Editor note: Adam Smith (1723–1790) is considered the father of modern libertarian thought, although economics and political economy have advanced significantly since the 18th century. Many of Smith’s insights have proved prescient, and it is often remarkable how today’s follies bring to mind a quotation or insight from his books, essays, or correspondence.
Smith’s warnings against “the man of system,” for example, apply to today’s Green New Deal and its parts.
Richard Ebeling, a leading scholar in the Smithian tradition, penned this two-part look-back at Adam Smith, which MasterResource reposts this July 4th week.
The Wealth of Nations was published in March 1776, just a few months before the signing of the American Declaration of Independence in July of 1776. If the American Founding Fathers articulated in The Declaration of Independence the political case for individual freedom, Adam Smith presented the complementary argument for economic freedom and free enterprise.…
Continue Reading“The Petroleum Economist’s headline for 1998 projects, ‘Ever Greater Use of New Technology,” will also characterize future years, decades, centuries, and millennia under market conditions. If the ‘ultimate resource’ of human ingenuity is allowed free rein, energy in its many and changing forms will be more plentiful and affordable for future generations than it is now, although never ‘too cheap to meter’ as was once forecast for nuclear power.” (Bradley, 1999: 40)
From time to time, MasterResource dips into the history vault to demonstrate how well the free-market, human ingenuity worldview has stood the test of time. Julian Simon Lives!, in other words.
Twenty-one years ago, I published a Cato Policy Analysis, The Increasing Sustainability of Conventional Energy (No. 341: April 22, 1999). It was 51 pages with 250 references.…
Continue Reading“Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” -David Graber, Los Angeles Times (below)
Bill McKibben, a radical deep ecologist, has been normalized in today’s alarmist, TDS world. He has a regular column in The New Yorker, claiming that man-made climate change is “the most thorough and complete crisis our species and our civilizations have ever faced, one there is no guarantee that we will survive intact.”
I recently came across a book review of McKibben’s deep-ecology manifesto, The End of Nature (Random House: 1989), titled Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower.
Published in the Los Angeles Times in that year by David Graber (“a research biologist with the National Park Service”), the review was all-in with McKibben’s scary worldview.…
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