{"id":1311346,"date":"2019-06-12T19:08:00","date_gmt":"2019-06-13T01:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.postindependent.com\/will-column-scarcities-are-recyclable-excuses-for-expanding-government\/"},"modified":"2019-06-12T19:08:00","modified_gmt":"2019-06-13T01:08:00","slug":"will-column-scarcities-are-recyclable-excuses-for-expanding-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/local-news\/will-column-scarcities-are-recyclable-excuses-for-expanding-government\/","title":{"rendered":"Will column: Scarcities are recyclable excuses for expanding government"},"content":{"rendered":"
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WASHINGTON \u00ad\u2014 Randolph Bourne (1886-1918) said, \u201cWar is the health of the state.\u201d James Madison said, \u201cWar is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,\u201d and the executive almost is the American state, Congress now being more theatrical than actual. Advocates of an ever-larger state, remembering Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s first inaugural address (seeking \u201cbroad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe\u201d), declare \u201cwars\u201d on this and that (poverty, cancer, drugs, global warming, etc.).<\/p>\n

Such declarations have become trite, but scarcities are recyclable excuses for expanding government: There are so many things that alarmists can be alarmed about possibly becoming scarce and therefore supposedly requiring government rationers. Because there is an inexhaustible, because renewable, supply of alarmists, Washington\u2019s libertarian Cato Institute has created the Simon Abundance Index to refute them.<\/p>\n

Its name honors the late Julian Simon, an economist who won a famous bet with Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford hysteric whose 1968 book \u201cThe Population Bomb\u201d predicted that \u201chundreds of millions of people\u201d would starve to death in the 1970s as population growth swamped agriculture production. Simon\u2019s 1980 wager was that any five commodities that Ehrlich would pick would be cheaper in 1990. Ehrlich picked five metals. All were cheaper in 1990.<\/p>\n

In 1972, in the extravagantly hyped and resoundingly refuted (by events) \u201cLimits to Growth,\u201d MIT computer modelers foresaw civilization collapsing because of \u201cnonrenewable resource depletion.\u201d The modelers extrapolated from the then-current use of 19 commodities and projected the exhaustion, before 2012, of the supply of 12 \u2014 aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten and zinc. Forty years later, Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish academic and \u201cskeptical environmentalist,\u201d noted:<\/p>\n

Because of technological innovations replacing mercury in batteries, dental fillings and thermometers, mercury consumption had plunged 98%, and its price 90%. Since 1970, when gold reserves were estimated at 10,980 tons, more than 81,000 tons had been mined and reserves were estimated at 51,000 tons. Since 1970, when known copper reserves were 280 million tons, about 400 million tons had been produced and reserves were estimated to be almost 700 million tons. Aluminum consumption had increased 16-fold since 1950 as the world consumed four times 1950\u2019s known reserves. Known reserves could sustain current consumption for 177 years. And so on.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeak oil\u201d has been exasperatingly (to eco-pessimists) elusive. In 1914, the U.S. government said oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, it said the world\u2019s reserves would be gone in 13 years. In 1951, after oil fueled a global war and the postwar boom, the government again said the world had 13 years of proven reserves. By 1970, however, there were 612 billion barrels, and by 2006, after another 767 billion barrels had been pumped, there were estimated to be 1.2 trillion.<\/p>\n

Along came fracking, which has illustrated one of Cato\u2019s points: Unforeseen technologies continually alter the relationship between population growth (which is beneficial: people are, as Simon said, \u201cthe ultimate resource\u201d) and resource availability. The Abundance Index emphasizes \u201ctime price\u201d (the amount of time required to earn the price of items) and the price elasticity of population (PEP), which measures the \u201csensitivity of resource availability to population growth.\u201d Cato\u2019s Abundance Index, covering 50 commodities, finds that between 1980 and 2018:<\/p>\n

The average time price of the commodities fell 72.3%. The time it took to earn enough to buy one unit in the basket of commodities in 1980 bought 3.62 units in 2018. The compounded growth rate of abundance means that the affordability of the basket of commodities doubles every 20.49 years. According to the PEP metric, since 1980 \u201cevery additional human being born on our planet appears to have made resources proportionately more plentiful for the rest of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cato\u2019s Abundance Index (measured with global prices relative to average global GDP per capita per hour) indicates this: The growth of abundance is highly probable because the fecundity of the future is almost certain. But the rate of growth is unpredictable because of government\u2019s willingness to expedite rather than regulate change.<\/p>\n

Many people who want to stampede a panicked public into expanding government\u2019s micromanagement of everything have forgotten Gregg Easterbrook\u2019s \u201cLaw of Doomsaying\u201d: Predict catastrophe no later than 10 years hence but no sooner than five years away \u2014 soon enough to terrify people but distant enough that they will not remember that you were wrong.<\/p>\n

George Will\u2019s email address is georgewill@washpost.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u00ad\u2014 Randolph Bourne (1886-1918) said, \u201cWar is the health of the state.\u201d James Madison said, \u201cWar is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement,\u201d and the executive almost is the American state, Congress now being more theatrical than actual. Advocates of an ever-larger state, remembering Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s first inaugural address (seeking \u201cbroad executive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1311346","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-19 00:00:35","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1311346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1311346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1311346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1311346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1311346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}