly, it happens during every major crisis.

22-minute video here. (Sources in the first, pinned comment underneath the video.)

The “Climate Change” Danger

Review of the book “Fossil Future: Why Global Human Florishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less”, by Lew Rockwell.

Quote:

Epstein thinks that the danger from global warming has been exaggerated, but though he presents extensive evidence in support of this, his main contribution lies elsewhere. He argues that modern civilization depends on fossil fuels and that far from curtailing their use, we need to spread them to the impoverished parts of the world. So great are the benefits from using the fuels that only a true “end of the world” nightmare caused by CO2 emission could require that we shift to other energy sources, and despite the alarmists’ caterwauling, this nightmare is most unlikely to occur. Moreover, Epstein holds that the benefits of fossil fuels are so obvious that only a defect in thinking could have induced people to ignore them. He is a philosopher as well as an energy economist, and he expertly identifies the false thought pattern that has led to our current confusions.

Epstein says, “Whenever we hear about what the ‘experts’ think, we need to keep in mind that most of us have no direct access to what most expert researchers in the field think. We are being told what experts think through a system of institutions and people…. Understanding how this system, which I call our ‘knowledge system,’ works and how it can go wrong is the key to being able to spot when what we’re told the ‘experts’ think is very wrong—about fossil fuels or anything else.”

Rerum Novarum: A Manifesto for the Ages

Article by Sebastian Wang.

Excerpt:

In our own time, the relevance of Leo XIII’s teaching is obvious. We live in economies where the forms of capitalism have been retained but the substance hollowed out: markets in name, but in practice dominated by a nexus of government and corporate power; competition in rhetoric, but in reality a game for those who can pay for access and influence. The same moral principles that led Leo to reject socialism oblige us to reject this corporatist order. The goal is not to level all differences of wealth, but to ensure that wealth is obtained and held by right, not by privilege; that property is widely held; that the worker has a path to independence; and that the State remembers it exists to serve persons, not to manage them.