A comment on the aforecited TP post reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to say: The arguments conservatives use for inaction on global warming seem sharply at odds with their arguments about terrorism.
Consider Dick Cheney’s celebrated One Percent Doctrine, which says that even a 1% chance of catastrophic terrorist attack should prompt us to respond as though it were a certainty.
Well, the chances of catastrophic damage from global warming are a hell of a lot higher than 1%. So …
Now, Boudreaux says that responding to global warming could hurt capitalism, so we should just "neglect" it. But responding to terrorism in the hysterical way we’ve done since 9/11 has sent the national budget completely out of control. The deficit has exploded, defense spending is rising every year, and the Department of Homeland Security has become a massive distributor of patronage money, which, as all good capitalists know, distorts the hell out of markets.
So where’s Boudreaux’s outrage about that? Will he say we should neglect terrorism rather than risk capitalism?
I really wish global warming were a scary foreign brown person. Then maybe we’d $%#! do something about it.
(There will be much more about this in my posts about fear, which I’ve been writing for over a week now and have spiraled completely out of control and at this rate will never be published, since I can’t seem to get to the damn point, so never mind.)
