Knowledge and our future- letter from Phil H to news24sevenTV

Dear Editor Ian,

 

Excuse this long missive. I haven't written for a while, and these issues have been simmering away in my mind.

 

I like Richard Prosser's blunt approach to fixing our broke country. But he has unusual ideas about the effectiveness of market protection for industry. Last time we had such a system of protection, the NZ consumer paid from twice to hundreds of times as much, for products 10 years or more out of date, compared to in countries with populations that enabled economies of scale. Richard Prosser is right that we cannot just transplant the Hong Kong Mass Transit System onto NZ, because we do not have the population to make it pay; but neither can we transplant Samsung Electronics.

 

THE "must-read" on this subject, is "From Wool to Weta" by Prof. Paul Callaghan, a Vic Uni nuclear physicist whose views on our anti-nuke laws, would be very agreeable to Richard Prosser. Richard Prosser and Paul Callaghan agree completely on the point that bulk commodities, unprocessed goods, and tourism, are no way to wealth. But you do not get Samsung Electronics by providing its founders with a protected market of 4 million people. What you need are conditions in which smart new internationally competitive businesses can start up and thrive.

 

Richard Prosser identifies several things which would help here. We could easily have the world's most efficient transport network if we just built the roads we need and stopped wasting our time and money with dead duck public transport schemes. Education, too, is important, and I would ask Richard Prosser whether he thinks it is worth paying 100,000 idealistic boys and girls to become environmental protection and urban planning graduates, when there are only 1,000 jobs available and even these are a positive curse to our economic future. One of our biggest problems, I suggest, is the attitudes of our oncoming generations; it is doubtful whether we are going to get any NZ Bill Gates's in the near future.

 

The reasons that Silicon Valley got started are surprising when one looks into it. No such thing could happen today in California's, or NZ's, regulatory environment. Basically, young geeks could buy cheap plots of semi rural land and put up cheap tin buildings on them, and form loose agreements with other youngsters to work on their clever ideas together; and then big venture capital was easy to get once the ideas were taking shape. But now, you become a "class enemy" by daring to put a cheap and nasty building up, or put any building up beyond the urban fringe where land is cheap; or to use resources, to employ people, and especially, to do tricky science stuff that upsets our Green witchhunters.

 

Now, Silicon Valley is flat out driving its business sector away, to India and Texas, and California is an economic basket case, with 12% unemployment. California has succeeded in halting all construction of roads, dams, and electricity generation plants; they have succeeded in conserving more and more land and species of fish, insects, and plants. They have also succeeded in driving land prices up, within their urban limits, by a factor of up to 60 times in places. What they have not succeeded in doing, is preserving existing successful industry, let alone allowing for continued new start-ups and jobs growth.

 

It is also a fact that almost all economic growth comes from NEW businesses. A high proportion of the most successful businesses around, did not exist 10 years before. Any nation or region in which the rate of formation and growth of NEW businesses has plummented, is truly headed for long term decline. Jim Rogers, one of the world's most successful inventors, has said in numerous interviews that the conditions for the next Silicon Valleys now exist mostly in India and other parts of Asia, and he advises smart youngsters to take their ideas over there if there is no future for them in their own countries.

 

Tata Industries and other conglomerates in India are flat out building small apartment blocks of a modern standard, for slum dwellers to move up to; the cost per apartment is under $10,000. Apartments of comparable size and quality are actually hundreds of thousands of dollars here, entirely because of the land conservation racket. We are kidding ourselves if we think overpriced land is a sign of economic maturity and prosperity. We are also kidding ourselves if we think we could not solve the problem of housing affordability overnight if we simply gave people and businesses the freedom to do so. It is dangerous nonsense to blame all our ills on "untrammelled free markets" and "deregulation". It is REGULATION, and too much bad regulation, that has given us some of the the world's most overpriced land and houses, WITHOUT actually preventing any ills like "leaky homes syndrome".

 

The pressures of accomodation expense on incomes will only add to our low international competitiveness. We could sustain far more "internationally competitive" pay rates if our land, and housing and accomodation costs, were down to what they should be, at a fraction of what they are. The irony here, is that while we are debating Emmissions Trading Schemes, far bigger damage has already been done to our wallets and our economy by local body Urban Planners being (mis)guided by global warming mania long since.

 

ON THE SUBJECT OF THE GLOBAL WARMING CON:

 

I can relate completely to your correspondent Alan Blake's comment:

 

".....at some point along this journey the bulldust detectors kicked in and I started to question the increasingly shrill claims of the AGW lobby.....

 

".....more and more people are beginning to wake up to this giant delusion and call it by its correct name - a lie....."

 

The IPCC went "a bridge too far" with me personally when they published the hockey stick graph in 2001; and anyone who knew enough history and knew of the medieval warm period, should have likewise become sceptical at that point. So, too, should anyone with a basic understanding of air and water thermodynamics. The sun's ability to heat the air, land, and oceans, is considerable; transference of heat from water (and land) to the air, is less so; and transference of heat from the air TO water, is scientific nonsense. Any fool should know that if the oceans are warming and cooling, that is far more important than anything that is going on in the air, and it cannot possibly be an end result of a process that began with ATMOSPHERIC warming.

 

But as I investigated what had happened to the scientific understanding of the Medieval Warm Period, what I found was that honest scientists were already objecting in large numbers, to the IPCC's deliberately ignoring literally hundreds of peer reviewed studies going back decades, in favour of just one study based on tree rings in Siberia. The authors and peer reviewers of this study were IPCC cronies, and refused to allow any further reviewing of their data. It has taken the Climategate leaks to confirm the suspicions of all of us who were sceptical. That Siberian tree ring study was a disgraceful fraud, pure and simple.

 

Like Alan Blake, I believe that we are far too polite and naive to credit anyone involved in this, as having acted in good faith. I find it difficult to believe, even, that anyone claiming credentials as a scientist, could ever have honestly been anything other than sceptical, given that the whole hypothesis always was so contrary both to basic science and longstanding historical fact. I find it sickening that taxpayer funded scientists who are either terminally incompetent, or willing parties to politically instigated fraud, still retain their positions of public trust; while the "sceptics" have been marginalised and their careers ruined.

 

The moral of this story is that it is easy to pull off mass fraud like this when most people are so poorly educated, unread, and ignorant that they are unaware of even the basics of knowledge that would have caused them to be suspicious. The success of the AGW lie is not the only consequence of dumbed-down education, hedonism, and apathy. We get the governments we deserve; we deserve "Helen Lite", and we have got it, complete with anti-smacking laws, grievance industry pandering, and an emissions trading scheme.

 

As for the mainstream media, they are the most culpable of all in this. They are worse than the blind leading the blind. Enthusiasm for utopian one world socialist government, with which the journalism profession is infested, amounts in the end to traitorship to our society. Far from being "society's watchdogs", these people, and the politicians they anoint, would sell us out like Vidkun Quisling sold Norway to Adolf Hitler. And of all the underlying justifications for policy making, distinguished commentators like Winston Churchill, C. S. Lewis, and F. A. Hayek have all said that the one we should fear most, is "science". Churchill referred to humanity "descend(ing) into a dark abyss lit only by the light of perverted science".

 

It is not "harmless", to use faked science to achieve utopian political ends that you would not have been able to democratically sell to your public on their own merits. It is unlikely in the extreme that "science", having been faked once to one political end, would not be faked again to other political ends. And it is doubtful that scientific method itself, and the progress we have enjoyed through it, would survive.

 

Yours Faithfully

 

Philip H