[This article is excerpted from chapter 15 of The Ethics of Liberty. Listen to this article in MP3.]

Now, here is a famous environmental activist who is serious about the global warming problem.

Michael Tanner, reviewing the Republican debates the other night, just assumes without question that Reagan is the standard bearer, even though his submitted budgets were always higher than what a Democratic Congress would approve and his welfare spending set records that were bested only by his successors. Most annoying is Tanner’s dismissal of Ron Paul: “one had to go all the way down to Rep. Ron Paul’s quixotic campaign before someone reflected Reagan’s commitment to limited government.”

The Christan Science Monitor reports that we have passed the tipping point: 1 in 2 Americans now receives income from government programs:

Ludwig von Mises warned of the unintended consequences that result from government interventions. In line with his warnings is the misallocation resulting from malinvestment by government in activities that are not the best use of scarce resources. These malinvestments create capital structures unsupported by real wants and desires. Bust comes when resources are cutoff or shift to the lines that are truly productive from those lines which exist solely because of these government interventions.

A few years back, when my son was in college, he had to mail a letter. I don’t remember the specific reason, but I do remember having a conversation with him in which he complained bitterly about the amount of work involved — finding a place where he could purchase a stamp, figuring out what kind of stamp he needed, actually writing the letter, locating an envelope, putting the letter into the envelope, having to physically leave his dormitory room to mail the envelope and so on.

[This article is excerpted from chapter 14 of The Ethics of Liberty. Listen to this article in MP3, read by Jeff Riggenbach. The entire book is being prepared for podcast and download.]

The environmentalists are pushing hideous looking fluorescent light bulbs of the kind shown here as a way to save electricity and thus reduce the need for power plants and resulting carbon emissions. The bulbs will thus allegedly help to save the planet from global warming and, therefore, the environmentalists argue, everyone should use them instead of the customary, incandescent bulbs.

Australia and Canada have already enacted laws or regulations that will make these bulbs mandatory within a few years. Efforts are underway to do the same thing here in the United States.

Joe Kissell at Interesting Thing of the Day does a little investigation to try to piece together The Story of Toilet Paper. If someone is going on about how idyllic life was before capitalism destroyed our more natural way of life (e.g., distributists, environmentalists, communitarians, hippies, etc.) then just bringing up the lack of toilet paper prior to the mid-19th century should snap them out of it.