Author: Sheldon Richman

When will Americans demand that the government denationalize money and free the market to do what it does better than anything else: serve the general welfare rather than the special interests? We owe it to ourselves and future generations to change this madness once and for all.

I was all set this week to plunge into the details of the Green New Deal so I could see what new impositions the climate-alarmist politicians have in store for us. Then I made a startling discovery. (Startling for me, that is. I’m behind the news curve.)

In a new book two professors of psychology, Gale Sinatra and Barbara Hofer, seek to explain why what they call “science denial” is rampant today and how dangerous it is. They also give their account in a strange conversation with Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, from whom we might have expected a tad more “skepticism” or at least some devil’s advocacy.

The government-“science” complex ostensibly promotes the search for facts about our world, but it actually promotes and enforces orthodoxy, protects resulting paradigms, and manufactures apparent consensuses that are questioned only at one’s reputational peril. That’s why I put the word science in quotation marks. I could have called it pseudoscience or junk science.

A couple of billion people in the developing world lack modern fuels and electricity. This kills such people prematurely, among other reasons, because they cook and heat their homes with wood and animal excrement, which create deadly indoor air pollution. They lack access to modern cheap, reliable, and potentially clean energy (that is, fossil fuels) because their governments create obstacles and arrogant Western politicians egged on by rich social activists block their access–without justification but much irony–in the name of protecting the planet.

When I see four of those yard signs on my morning walk, I chuckle. If I’m in a mischievous mood I might someday suggest a couple of memes that the owners might add. I could embrace all of those memes, but not without some qualification and in several cases, a good deal of qualification. But […]

I don’t know if we’re in the heyday of questioning the motives of people we disagree with rather than simply rebutting them–character assassination, that is–but it’s got me wondering why this is such a popular pastime these days.

Risk is integral to life, social life included. As Thomas Sowell puts it, there are no solutions, only trade-offs–you can’t do only one thing. So each of us does cost-benefit analyses all the time in everyday life.

Before we can decide whether something is good or bad, we need a standard. Good for what or whom? Moreover, in environmental matters it makes a difference whether you see mankind as an invader and destroyer of benignly stable nature or as a species that flourishes by taming often dangerously volatile nature, that is, making it a safer, more hospitable place.

President Biden has reversed himself under pressure from his progressive flank and has given the go-ahead for a new moratorium on renter evictions throughout most of the United States for individuals making up to $99,000 a year (couples, $198,000). The twist is that Biden acknowledges that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which reports to his secretary of health and human services, has no legal authority for the action.