I do not trust the numbers for New Zealand prior to the early 1990s released by the OECD. New Zealand simply did not have a tax structure including a GST in the double digits back then to support estate of that size. Nonetheless, the size of government in New Zealand is systematically larger than in Australia, a richer country which can afford a large government and generous welfare state.
Climate science is the latest manifestation of solution aversion: denying a problem because it has a costly solution. The Right does this on climate science, the Left does it on gun control, GMOs, and plenty more. Cass Sunstein explains:
It is often said that people who don’t want to solve the problem of climate change reject the underlying science, and hence don’t think there’s any problem to solve.
But consider a different possibility: Because they reject the proposed solution, they dismiss the science. If this is right, our whole picture of the politics of climate change is off.
Campbell and Kay asked the participants whether they agreed with the IPCC. And in both, about 80 percent of Democrats did agree; the policy solutions made no difference.
Republicans, in contrast, were far more likely to agree with the IPCC when the proposed solution didn’t involve regulatory restrictions…
Here, then, is powerful evidence that many people (of course not all) who purport to be skeptical about climate science are motivated by their hostility to costly regulation.
The Left is equally prone to motivated readings. For example, it was found that those on the left are much more concerned about home invasions when gun control can reduce them rather than increase them.
Previously the precautionary principle was used to introduce doubt when there was no doubt. But when climate science turned in their favour, environmentalists wanted public policy to be based on the latest science.
The welfare states in Scandinavia do not make their societies any less unequal than most other welfare states once you take into account taxes and transfers – after-tax redistributions.
It is the height of folly to attack a country with weapons of mass destruction with the intent of conquering it. That intent of conquest and regime change gives the other side every incentive to use their weapons of mass destruction if only in an act of desperation. The whole purpose of weapons of mass destruction is to deter invasions.
Rather than concede the other side’s argument and use it against them, the renegade left preferred every other argument, most of which bolstered the case for invasion.
The most obvious of these was more weapons inspections by the UN instead of invasion. If there is a need for more weapons inspections, there must be some WMD weapons to find. The UN had 12 years to find these and still cannot find them all.
What was the point of the UN inspections and the renegade left calling for the inspections to continue as an alternative to invading in 2003 unless they expected to find more evidence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons?
The reality is Saddam played a fine game of bluff. He destroyed his WMD capability early after the first Iraq war. He could not be afforded be found with WMDs.
Saddam then tricked everybody into believing that he still had weapons of mass destruction as a way of projecting strength, especially to regional rivals.
It is also the case that if the UN inspections stopped, Saddam would have resumed his WMD armament program.
It is not possible to stop countries from developing WMDs. You can deter them from using them. Far more volatile characters in Russia and China in the 50s and 60s were deterred from using nuclear weapons.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
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