Cuba Takes a Big Step Away from Socialism.

Cuba's socialist dictatorship has announced that it will be taking some huge steps away from socialism. Just days ago Fidel Castro admitted that the Cuban model wasn't working for Cuba, though he backtracked on that after his comments got widespread attention. But more importantly the dictatorship, now run by Fidel's brother, Raul, has announced steps that indicate that socialism is one the way out in the Cuban Marxist paradise.

The Cuban government has said that it will be firing at least half a million state employees. And they indicated that the total number laid off could reach 1 million. The official employment numbers in Cuba show that 5.1 million people have jobs. At the moment 10% of all the employed could be laid off by early in the new year.

The government will loosen regulations restricting private employment hoping to take up the slack. Individuals will be allowed to form cooperatives or be self-employed.

The only legal trade union, which is run by the Communist Party, says: "Our state cannot and should not continue supporting businesses, production entities and services with inflated payrolls, and losses that hurt our economy are ultimately counterproductive, creating bad habits and distorting worker conduct."

The problem is that 95% of all employees work for the state and the state is inefficient when it comes to producing wealth. This means the average wage in Cuba is $20 per month.

Cuba needs reform but reform is not easy. The collapse of socialism in the Soviet block showed that change is not easy and that even good reforms can have short term bad consequences. Centrally planning reform is as difficult as centrally planning an economy. Big steps sometimes works, sometimes many small steps are better. Russia had to take big steps to change but people had become used to the old system and found ways to work around problems. Reforms sometimes meant that the loopholes no longer worked and that made some areas less efficient.

China, as totalitarian as it is, has taken many steps in the right direction and an an accelerating pace. There is now a vibrant private economy there to take up the slack. But if Cuba lays off 10% of all employed people it is unlikely that the tiny private sector will be able to absorb them fast enough. The reforms Cuba announced are needed but should have come before the layoffs, not after.

People do not understand how devastating it is when a socialist system falls apart, as all socialist systems eventually do. When I was in Bulgaria a few years ago the socialist safety net had collapsed completely. I watched old women begging on the streets or trying to sell pathetic bouquets of flowers in front of the cathedral in the hope of earning just a few cents.

It broke my heart. One sad women clutched her tiny bouquet with a hungry look on her face. I counted all my money, leaving just enough to take a taxi to the airport in the morning, and gave the full amount to this woman. In dollar terms it was just a few dollars, for her it was days worth of income. She grabbed my and and started kissing it and crying. I could barely watch.

This is the danger of centralized state control. As bad as it is when one business goes under imagine what happens if they are all run by the same body of men and that body falls apart. The private sector works better because it is larger with many sectors. Weakness in one area doesn't mean destruction of all areas. But when you rely on one body, and when that one body has wiped out competition in the form of other bodies providing goods and services, you are in very risky situation. The old saying is that one should put all of one's eggs in one basket. Socialism is putting all eggs in one basket—the State basket.

But socialist states collapse. With them the entire health system collapses, the education system falls apart, housing falls apart (literally), jobs disappear and the tiny pensions that many elder have come to depend upon completely disappears leaving them in the streets to beg. Yet people justify socialism on the basis that it prevents the very thing I saw in the former socialist republics.

Socialism is like drunk driving, everything goes fine until it doesn't and when it doesn't you have a major mess on your hands. And like drunk drivers eventually things will hit the wall.

If the communist system in China disappeared the country could probably weather the storm because it has a vibrant private economy today. Cuba, which stayed true to socialist teachings, in spite of evidence telling them not to, has no such private sector. And I question whether it can build one fast enough to soften the blows of the necessary reforms.

Evangelicals Take Aim at Liberty

The Washington Post has an article entitled, "Is the Tea Party unbiblical?" My first reply is: So what if it is?

There seems to be this move by the Left to invoke the Bible to justify their big governmentalism. Now I personally think they are firmer ground than free market types who think that a book rooted in primitive tribalism can support their views. But I have to ask the Left why they are bothering. First, most of them don't take the fables and myths of the Bible seriously. Second, they are leaping onto the religious bandwagon just as the American public is, as Afrikaners would say, "gatvol" of the mixing of religion and politics. The Left rightfully ignores the screed of dead tribalists when it comes to homosexuality and a host of other issues, so why invoke this outdated morality when it comes to so-called "social justice" issues?

These types are as transparent as the Religious Right which tried to impose their biblical values on society through the use of coercive government. If it was wrong for Falwell why is it right for the socialist types in Christianity?

The second thing about the article is that by "Tea Party" while they target the gaggle of right-wing, neanderthals ranting about immigrants and taxes under the Tea Party banner, their real target is the rather unrelated creed of libertarianism. The Tea Party is not libertarian. It shares some libertarian sentiments but the views of Tea Party types is only for small government some of the time. When it comes to social issues they tend to support big government all the way.

The Post article quotes some professor of Christian ethics who is involved with a Left-wing lobby group called "New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good." The name alone is a clue that these are people are collectivists. But that is what I would expect. The Bible is a tribalistic book and tribalism is another form of collectivism. I don't deny there is a common good but that good is the protection of the equal rights of all. What the Left means is a redistributive state where some are penalized for the sake of others. By definition that is not the common good since some are sacrificed for the well-being of others. Telling the sacrificed, as they are economically raped by the state, that it is good for them is absurd. Big government always acts on behalf of some while the other are the "acted upon."

This professor, David Gushee, says: "This kind of small government libertarianism, small taxes, leave-me-alone-to-live-my-life ideology has more in common with Ayn rand than it does with the Bible." I would have to agree there. Biblical government doesn't leave people alone. Ask the "heretics" who were executed by God-fearing biblicists! Ask gay people who are on the sharp end of the biblical sword when it comes to marriage equality and basic civil rights.

At all times in history the Bible has been mostly invoked to oppress not to liberate. The orthodox Christians in the South had plenty of Scripture to back up their slave-owning practices. Individuals who opposed equality of rights for women had no shortage of biblical references at that call. In his dissection of socialism Mises wrote that "no movement against private property which has arisen in the Christian world has failed to seek authority in Jesus, the Apostles, and the Christian Fathers, not to mention those who, like Tolstoy, made the Gospel resentment against the rich the very heart and soul of their teaching." Mises said, and I concur, that the Christian church "has prepared the soil for the destructive resentment of modern socialist thought." Mises claimed that: "Any would-be destroyers of the modern social order could count on finding a champion in Christianity."

The Post does quote some Tea Party officials who claim "Jesus was not for socialism," and these people are right as well. How can this be the case?

The point Mises makes is not that the New Testament advocated socialism because it didn't. It didn't advocate any kind of economic order at all. Certainly the church in The Book of Acts practiced a form of collective ownership where each contributed their worldly goods into a common pool for redistribution. But it was not a common ownership of the means of production, which is what socialism really is. Redistribution of wealth is just part of the socialist gospel, not the entire thing. Prof. Anthony Waterman wrote that early Christianity "had no recognizable body of social thought" whatsoever.

What it had, however, was utter contempt for material existence and wealth. These believers accepted the promise of Jesus that he would return to earth before the last of them died and establish his kingdom. He told them to not worry about production at all but to wait in anticipation for the end of the world. There was no emphasis on economics because there was no need for an economy—the world was coming to an end. Mises wrote:

It is only in this way that we can understand why, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus recommended his own people to take no thought for food, drink, and clothing; why he exhorts them not to sow or reap or gather in barns, not to labor or spin. It is the only explanation, too, of his and his disciples’ ‘communism.’ This ‘communism’ is not Socialism; it is not production with means of production belonging to the community. It is nothing more than a distribution of consumption goods among the members of the community—’unto each, according as any one had need.’ It is a communism of consumption goods, not of the means of production, a community of consumers, not of producers. The primitive Christians do not produce, labor, or gather anything at all. The newly converted realize their possessions and divide the proceeds with the brethren and sisters. Such a way of living is untenable in the long run. It can be looked upon only as a temporary order which is what it was in fact intended to be. Christ’s disciples lived in daily expectation of Salvation.

Church father Tertullian put it this way: "I have no concern in this life except to depart from it as speedily as possible." Edward Gibbon, whose work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, showed the detrimental impact of Christianity, wrote:

The ancient Christians were animated by a contempt
for their present existence, and by a just confidence of
immortality, of which the doubtful and imperfect faith of
modern ages cannot give us any adequate notion. In the
primitive church, the influence of truth was very
powerfully motivated by an opinion which, however, it
may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, has
not been found agreeable to experience. It was
universally believed that the end of the world and the
kingdom of Heaven were at hand.

What the socialists found useful in the New Testament was contempt it expressed for this world and material possessions, which often expresses itself in the oddest of places. When Mary is told that she is with child, supposedly through some miracle, she exalts God and denounces the rich, saying that God "hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away." Jesus said that it was the poor who were blessed. His brother James warned: "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. In the story of the rich man and Lazarus we learn that poverty-stricken Lazarus dies to awake in Abraham's bosom, while the rich man burns in hell. The only crime mentioned appears to be his wealth.

Paul, the real founder of Christianity, said that the poor aren't tempted to abandon God but that the rich "fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil, which some coveted after, they have erred from the faith." Jesus was more direct. He said that you "cannot serve God and mammon" and told his followers to avoid work, toil or wealth-building. He urged them to "seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take things of itself."

This contempt for wealth and the wealthy energizes much of the resentment behind socialism. As the pro-market theologian Michale Novak admits: "The gospel accounts amply supply the liberation (socialist) theologians of our day with a rhetoric to be employed against riches and the rich." Barbara Ward, in her work Faith and Freedom, wrote: "Communism owes its immense vitality more to its biblical vision of the mighty put down and the poor raised up than to its theories of value or its interpretation of history."

Conservative sociologist Peter Berger says that the roots of western socialism "are undoubtedly in the communitarian tradition of Western Christianity." And pro-capitalist Catholic Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn said that "the ethical content of Christianity" fosters and promotes "the temptation toward socialism." He wrote: "Along the path of the socialist utopia lies a day of judgement when the humble will be exalted and the rich and mighty brutally dispossessed. And from the Socialist-Communist utopia itself can be gleaned the picture of paradise lost—and regained; a new age of innocence, of peace and brotherly love, with envy, crime and hatred banished forever."

So both the Christian Left and Christian Right are correct to a limited degree. Christianity, as the Right says, didn't exactly preach socialism. But, as the Left notes, it was contemptuous of wealth and the wealthy. It had disdain for material existence and preached an apocalyptic judgement against the mighty and wealthy in favor of the poor and dispossessed. Marxism leaned on Christian mythology to make its points. After centuries of the Gospel, the soil was well prepared for Marx's secular version of the same thing. Unlike Jesus, however, Marx didn't promise revenge and paradise in the future, but in the here and now.

If one must pick which of these two odious arms of religious statism is more correct, as far as which way the New Testament leans politically, I would have to go with the Left-wing Christians. And that is how most Christianity, over the ages, has leaned.

Eventually the Christians realized that Jesus wasn't coming back when he said he would. Eventually they needed a system of ethics in regards to production and distribution. And when that ethic was formed it was rooted in the envious attitudes of the New Testament with its contemptuous views of material existence and wealth. That pushed the Church in a statist direction economically.

The Religious Right is correct in that neither Jesus, nor the New Testament, had a particularly socialist economic policy. It had no policy whatsoever. But it did have the attitudes that the socialists have used for a couple of centuries now to inspire contempt for depoliticized markets, private property, and free exchange.

Why I am NOT a Leftist.

I ought to be on the political Left. But I’m not. I am passionate about freedom of speech—a stanch opponent of censorship. I am a bleeding-heart type who cares about what happens to people. I want people to have prosperity. I want people to have all the health care possible. I want equality of rights before the law. I am sick unto death of prejudice and bigotry—whether against blacks, women, Jews, gays, immigrants, legal or illegal, etc. I despise war. I tend not to support the police, feeling they are out-of-control thugs far too often. I want to end the war on drugs— yesterday. I tend to dislike big business more than I like it (think Amazon as an example).

As for the enemies of the Left: the political Right, I tend to loathe them. I’m no fan of religion, in any format. I favor secular government and think reason is superior in every sense to any concept of faith or divine revelation. I don’t think there is a magic man in the sky answering prayers or laying down moral edicts. I’m probably more in tune with the Sexual Revolution of the 60s than I am a fan of Calvin’s morality. Everything about me, especially in regards to the issues that I’m most passionate about screams LEFT. So why am I NOT a Leftist?

I do use these labels in their modern sense. I actually do think my positions are the original Left in politics and that Progressives are an unfortunate middle-of-the-road compromise with conservatism; that is that the modern Left wants the goals of the original Left (classical liberals) but wishes to achieve them through the use of conservative means—state power. When it comes to the modern Left we part company on some very important issues. Here are some of them:

1. The use of state power. The biggest difference between myself and modern Progressives is that they believe we can achieve liberal ends through the use of state power. I think that is a dangerous delusion, which is inimical to the very goals that are being sought. State power does not benefit the poor and powerless over the long-term. It is always used by the rich and the powerful.

This seems true no matter the issue. Attempts to regulate Big Business are counter-productive in that these powers are soon wielded by Big Business itself to stifle competition and redistribute wealth, from the less-wealthy to themselves. The concentration of state power always and everywhere benefits only two classes: those who hold the power directly (the political class of bureaucrats and politicians) and the wealthy, powerful individuals who bid for the favors of the political class.

Even the most mundane attempts to help those in need, or do good in some way, are means by which the political class and their wealthy masters use the force of law to redistribute rights and wealth from those on the bottom to those on the top. Programs meant to “save the planet,” such as ethanol, end up sending billions in subsidies to the business elite and their political puppets. Those programs that don’t directly benefit the powerful classes that manipulate politics do tend to increase the power of the political class of bureaucrats and politicians. The expansion of power for the political class, in the end, will benefit the rich and the powerful.

2. The political Left tends to believe that rational, central planning is possible. It isn’t. Hayek clearly demonstrated that the type of knowledge necessary to centrally plan a society is diffused in nature. It can not be collected centrally and thus all attempts to plan are done without sufficient knowledge. This results in mistakes and unintended consequences, some of which can be catastrophic.

Even if the knowledge necessary to make such planning decisions could be accumulated in a timely enough manner to matter, the process by which decisions are made is too easily corrupted because of the points I made in my first point.

3. If the Left were able to abolish the tendency of power to be used for those who already possess it, and if the Left were somehow able to hurdle the barriers presented by the diffusion of knowledge, there is another problem: power does not remain in the same hands. Imagine a Left-wing elite, who are truly compassionate and caring, who are totally untempted by the temptations of power and can not be bought off by the rich and powerful who buzz around politics the way flies buzz around shit. If such an unlikely miracle were to happen, how long would it last?

Consider a program with very laudable goals, in my opinion, sex education. I think our culture doesn’t teach the necessary information about sexual decisions. The Left, when they run sex education, tends to teach plumbing. The Right, when they run sex education, tends to teach abstinence and religion. While the plumbing issues need discussion, they can be covered in a relatively short amount of time. It isn’t that complicated. What the kids don’t get is how to make sexual decisions, how to decide, for themselves, whether they are ready to traverse the sexual minefield or not.

The Left instituted sex education in the schools, and remember I’m on their side here. But it wasn’t long before those programs were being run by Christian fundamentalists who used the entire bureaucratic structure to preach fundamentalist morality about abstinence.

Afrikaner whites in South Africa set up a system of racial classification which allowed privileges and rights to be doled out unequally based on that classification. Through rather ruthless means they managed to hold the levers of power for a few decades. Now they don’t and the same racial classifications that they instituted are used to dole out rights and privileges unequally but with them getting the short end of the stick. I should note the plight of the mixed-race “coloureds” who lament: “Before we were too black, now we are too white.”

4. If a Progressive political class managed to solve the knowledge problem; managed to avoid the temptations that power itself offers; avoided giving out special favors to the rich and powerful it would still face the problem outlined in point #3. It is not possible to avoid individuals, not so well-intentioned, from gaining political power?

The only means by which they can prevent handing over political power to their enemies—to those not so well-intentioned or beneficent—is to stifle, or destroy the democratic process. Power would have to be seized and held. But once that is done another system of incentives kicks into effect attracting those individuals drawn to power, who rarely are so well-intentioned. The police exemplify this problem. Some police officers clearly are attracted to the job because they wish to help people. But equally clear is that a very high percentage of officers are attracted to the power. It isn’t that love the law so much, much more it is the “enforcement” that appeals to them. The Left tends to have low opinions of police officers. Yet, the system necessary to prevent the bad guys from taking over a nation, attracts the very sort of mentality that corrupts the police. Power does corrupt.

5. Another area where I disagree with the contemporary Left is that they are too enamoured with the wrong kind of equality. Other than those who openly espouse authoritarianism, everyone believes in equality of one kind or another. But there are many equalities, and the Left is often vague about what sort they are referring to when they use the term. For instance, there is equality of ability. That seems to be a fiction. People are not all equally capable, either physically, mentally, or morally. There is equality of condition, in which everyone has the same set of assets. There is equality of rights before the law.

Equality of rights before the law is the only kind of equality that makes sense to me. Equality of condition, or wealth, is not possible because there is no equality of capability—either physical, mental or moral. People of unequal ability will end up with unequal shares of what we call wealth. The only possible way to prevent this is to create a system of unequal rights—that is the capable must be restrained in some way from being too capable, or the fruits of their labor must be confiscated and redistributed.

And that gets back to the first problems I outlined about using political power. In order to redistribute wealth you have to create a class of individuals—the political class—who have unequal powers. They have the ability to use force against peaceful individuals merely for the sin of being too productive and thus accumulating too much wealth. Equal outcomes not only require unequal rights before the law but mandate the creation of a class of people with unequal power over others. But the centralization of power is precisely the thing that ultimately destroys a liberal society. The centralization of power is necessary to create an equality of wealth, but the centralization of power attracts those who are rich and powerful and who will use that power for their own benefits, not for the purposes that were in mind when the dreamers established the system.

6. Another area where I think the Left is wrong is that they are too obsessed with intentions and not obsessed enough with outcome. That is, they think the intentions of a program or plan are what matters. If you want to nationalize health care, because you want everyone to have care, that is all that matters. The plan is preferable to the unplanned provision of services because the planners have the best of intentions.

Intentions simply don’t matter. I may intend to fly but jumping off a cliff, regardless of my intentions, is likely to end badly—and not just for me, but for anyone unlucky enough to be hiking down below when I try. From the right height, it’s possible to take out a whole troop of Girl Scouts.

Entrepreneurs intend to get rich. To get rich in a free society, one where they do not have access to political privilege or manipulation, they must produce a good or service that others need, or want. To serve their own end, they are required to serve the ends of others. But, and this is important, this is ONLY true when they are unable to manipulate the political process to skew the playing field. For instance, the multinational corporations getting rich off ethanol subsidies are only making a profit because they have used the political process to FORCE consumers to buy their product.

If the business classes, through their allies in the political class, are able to draw up a system of regulations or taxes, they can use those regulations to reduce competition for themselves, thus artificially increasing their profits. They can ban foreign competition for a plethora of reason: “the competition is harming the planet,” “they don’t treat their workers fairly,” “they don’t pay the sort of taxes we pay,” etc.

Consider the example of Nike. Nike has been a strong supporter of legislation to regulate carbon emissions—and if the alarmists are right, that is a laudable goal. The legislation Nike supported applies to production in the United States, not overseas where Nike produces most of their shoes. On the other hand, their main competitor, New Balance, produces most their shoes in the United States. Their costs of production would have increased substantially while Nike’s wouldn’t have changed. The result would be a competitive advantage to Nike and possibly the redistribution of jobs from the US to overseas.

Consider an article from the San Francisco Chronicle, written by a very naïve reporter. The reporter noted that Obama promised $15 billion per year to fund so-called alternative energy projects. The reporter noted that a coalition of Big Oil companies endorsed the project “even though many of its members—such as oil giants BP and ConocoPhillips—emit large amounts of greenhouse gases.” The reporter made it sound as if these companies were selfless advocates of saving the planet. He ignored the fact that both of them own companies which produce these so-called alternative energies and both would profit by having politicians hand them subsidies.

Take BP as an example. They were supposed to build a wind farm in the United Kingdom. But they dropped that plan completely and decided to build in the United States instead. The left-wing Guardian newspaper noted this was because US “government incentives for clean energy projects can provide a convenient tax shelter for oil and gas revenue.” If the Guardian is correct, then the subsidies in the US didn’t create more alternative energy, it just redistributed it from the UK to the US and it did so by making it more profitable to sell oil and gas by sheltering those profits. The Wall Street Journal noted that BP and other major oil companies “could be well-positioned to advantage of subsidies, which take the form of tax breaks on U.S. income.”

Once political power enters the marketplace, profits are found, not by satisfying the needs of consumers, but by catering to the political class and using them to skew markets in favor of the people the political class needs the most: the fat cats with money and influence.

The intentions of the people who wrote this legislation, and the naïve environmentalists who lobbied for it, was not to make Big Energy even wealthier. But that was the outcome, for the very reasons I’ve mentioned already.

7. One final area where we part company is that the Left tends not to understand the role of incentives in creating favourable conditions to solve problems. They seem to think that there is a collective wisdom that exists, that can be quantified and measured, and then imposed from the top-down. The market-based, free, open society is one that diffuses problems solving to multiple levels. It incentives finding solutions by rewarding, disproportionately, the individual, or group of individuals, who discover new paths, or methods to solve old problems.

The market-based system is one where rebels are rewarded. The bureaucratic system of state control requires the satisfaction of bureaucrats, the individuals that Ludwig Mises called, the “old men.” State power is inherently conservative because everyone succeeds by satisfying those above them.

Markets are inherently unstable in that there is a process of “creative destruction,” as Schumpeter put it. Old ways are abandoned by brash, young entrepreneurs who have “no hope” of succeeding, but do. Soon the rest of society is rushing to catch-up with the new methods. This is one reason that markets are not conservative, but liberal. They foster change by rewarding those entrepreneurs who challenge conventional wisdom with new methods, products or ideas.

Markets are change-prone, bureaucracies are change-adverse. There is a reason that the private recognition of gay relationship far exceeds the political recognition.

Prof. Mike Hulme on the politics of climate claims.

Prof. Mike Hulme is one of the most well-known of the warming doomsayers. He teaches at the University of East Anglia, in the UK. He is also surprisingly candid. (He is NOT the person in the photo to the far left, although he is on the Left.) Recently Hulme participated in a debate on the warming issue. The topic was along the lines: Do science and economics support government action on climate change?

Hulme opened the debate, and the first thing he did was dismiss the debate topic itself. I took very precise notes of his words. Since I watched this on video, I stopped the presentation every couple of seconds so I could write down, word-for-word, precisely what he said. Hulme said: "Yes, I believe in government action on climate change, not action that is driven and determined by either science or economics, but action that is decided on of political ideology, risk evaluation, ethical judgments, public deliberation and a democratic sensibility."

Hulme said that we should be clear that "neither science nor economics should determine government action. ...I make this claim about neither science nor economics driving government action because I believe it should be determined by politics. Politics which is, if you like, the conduct of social relations involving authority and power in order to make decisions. Politics is what we have. And that is where government action and policy should be formulated."

Hulme was also quite happy to say what political ideology he uses. He said that the debate needs to start out with a discussion of the role of government. As he put it: "Is our preference for a small and minimalist state? Or is it for a large and interventionist state?" He said: "My own personal instincts, and my own political beliefs are for a more interventionist state, than for a minimalist one. So, for example, I believe in a state that would play a significant role with regards to wealth redistribution both within and between societies."

An interesting confession I think. He wants a state that redistributes wealth "within and between societies." Now, unless Hulme means something unusual by "societies" he is speaking about international wealth redistribution. Ask yourself what kind of state is necessary to redistribute wealth between different nations. Is he speaking about global governance where the UN or some similar body has the ability to confiscate wealth in productive nations and redistribute it to unproductive nations? He's wasn't entirely clear on that but I note that numerous warming groups have pushed for international control of markets to "stop the warming crisis."

This raises some interesting questions. Are the claims about warming the prime issues for these activists or are they secondary issues? Are the prime issues those of global governance, economic central planning and wealth redistribution instead? Hulme didn't seem to be saying that his politics is the result of his science, but that instead, his science is heavily influenced, perhaps solely influenced, by his politics. Is this debate primarily politics disguised as science? That certainly has been my view since the Green Left discovered warming claims to push a very precise political agenda.

I previously argued that much of the Green agenda was created after the collapse of socialism around the world. Old socialist arguments no longer had any credibility and thus the centralized state with economic planning needed a new veneer to cover up the cracks and worn parts. It is my belief that the many of the most ideological types on the extreme Left flung themselves into the environmental movement precisely because they it as a vehicle to relabel their ideology and give it the cloak of science once again.

In a column that Hulme wrote he said: "Too often, when we think we are arguing over scientific evidence for climate change, we are in fact disagreeing about our different political preferences, ethical principles and values systems." Hulme says that the field of science has become a debate platform, not about science, but about politics and that we "fail to engage in honest and robust argument about our competing political visions and ethical values." He says science is too uncertain and incomplete and that is "especially the case with the science of climate, a complex system of enormous scale." Hulme says he thought climategate was good since it might push the real debate into the spotlight and the real debate is "about political beliefs and ethical values."

Some years ago I wrote a political column that was published weekly. Typically they paired the column with one written by a woman I knew. She was a hard-core socialist and, a recent search online about her, reveals that she is still a socialist. She is an activist with the Democratic Socialists of America and says her goal, as well as the DSA's goal, is "to establish socialism as a political force in the U.S. and around the world by training mobilizing socialist activists...." After the collapse of socialism she became director of the Global Warming Project for the non-scientific Union of Concerned Scientists (membership does not require scientific credentials at all, just cash).

That Hulme is openly saying that the global warming debate is not a scientific one, but a political one, is refreshing. Such honesty is rare with his compatriots in the warming trenches, even if their private emails showed them acting precisely like political lobbyists and not like scientists. But I suspect Hulme won't attract much of a following from his fellow warmologists. The reason is simple. They realize that if they presented their campaign in openly stark political terms, they would lose the debate. The public is not quite willing to march toward massive state interventionism is the name of of politics. And since the public isn't willing to march in that direction they need to be stampeded instead. And the way to do that is to try to scare the hell out of them using scientific theories.

While Hulme is honest, his fellow warmologists are tactically smarter. They know that when it comes to politics, honesty is not the best policy. So they will continue to pretend, in public at least, that they are dispassionate scientists without a political agenda who are merely urging policies that are necessary due to the massive crisis that they say we are facing. And, if some silly blogger, writer, reporter, whoever, points to the political agenda they will act offended and howl in derision. Politically that is actually their best option.