FELDSTED: “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods”

Henry Louis Mencken (1880 – 1956) was an American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic and scholar of American English. He was of the opinion that:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

We have suffered through decades of hysterical warnings that the world is doomed. The biggest hobgoblin of all time is the global warming, climate change hoax. We are offered the alternative of impoverishing ourselves by destroying our economies or watching the world drown. Hanged if we do, hung if we don’t. 

The proposition is preposterous.

We have no assurance that a reduction of carbon emissions, by the minority of nations who have committed to reduction, will have any effect on climate change. That makes carbon reduction a highly risky investment with little potential of a tangible return.   

  

Most of the environmental movement is based on similar fear-mongering. Proponent pick the worst possible scenario as adequate reason to block construction of pipelines, logging, roads, tanker ships and other works required to maintain a healthy economy. Nothing we do is risk-free. Our very lives are not risk free. 

The adventurers who discovered and rediscovered North America did not do so without high risks. History only records those who were successful and got back home to report their findings. Others who tried and failed on the discovery, or return voyage, are forgotten.

The immigrants who followed did not do so without risk. We have incomplete records of those who came, but know that many lived short lives, succumbing to illness, injuries, mishaps and murder.

Generations following gradually built a nation, one piece at a time, overcoming whatever obstacles they discovered. Men of vision undertook to connect us from east coast to west, and then enticed immigrants to settle the sparsely populated areas between. All faced hardships and risks we cannot imagine today.

Pretending that we can continue to move forward and improve as a society without the inventiveness, ingenuity, hard work and risks undertaken by previous generations is irrational. We are dropping the torch handed to us by previous generations without conscience, regret or remorse.

We are often told we get the government we deserve. I do not believe that. We wind up with the government that has the best sales pitch. 

Quoting Mencken again: “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under” and “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods”. 

Food for thought.

John Feldsted