Hobgoblins! Save Us!

"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." ~ H.L. Mencken, 1923

In J.R.R Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit, the wizard Gandalf warns Bilbo that the Grey Mountains are "simply stiff with goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs of the worst description".

In Mencken’s time, hobgoblins also ran wild. But they were of a different sort. The demon Alcohol had people clamoring for Prohibition, enough that a Constitutional amendment was actually passed to ban it. The horrible fiends Capitalism and Business scared people enough that they embraced The New Deal, a government intrusion into the economy which would have been unimaginable a few decades earlier.

Mencken would have no trouble recognizing today’s hobgoblins. Global warming. Pesticides. Industrial chemicals. Biotechnology (for that matter, just about anything that makes our lives easier, or our food cheaper and more abundant). Cell-phones (remember they were supposed to cause brain cancer? And now they are the only cause of auto accidents that anyone seems concerned about. Verizon must have fallen behind in their campaign contributions). Second-hand smoke. Suburban sprawl. HMOs. Guns. Drugs. Income inequality (yes, a shameless, self-promoting link to one of my earlier articles). Microsoft. Saddam Hussien. China. Trade Deficits. Even bad airline service (remember the "Airline Passenger’s Bill of Rights"?)!

They come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have something in common. They are used by politicians (and their allies in the media) to frighten people into thinking that something must be done (by the government, of course). The result is that politicians solidify and expand their power, and we lose our liberties. And, almost without exception, the government’s action makes the problem worse, and thus enables them to call for further action. And so we have gun-control laws that make our streets less safe, chemical bans that make us less healthy (see also here), and a foreign policy that endangers, rather than protects, our citizens.

Global warming is one scare whose persistence has mystified me. The basic claim of the global warmers is so easy to debunk, that I can’t understand why I still have to hear about it. By now, global warming should have gone the way of its cousin, global cooling (which was all the rage 25 years ago, as scientists told us we were headed into another ice age).

Here are the basics on global warming. The Earth has warmed over the last century, but most of that warming occurred before 1940, when many fewer cars roamed the earth. From 1940 to 1975, a cooling period took place. Since then, the temperature has been relatively stable. So, the impact of human activity on the earth’s temperature would seem minimal. Yes, ground-based measurements do show warming in recent decades, but these measurements suffer from what is known as the urban heat island effect. In simple terms, this means that most temperatures are measured in urban areas, often at airports. As urban areas have grown, more acreage has been paved over. Anyone who has ever walked across a parking lot in July in bare feet knows what happens to asphalt in the sun. It gets real hot. So, the fact that urban, ground-based temperature measurements show warming is really rather uninteresting.

Satellite measurements, which are not affected by asphalt, are more interesting. They actually show a (small) cooling over the past 20 years. There you have it. Theory debunked. All of this information has been available for at least three or four years now (look it up yourself), yet we still have to listen to European politicians whining about George Bush’s rather tepid opposition to Kyoto. His concerns about how much the Kyoto treaty will cost are valid, but they miss the real target. Global warming is a hobgoblin, and a rather easy one to slay at that.

I don’t have a magic solution on how stop the hobgoblins. Nor do I think one exists. As long as men seek power, they will use fear as a means to obtain that power. So, new hobgoblins will appear all the time, and many old ones will get resurrected. But when they do, give my approach a try. As soon as I hear about a new scare, I immediately assume that it’s phony. The scarier it sounds, the more I am sure that there is absolutely nothing to it. I then read about it as the weeks pass by, and see if any real facts appear that might change my mind. It almost never happens. Hobgoblins, after all, are just imaginary.

July 2, 2001

Jim Waddell [send him mail] is a financial analyst in Poughkeepsie, NY.

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