The Humble Libertarian original

"The Obama Administration fast tracked Solyndra's loan application and now $535 million dollars of American tax payer money is gone along with 1,000 green jobs. How many more examples of green jobs failure do we need before we realize you can't centrally plan economic prosperity?" Hat tip: Young Americans for Liberty Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Bill Gates recently defended nuclear energy, with accurate, albeit creepy economic logic. He pointed out that, compared to coal, nuclear energy is still safer in terms of " people killed per kilowatt hour ". That has to win 'Stat of the Year', if such a prize committee exists. Of course, this is only half (or much less) of the argument. Otherwise, me peddling a bicycle in my living room to power a light bulb might win a power source award in terms of "safety". Cost per kilowatt hour is the other essential variable. Because, like Gates points out, there are a lot of "cute" energy ideas. But, " in 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic ." In countries that do not regulate for economic externalities (like pollution), coal is a hard proposition to turn down. But, in terms of overall safety and affordability, nuclear is currently the answer. And that's why Gates is putting his money there . Eric Olsen , Regular Column...

Thank you! In the video below, Congressman Ron Paul has agreed that the media- driven at least in part by the agendas of the regulatory state and environmentalists- is politicizing the earthquake damage in Japan by hyping fear over nuclear power. In an unrelated discussion, Paul spends the second half of the interview answering questions about monetary policy and the Federal Reserve... noting interestingly at the very end that the Federal Reserve ordered a bunch of his books and distributed them to Fed workers to read and study. All at once, the Fed's actions please me, aggravate me, and amuse me to no end. Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

Amid heavy media fear mongering over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill last summer, James L. Payne published a piece at the Independent Institute entitled "What's a Disaster?A Citizen's Guide to Surviving the Fear Mongers." In it Payne offers some excellent and concise explanations for the perpetual panic attack that is 24-7 media coverage, and proposes an objective scale with a scientific ranking system to help us assess the real damage and magnitude of a disaster. The scale ranges from a Category 1 disaster to a Category 9. A Category 1 disaster would involve: "One billion or more people killed. This is the kind of disaster that a medium-sized meteorite might cause, like the one that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs." A Category 9 disaster entails: "Few or no people killed, but some harm, or possible harm, to industry, tourism, or the environment." Payne argues that "the BP oil spill" was merely a Category 9 disaster consisting of...

The devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan proved once and for all that nuclear energy is a remarkably, I daresay, miraculously safe source of clean and reliable energy-- though you wouldn't get that impression from watching the mainstream media coverage as events unfold at the earthquake-stricken Fukushima power plant in Japan. With overblown scare headlines using loaded words like " Nuclear Disaster " ( m ) , " Nuclear Nightmare " ( m ) , and " Dramatic Escalation " ( m ) , you'd think the media was trying to sell more newspapers and garner more viewers. While body counts as a result of the earthquake and tsunami number into the tens of thousands, establishment media outlets shamelessly try to outdo each other in their alarmist and sensational rhetoric for a bigger piece of the public's attention. But the truth is often less dramatic, exciting, or scary. Another reason for the brazenly biased coverage of Fukushima is a strong unde...

Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the evils of present-day society, they usually fail to understand either the root of those problems (government intervention) or their solution (the operation of a freed market). In Progressive commentary on energy, pollution, and so on—otherwise often quite insightful—calls for government intervention are quite common. George Monbiot, for instance, has written that “[t]he only rational response to both the impending end of the Oil Age and the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities, our farming and our lives. But this cannot happen without massive political pressure.” But this is precisely backward. Existing problems of excess energy consumption, pollution, big-box stores, the car culture, and suburban sprawl result from the “massive political pressure” that has already been applied, over the past several decades, to “redesign our cities, our farming, and our lives.” The root of all the problems Monbiot finds so ob...

What you may not know is that biodiesel, despite the tree-hugging market appeal of its promoters, is being cornered by a bunch of monopolists as predatory as J.D. Rockefeller ever dreamed of being. According to Adam Schwartz, head of the Green Guild Biodiesel Cooperative (“ Nothing Grows from the Top Down ,” Green Guild Biodiesel, June 20, 2010), biodiesel production is being consolidated in the control of the big producers and the soybean industry. “In Virginia new legislation made it illegal to transport vegetable oil without a commercial license, essentially forcing an already marginalized biodiesel community to go completely underground.” I hear frequently from a doctoral student named Keith Taylor, who’s researching electrical power cooperatives and decentralized models for developing wind power. He’s sent me quite a bit of material, over the past year or so, on the extent to which government “alternative energy” policy systematically privileges large-scale, conventional corpo...

In this video, Judge Napolitano (filling in for Glenn Beck) absolutely demolishes any pretense that voluntary decisions, by private parties, on a free market were in any way responsible for the oil spill in the gulf. Instead, a series of bad decisions by the government, following the collusion of corporate special interests with Congress, caused this spill and the subsequent mishandling of it. W. E. Messamore , Editor in Chief Articles | Author's Page

With Earth Hour 2010, which is to say: "anti-poor, anti-freedom, anti-humanity, anti-progress, anti-happiness hour 2010" just a day away , let's review what Earth Hour really means: Anti-poor: It is anti-poor because its organizers support strict, coercive carbon mitigation policies which will destroy the ability of the third world poor to develop and become affluent. It's easy and fun to sit in the dark for an hour with friends when you know you can turn the lights back on, but you're being incredibly dense, insensitive, and cruel to the people of the world without your advantages, who have a dream of developing and becoming affluent like you. Those people often sit in darkness anyway, not by choice, but because of substandard power systems and intense poverty. They live in countries that need to industrialize, that need to burn fossil fuels, that need to use energy in order to develop. The carbon-regulatory schemes at issue with the Earth Hour supporters, will...

Republican Governor Gary Johnson 's advocacy group Our America Initiative is starting to gain steam by putting some fantastic ideas out there and helping Americans to understand that good government is easy! I am proud to announce that I will start making regular contributions to the Our America Initiative blog and am honored to be a part of what I hope will be an historic initiative to restore America to its former greatness by restoring her freedoms. The following is an excerpt from my first blog post at Our American Initiative : One important question for our era is: How do we create clean, affordable, renewable energy? It would seem that Silicon Valley engineer, K.R. Sridhar has found an answer to that question, the Bloom Box. With its dazzling premiere on 60 minutes Sunday evening, the Bloom Box is making a big splash on the Internet as the next best solution to our energy needs. It’s a small fuel cell that produces a lot of energy, allowing its users to unplug from the powe...

Photo © 2009 W. E. Messamore Calls for a Second Stimulus Package Amidst the wreckage of the first stimulus package, which passed this February , we are already hearing whispers and rumors about a second stimulus package, including Warren Buffet and Nancy Pelosi 's guarded support for such a measure. Instead of writing a redundant essay with arguments against a second stimulus package (which would simply rehash the same arguments I made in a Feb 1st essay entitled " Economic Folly: 7 Reasons The Stimulus Package Will Be Bad For America "), I have put together a cool, quirky, and totally effective alternative stimulus package. If it's a second stimulus package they want, then they should pass this one. You can call it "A Conservative Stimulus Package." On second thought- the whole drug legalization part might not make it so popular among traditional conservatives. Better call it "A Libertarian Stimulus Package." I'd also be happy with something...