The Worse-than-Medieval Economics of Climate Technocrats
Throughout my life, a specter developed by the state has been used to haunt and cajole the world’s politics to favor centralized technocracy. I remember it first being called “global warming,” complete with apocalyptic prognostications meant to occur by specific years. Sometime after those predictions failed to materialize, it was rebranded as “climate change,” and the technocratic class’s predictions became more ethereal and vague.
The craze made its way into the discipline of economics, where mainstream theories of externalities are used to justify state intervention into the lives of their subjects under the guise of solving climate change. Despite their aspirations to be forward-thinking and progressive, medieval thinking would be preferable to the reasoning used by technocrats and mainstream economists.
Externalities and “Real” Prices
Beyond the broader categories of microeconomics and macroeconomics, mainstream economics has fragmented into mutually unintelligible fields, each with their own idiosyncratic axioms and laws, like labor economics, energy economics, health economics, development economics, and welfare economics. The latter is of the most interest concerning climate change and technocracy, as it deals primarily in externalities.
In mainstream economics, externalities are benefits (called positive externalities) or costs (called negative externalities) incurred by unrelated third parties due to a person’s consumption or production of a good. Since mainstream economics relies on a Marshallian framework when determining the existence of an externality, thanks to the contributions of Arthur Cecil Pigou, externalities are used to argue that the market fails to establish the “correct” price of certain goods, never reaching equilibrium on its o
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