In The American Spectator Online
THE PEOPLE AND THE EXPERTS
The hollowness at the core of liberalism today.
By William Murchison

Excerpts:

The lack of a coherent, understandable goal. What would Climate Reform look like, once accomplished? Would all regions receive just the right amount of gentle rain at just the right times and intervals? How thick should the polar ice cap be? Thicker than now? As thick as in, say, 1890? Warnings about rising sea levels suggest that experts know, or should know, what levels are ideal. They have yet (so far as I know) to inform us as to these ideals, preparatory to proving, in the face of challenge, why the levels they have in mind are best for us.

Then there’s the really big challenge. Whatever Climate Reform looks like, how do we do it, given the lack of an overarching authority for planning and enforcement? Wonderful slogans abound: for instance, cut out dependence on fossil fuels. Well, OK. But does that mean get rid, totally, of coal and crude oil? Can we retain some? How much, in that event? What about all the investments and jobs for which coal and gas account? We’d replace those… how, exactly? And having done all that (whatever it turned out to be), what would we then use for energy? Wind and solar power? From where? On what timetable? At what cost? And who goes first? The Chinese, on whose doorstep lies responsibility for half the globe’s projected increases in emissions? What if they told us, and all our learned experts, to go jump in the lake? We would respond … how?

To find the president of the United States on the myth-making side of the Climate Reform argument isn’t encouraging. But it’s not surprising either. The liberal way, these days, is to devise a problem so as to scratch the instincts — anti-free market, anti-old time America, pro-big government, pro-regulation — of constituencies likely to respond well at election time to those doing the scratching. Possibly the best thing to say about conservatives is that they tend to lack grand ambitions of this sort, neither trusting reformers very much nor neglecting attention to the consequences of abrupt and far-reaching change.

HKO

Undefined and unclear objectives is a wonderful place for the moral supremacists to hide.

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