The Separation of Science and State

The current ClimateGate flap does not tell us anything new. We already know that scientists are completely in the pocket of the politicians. This was made transparently clear recently on CNN when scientist Michael Oppenheimer sounded like a politician and climate auditor Steve McIntyre sounded like a scientist.

We know why this is so. Money. Follow the money.

Modern governments want to gin up the moral equivalent of war so that they can mobilize the resources of the nation to fight it. The preferred way of ginning up a moral equivalent of war is to get the scientists to declare a disaster. Maybe social scientists declare poverty a disaster. Physical scientists declare the environment or the climate a disaster. Politicians butt in, announce that the science is settled, and declare the moral equivalent of war.

In the case of climate it is the United Nations ginning up the crisis through the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The idea is to create a moral equivalent of war on an climate crisis and invest the United Nations with global taxes so that it can lead the fight.

I believe it is time for all people of education and feeling to stop this assault on our freedoms. The only thing government is any good at is war, real war. When it tries to gin up moral equivalents of war it just makes a mess. Think education, health care, pensions, welfare.

In the United States we express such broad-scale political sentiments in our Constitution. So here is the text of a proposed Twenty-eighth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Amendment - Freedom of Science

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of science, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

Back in the Dark Ages, we know, government and religion were closely linked. The king derived his right to rule from God and the priests derived their power from association and support of the king.

In the pre-scientific age, this compact arrangement made sense, but by the 18th century it had become an embarrassment. It made the church into an appendage of the crown, and a rather feeble one at that.

So the Founding Fathers called for a dis-establishment of religion in the Bill of Rights. The result is that the United States is the most religious country in the world among developed nations.

Thomas Jefferson called this arrangement the separation of church and state. It succinctly symbolized the whole concept of the separation of powers within the government between legislative, executive, and judicial branches.

In his seminal work The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism Michael Novak has differentiated not just government but the whole of modern society into three sectors: the political sector, the economic sector and the moral/cultural sector.

These three sectors are, and ought to be, separate and divided centers of power. In part, this is agreed by all. Everyone agrees that the political sector should not dominate the moral/cultural sector, nor the moral/cultural sector issue orders to the political sector. Everyone agrees that the economic sector should not dominate the political sector.

But some reactionary liberals find it very hard to deal with the idea that the political sector should not own and dominate the economic sector.

And we know why. Liberals live for political power and political power is nothing without power over the economic sector. Some day they will get their comeuppance. But that is not our concern today. We are concerned about science.

The ClimateGate scandals demonstrate that association with the political sector has utterly corrupted the scientists. And we know why. Money. Money is the mother's milk of science, and scientists will do anything to get it. So they go along with power plans of the politicians, and serve up politically motivated science, "settled science," as they call it, to the politicians in return for research money.

It is time make a break with the past and advance boldly into the future. We must end the government domination of science. Science cannot prosper as an established appendage of government. It can only be corrupted. So science must be separate from government. We must have a separation of science and state.

It won't be easy. Science is embedded in government schools, government research labs, government research foundatations, government universities. And of course there is the relation between the Department of Defense and military science.

But we must begin the journey. Science must not, and should not be, of right, an appendage of government. And the start of that journey is an act of disestablishment. Science must be separate from government and must no longer waste its prestige in pandering to the shabby manipulations of professional politicians.

Let us begin the journey today.

The ClimateGate Smoking Gun

Here it is. You were expecting it. You've learned from repeated experience that every "-Gate" has a smoking gun. ClimateGate is no different.

Willis Eschenbach is the chap who found the smoking gun. Willis is a frequent commenter and contributor at Climate Audit and What's Up With That. Willis found the smoking gun in Darwin, Australia.

Willis looked at Darwin and found that the only continuous record over the last century, at Darwin Airport, shows a mild decline in temperature, about 0.5 deg C. All of the decline happens in the first half of the 20th century; the second half shows a mild warming. Guess what the climate scientists delivered as an adjusted record? A strong warming trend of +1.2 deg C.

Way to go fellahs!

Of course, it's impossible to figure out what the Climatic Research Unit did with the data. CRU doesn't divulge raw data and methods. Only the unimpeachable results.

But NOAA's Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN) does divulge the raw data. And Willis finds that they have just punched in huge increases in temperature, based on trends from nearby records, to fill in missing info.

Only nearby for Darwin is 500 km away!

My guess is that this isn't a conspiracy. It's just laziness. The Climate scientists ginned up a method of homogenizing data that worked for the US and Europe, and then applied it to the rest of the world without thinking and checking too carefully. Or maybe they made cursory checks way at the end of the project when they had run out of money. Probably they just threw up their hands and just walked away from the problem.

But the fact is that the whole job needs to be done over. Then we'll find out just how serious the current warming is. If there is any.

And all that must come before we can determine whether humans are responsible for the warming. If any.

Go on. You'd better read the whole thing.

The Problem of the Fed

With Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke up for renomination, United States senators are taking the opportunity to grandstand. And the editors at National Review aren't too pleased.

Neither the Fed nor the Treasury nor the FDIC has functioned flawlessly throughout this crisis, but together they have functioned well enough: better, even, than many had expected, and Bernanke’s clear thinking has helped to unify and coordinate their efforts.

The problem with the Fed is not whether or not it functioned well during the financial crisis. The problem is the way that a government central bank makes crises more likely.

The Federal Reserve System's most important vital role is as lender of last resort. Crudely speaking, that means that the Federal Reserve will print money, in a crisis, to bail out the credit system.

But the only reason that a credit system ever needs bailing out is that some players are suspected of being unable to make good on their obligations. This is inevitable in a highly leveraged credit system. Quite simply, when an institution is highly leveraged it means that it can't honor their obligations if things go south. When you are 90 percent leveraged, it means that when the underlying assets decline by a mere 10 percent, you are insolvent.

And, of course, banks are the primary culprit in this game. Banks are allowed to leverage beyond 90 percent.

But banks belong to the era of horse-drawn credit, when there wasn't a large market for securities. Today there is a global market for credit in all its ramifications from equity to secured debt to unsecured debt to derivatives. All of these different financial instruments display different combinations of risk and reward.

It shouldn't be that hard to set up rules to keep everyone above water, to limit the exposure to debt (which is a rigid contract to pay interest and principal) and encourage equity (which is a partnership for sharing risk).

But the problem is government. Government likes to make credit cheap, meaning encourage debt financing. But that tends to make it riskier.

No problem, says the government. We have a central bank which can fix a credit crisis as lender of last resort.

Well, yes. But there is a cost to the lender of last resort role. The cost is inflation. The job of the lender of last resort is to flood the jammed wheels of credit with oceans of lubricating debt. Prudent investors pay the price in devalued dollars.

When people like Ron Paul agitate for an end to the Fed, they are calling for an end to the moral hazard of a government central bank. When the central bank is owned by the government, it represents the interests of the government first and the people second.

And clearly, the Fed has been the government's central bank, not the people's central bank. It bails out the government--or the government's banking system, and the people pay for it.

The simple fact is that the value of the dollar has decreased by about 98 percent on the Fed's watch. In the first century of the USA, when it didn't have a government central bank, the value of money declined by 10 percent.

We are Americans, and we can do better.

GOP and Young People

Young voters went 66% for President Obama last year. As you might expect, for Hope and Change are the very life-blood of youth. What's not to like?

Well, here's what. An agenda of mandatory health insurance, cap-and-trade, and tax increases is not going to do much to help young people get a start in life. Not when young people are forced to pay for grandma's health care, high energy prices, and taxes to keep powerful interests in clover.

With that sort of agenda, young people are likely to stay unemployed well into the 2010s.

Maybe young people should reconsider their support for Obama. Maybe you already are. Maybe you are really natural Republicans, if only you knew.

So let's go over the issues one by one. And the best way to do that is with the ten points of the new GOP Purity Test being floated by some Republican National Committee members. We will look at each point in turn, and leave out the "Whereas's."

1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;

Obviously you young people like the government spending money on education. But I wonder if you realize that all that money is not for you, but for the vast education blob. You'd do much better if you had the money to spend yourself, rather than have the government spend it on educational bureaucracy.

(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;

You do realize, don't you, that the central policy change in ObamaCare is to force young people to get health insurance and to force young people to pay much more for health insurance than at present? The idea is to get young people to help pay for all the health subsidies that the government will be handing out to its supporters.

(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

I know you chaps believe in saving the planet, but you do realize, don't you, that cap-and-trade is going to make it harder for you to build a career, start a family, and buy a house. Because when you make energy more expensive you make everything more expensive, and that hurts young people just starting out.

(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

Helping unions win elections is great if you want to go and work for the DMV and be a bump on a log for the rest of your life. It will make it harder for people without political connections. That usually includes young people.

(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

Everyone is in favor of immigration and assimilation, but not when it threatens their job. Since young people are typically the least experienced and the lower paid, you are the most at risk when illegal immigrants are competing for low-skill low-paid jobs,

(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

I can understand that many young people might not like America's wars. After all, it's young men that have to fight them and die in them. But someone has to do it, and we honor those young men and women that do.

(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

Young people have supported the elimination of nuclear weapons in the past. It would be wonderful to have a world of Kant's Eternal Peace. But what do you do if Iran and North Korea have nuclear weapons? You gotta contain them, right?

(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

Gays have done a pretty good job persuading young people that relationships are relationships, and when people love each other... I'd just like to say this. As a man, I appreciate that the more heterosexual marriage is deprecated, the easier it is for us men to prey on young women. The most powerful thing a woman has going for her is the right to say No.

(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing, denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

The thing about abortion is that the people most in favor of it are young men. I wonder why?

(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership;

Well, we conservatives have a thing about this. I suppose because it's symbolic. It says we are not completely dominated by government and its all-enveloping rules and regulations. it's a fantasy, of course. The government could round us all up tomorrow if it felt like it. But it's nice to dream.

It's funny how young people have tended to support the left over the years when their economic interests so clearly require an open and competitive marketplace. Perhaps young people like the left because it seems to offer a security blanket against a cruel hard world with promises of equality, care and compassion.

The only problem, of course, is that the only way you can get care and compassion is in free relationship with others. Government doesn't do care and compassion. Government is force.

Youth of America, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.

The Entrepreneurial Virtual Newsroom

Conservatives don't get to choose Time's Man of the Year. The whole point of the exercise is to boost some liberal notion, not legitimize conservatives.

It's a part of the progressive message machine, a "giant food chain of intellectual thought, with respectability unquestioningly bestowed on just about everyone of any note who believed" in the progressive belief system.

That's Jeffrey Lord at the American Spectator. Even though he's not on the food chain, he has a candidate for the most important mover and shaker of 2009. The folks in the Virtual Newsroom. We all know who they are.

In one corner are the newspaper and magazine people, as of old. But then there is talk radio. And now there are the TV people on Fox News.

But then there is the "Internet 'desk.'"

What's particularly interesting here is the size of this division. Job applications pour in hourly from conservative bloggers around the nation. The applications are stamped "hire now" by someone wearing a Harry Potter-style "invisibility cloak" and the virtual newsroom expands yet again.

Finally there are the popular authors and their books: Mark Levin in Liberty and Tyranny, Ann Coulter in Guilty, Glenn Beck in Common Sense, Laura Ingraham in Power to the People, Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism, Michelle Malkin in Culture of Corruption, Dick Morris in Catastrophe.

The glorious thing about it is that it is not the bureaucratic Big Media model of the liberal media. The Virtual Newsroom is a living, breathing example of Hayek's "spontaneous order."

No one "has" to write or broadcast a particular story. It's a free market in story ideas out there on the Virtual Newsroom floor. As a result, creativity reigns. A million different ideas float through the Virtual Newsroom on any given day[.]

And one of two of them has the potential to be a blockbuster. Maybe it exposes the corruption of ACORN. Or it exposes the crazy extremists in the White House. Or it crunches over the "climate consensus."

Sorry liberals. It may be annoying and frightening, but the Virtual Newsroom is here to stay, whatever the Democrats in the Senate do to shut it up.

And even if you folks won't give any recognition to the Virtual Newsroom, we know it's there and we honor its noble Inky Wretches.

1,000,000 Page Views Strong

Yesterday, December 1, 2009, a day which will live, in history, was the day that usgovernmentspending.com reached its first million page views.

It was March 23, 2007 when the site first went live, and in 5 days it had its biggest day ever, 3,353 visits, after a boosting by Andrew Sullivan on The Atlantic blog.

Since then, usgovernmentspending.com has grown to become the world's leading government spending website, with over 1.000 visits a day. There is really else nothing out there that gives you:

• 200 years of federal spending
• 100 years of state and local spending
• 200 years of GDP (thanks to measuringworth,com)
• 200 years of federal debt
  
• 16 years of state and local spending for individual states
• Charts, charts, charts
• Downloads, briefings, and more
  

The reason that usgovernmentspending.com is so popular is simple. Google puts it up at the top of its rankings on literally dozens of search phrases. For instance, it appears at #1on Google's search results for the following searches (and many more): "us government spending" and "government spending as a percentage of gdp" and "government spending 2009" and "government spending breakdown".

And let's not forget usgovernmentspending.com's sister sites: usgovernmentrevenue.com and ukpublicspending.co.uk. They are no slouches either.

The interesting thing is that, even though usgovernmentspending.com merely regurgitates official government statistics, it outperforms the sites where the official statistics are published.

The reason is not too difficult to figure out. Usgovernmentspending.com is all about getting the data out and presenting it in the most convenient and appealing way possible. It's not just the numbers, it's the charts, it's the links, it's the briefings, it's everything.

How high can usgovernmentspending.com go? Well, it doesn't have celebrity gossip and it doesn't have beautiful babes, so there is a limit.

But here is an interesting factoid. Last year, in 2008, usgovernmentspending.com naturally had a surge of traffic in the weeks before the election. The interest peaked about a week after the election at 500 visits per day, and by New Year's, traffic was down by 80 percent to 100 visits per day.

Not this year. Traffic hit 1,000 visits per day in early November, and continued up. After an understandable stall over Thanksgiving it is still going up. No sign of a decline for Christmas shopping and holiday cheer. Not yet.

Could it be that this year Americans are passionately interested in the workings and the expense of their government as never before, and that next year they intend to do something about it?

Only time will tell.

The ObamaCare Train Wreck

Do these people really understand what they are doing with ObamaCare? It doesn't sound like it.

Hugh Hewitt had a couple of ObamaCare supporters on his radio program on Monday. And they, Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic and Henry Aaron of Brookings, didn't have a clue.

They didn't really know where the Medicare savings were coming from. Except that Jonathan Cohn knew they were coming from productivity improvements like better infection control. Dr. Henry Aaron knew the money was coming from somewhere:

The story is that if one is going to extend coverage as the Senate plan would do to 25 to 35 million, or currently uninsured Americans, they’re going to consume some more health care services. And the money to pay for that needs to come from somewhere. Most of the money would come from projected growth in productivity of health care delivery under Medicare.

This sort of thing shows that the Democrats have lost the plot. They are just playing one group off against another. They are going to give uninsured Americans more health care services and they are going to take it away from other Americans.

But that's not what Democrats are for. They are for giving America glorious benefits and taxing the rich or evil corporations. Nobody is supposed to have to pay for all this. Especially not grandma. It is all supposed to appear magically.

You cannot suddenly turn up and say that, hey, we are going to take away benefits from you seniors to give to the uninsured Americans. Not after a century of demanding benefits for seniors. You don't do that. You don't ever take benefits away from welfare state recipients.

My view is that the current generation of Democrats are like the inheritors of an imperial dynasty. Two generations back there were rough tough Democrats that came out of the hills and conquered the United States for themselves and their supporters.

But now the Democrats are soft and civilized. They are used to the easy life in their inherited Senate seats and their fluffy think tank berths and their leisured academic tenure. They think that grants grow on trees. And they don't know how to appeal to the great mass of Americans.

Actually, they don't like the great mass of Americans.

More and more, it is looking like a Perfect Storm coming up for our Democratic friends. They played their tactical game beautifully in 2006 and 2008. They blamed everything on Bush and the Republicans, and they sold the American people on the idea that they were post-partisan moderates.

Now they want to govern like McGovern and the American people are upchucking.

And the upchucking has only just begun.