The Resurrection of the Left

My left-wing friend Xerxes has chosen the occasion of Easter to declare his belief that our civilization is in need of a resurrection.

I find it fascinating that we both think our civilization or culture is in crisis, both left and right think so, but for completely different reasons.

What alarms me is an apparent growing lack of faith, values, morals, growing totalitarianism, and an aggressive attempt to shut down civil discourse. What frightens him is growing income inequality and global warming. Both of which strike me as non-issues.

As for income inequality, it is inevitable, if everyone is getting richer, that income inequality is going to grow. If, for example, everyone’s income goes up by 20%, the result will be greater income inequality. Income inequality is reduced, conversely, so long as everyone is getting poorer. And an economy that is not growing is almost surely shrinking. So you really have only two choices: either growing income inequality, or growing poverty.

In addition, if any new advancement is found, improving prosperity generally, those who invent, discover, or first adopt it will see their incomes shoot ahead. It will take time for this to spread to everyone. By that time, with any luck, something  else new has been invented. Accordingly, the better everyone’s life is getting, the more income inequality you will get.

And what exactly is the problem with income inequality? So long as everyone is getting enough to meet their needs, how does it harm A if B is doing better? To object is surely simply the sin of envy: I am coveting my neighbour’s goods. This is sometimes presented as the worst of all sins. It was the sin of Cain, that brought murder into the world. Some make it the sin of Eve, and of Lucifer as well; the Quran does.

As for global warming, the full proposition we are required to accept is not just that the earth is getting warmer. To avoid “denying,” you must embrace a sequence of assertions: 1. That the earth is getting warmer. 2. That this will not be corrected by any natural processes or upcoming technological improvements, without conscious large-scale human intervention. 3. That the earth getting warmer is, on balance, a bad rather than a good thing. 4. That we can meaningfully do something about it, and 5. That the costs of doing something about it are less than the costs of letting it happen.

Each of these proposition is clearly in dispute, including the first, that the earth is getting warmer. Just do a web search. Some say it is getting colder. The computer models that assert global warming have so far been consistently wrong whenever they have made a prediction specific enough to be tested. Given that we do not know whom to believe, and have no personal expertise in the area, we should rationally take them all at 50/50 odds. Each requires the previous one to be true, so this is cumulative. We end up with a 3.1275% chance of the “global warming” dogma being true and large-scale government action being justified. That’s not good odds for putting down a lot of money. And that is without factoring in whether the given solution proposed is going to be the proper one, if there is more than one option, and whether you can convince all the governments of the world to adopt it.