By Robert Bradley Jr. — October 20, 2023
“We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.” (- Techno-Optimist Manifesto, below)
Add a new name to the powerful critics of climate alarmism and forced energy transformation. Marc Andreessen is the author of The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which draws upon the Julian Simon tradition of free minds and free markets to solve real challenges. This is a refreshing anecdote to the doom-and-gloom neo-Malthusians–and a threat to the climate industrial complex.
Sure enough, the critics are out with swords. Having posted The Techno-Optimist Manifesto on LinkedIn to the Climate Change Professionals Group, I was asked: “How is this diatribe from consume-more economics suitable for climate change professionals group??”
I responded:
Very appropriate where a better worldview about man and nature is the cure for ‘climate anxiety’.
Energy density, consumer welfare, fiscal sanity, and preservation of the living space (from wind and solar) is the way forward, not futile, wasteful Big Brother.
He answered: “It’s actually promoting unabated growth with no consideration of consequences or environmental impacts.”
I responded:
Not at all. Real pollutants and problems can be addressed via human ingenuity in free market settings.
It is the false pollutant carbon dioxide—and futile, costly climate policy—that needs to be overcome. The Malthusian mindset of doom-and-gloom too.
—————–
Energy and free markets are important areas of Andreessen’s Manifesto, which follow:
Energy
Energy is life. We take it for granted, but without it, we have darkness, starvation, and pain. With it, we have light, safety, and warmth.
We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.
The current gap in per-capita energy use between the smaller developed world and larger developing world is enormous. That gap will close – either by massively expanding energy production, making everyone better off, or by massively reducing energy production, making everyone worse off.
We believe energy need not expand to the detriment of the natural environment. We have the silver bullet for virtually unlimited zero-emissions energy today – nuclear fission. In 1973, President Richard Nixon called for Project Independence, the construction of 1,000 nuclear power plants by the year 2000, to achieve complete US energy independence. Nixon was right; we didn’t build the plants then, but we can now, anytime we decide we want to.
Atomic Energy Commissioner Thomas Murray said in 1953: “For years the splitting atom, packaged in weapons, has been our main shield against the barbarians. Now, in addition, it is a God-given instrument to do the constructive work of mankind.” Murray was right too.
We believe a second energy silver bullet is coming – nuclear fusion. We should build that as well. The same bad ideas that effectively outlawed fission are going to try to outlaw fusion. We should not let them.
We believe there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment. Per-capita US carbon emissions are lower now than they were 100 years ago, even without nuclear power.
We believe technology is the solution to environmental degradation and crisis. A technologically advanced society improves the natural environment, a technologically stagnant society ruins it. If you want to see environmental devastation, visit a former Communist country. The socialist USSR was far worse for the natural environment than the capitalist US. Google the Aral Sea.
We believe a technologically stagnant society has limited energy at the cost of environmental ruin; a technologically advanced society has unlimited clean energy for everyone.
Markets
We believe free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy. Willing buyer meets willing seller, a price is struck, both sides benefit from the exchange or it doesn’t happen. Profits are the incentive for producing supply that fulfills demand. Prices encode information about supply and demand. Markets cause entrepreneurs to seek out high prices as a signal of opportunity to create new wealth by driving those prices down.
We believe the market economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence – an exploratory, evolutionary, adaptive system.
We believe Hayek’s Knowledge Problem overwhelms any centralized economic system. All actual information is on the edges, in the hands of the people closest to the buyer. The center, abstracted away from both the buyer and the seller, knows nothing. Centralized planning is doomed to fail, the system of production and consumption is too complex. Decentralization harnesses complexity for the benefit of everyone; centralization will starve you to death.
We believe in market discipline. The market naturally disciplines – the seller either learns and changes when the buyer fails to show, or exits the market. When market discipline is absent, there is no limit to how crazy things can get. The motto of every monopoly and cartel, every centralized institution not subject to market discipline: “We don’t care, because we don’t have to.” Markets prevent monopolies and cartels.
We believe markets lift people out of poverty – in fact, markets are by far the most effective way to lift vast numbers of people out of poverty, and always have been. Even in totalitarian regimes, an incremental lifting of the repressive boot off the throat of the people and their ability to produce and trade leads to rapidly rising incomes and standards of living. Lift the boot a little more, even better. Take the boot off entirely, who knows how rich everyone can get.
We believe markets are an inherently individualistic way to achieve superior collective outcomes.
We believe markets do not require people to be perfect, or even well intentioned – which is good, because, have you met people? Adam Smith: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.”
David Friedman points out that people only do things for other people for three reasons – love, money, or force. Love doesn’t scale, so the economy can only run on money or force. The force experiment has been run and found wanting. Let’s stick with money.
We believe the ultimate moral defense of markets is that they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start religions into peacefully productive pursuits.
We believe markets, to quote Nicholas Stern, are how we take care of people we don’t know.
We believe markets are the way to generate societal wealth for everything else we want to pay for, including basic research, social welfare programs, and national defense.
We believe there is no conflict between capitalist profits and a social welfare system that protects the vulnerable. In fact, they are aligned – the production of markets creates the economic wealth that pays for everything else we want as a society.
We believe central economic planning elevates the worst of us and drags everyone down; markets exploit the best of us to benefit all of us.
We believe central planning is a doom loop; markets are an upward spiral.
The economist William Nordhaus has shown that creators of technology are only able to capture about 2% of the economic value created by that technology. The other 98% flows through to society in the form of what economists call social surplus. Technological innovation in a market system is inherently philanthropic, by a 50:1 ratio. Who gets more value from a new technology, the single company that makes it, or the millions or billions of people who use it to improve their lives? QED.
We believe in David Ricardo’s concept of comparative advantage – as distinct from competitive advantage, comparative advantage holds that even someone who is best in the world at doing everything will buy most things from other people, due to opportunity cost. Comparative advantage in the context of a properly free market guarantees high employment regardless of the level of technology.
We believe a market sets wages as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker. Therefore technology – which raises productivity – drives wages up, not down. This is perhaps the most counterintuitive idea in all of economics, but it’s true, and we have 300 years of history that prove it.
We believe in Milton Friedman’s observation that human wants and needs are infinite.
We believe markets also increase societal well being by generating work in which people can productively engage. We believe a Universal Basic Income would turn people into zoo animals to be farmed by the state. Man was not meant to be farmed; man was meant to be useful, to be productive, to be proud.
We believe technological change, far from reducing the need for human work, increases it, by broadening the scope of what humans can productively do.
We believe that since human wants and needs are infinite, economic demand is infinite, and job growth can continue forever.
We believe markets are generative, not exploitative; positive sum, not zero sum. Participants in markets build on one another’s work and output. James Carse describes finite games and infinite games – finite games have an end, when one person wins and another person loses; infinite games never end, as players collaborate to discover what’s possible in the game. Markets are the ultimate infinite game.
There are many things we should build if we believe hard enough. But “should” does not mean “could”.
Trickle down nonsense. As has been shown in reality people who get the money, keep it. Unless society forces them to pay for everything else though regulation and taxation.
It’s coming up to half a century since Thatcherism and Reaganomics adopted the Austrian school of economics. We can all see how the economic growth rates declined in the West since they did. Markets focus money at the top where it is hoarded and does nothing.
Who founds religions? The merchant Mohammed or the bookseller Hubbard? False beliefs are a problem but the author’s should not be looking at motes in the eyes of others.
The 1st Commandment is for our benefit. It stops people from making the very big mistakes, like this manifesto.
And where do they keep it? In bank accounts, which are then used by banks to loan out on mortgages and business loans. In stocks, helping to finance businesses who can then employee people and purchase capital equipment. In property, providing work for architects, brickies and plasterers. In luxury goods, again providing income to numerous businesses. The only way the wealthy can keep money out of circulation is by putting cash into a safe, and even then it will be inherited by the next generation who will no doubt spend some of it.
Taxation is theft. If it is wrong for the common man to threaten to kidnap you and demand your money, it is wrong for the government to do the same.
‘Taxation is theft.’ Some is, some isn’t. The trick is to try to limit government spending to what is necessary for society to function whilst limiting it’s unnecessary overspending, ie- theft by taxation. I don’t know of any country that’s actually managed that delicate balancing act, however; most governments find it ‘necessary’ to spend more and more.
Ah yes, limited government. Sadly that experiment failed about 90 years ago and is swirling in the bowl about to have the last remnants flushed away in a flood of modern monetary theory.
Socialists are incapable of understanding how investment benefits society.
They believe that companies spring up because of government regulations, and that new products are invented only because government invests in research.
But in case you haven’t noticed- that’s what happens- ergo, trickle down works.
As for fusion- sure, it’ll take time, but it’ll happen and when it does, it’ll be the most revolutionary thing to happen in many generations. If all the fortunes spent on wind and solar were spent to advance fusion, we’d get there quicker.
Trickle-down works obviously. We have the most obese ‘poor’ people on earth. MC apparently prefers to see everyone living equally in true poverty than for anyone to have ‘obscenely’ more while the poorest among us live lives that medieval nobility might envy.
It’s simple minded to associate one thing to explain all economics. There has been growth in recent decades. But then we shipped our factories to other nations. Did the Austrian school of economics call for that?
That’s a stretch of YOUR imagination.
Not even the 11th Commandment, “Thou Shall Not Get Caught”, is honoured these days.
Witness the behaviour of the FBI, Prosecutors, and Judiciary in the USA today. They weapons of government are being openly and brazenly abused in an attempt to stop roughly half of voting US citizens from even being allowed to vote for a non-approved Presidential candidate.
“Trickle down” is pure BS by socialists advocating for central planning. That Thatcher and Reagan failed to adequately deal with socialist delusions about economics does not refute what they tried to do.
Every time taxes are decreased, the economy picks up. The higher the pre-existing tax rates, and the greater the decrease, the bigger the economic increase.
Every time taxes are increased, the economy slows down.
Well, at least we have common ground on fusion being a false hope.
Although I’m in favor of the first commandment I am not sure how it protects us against errors of judgment.
The rest of your points seem to disprove your contention (unless you’re a polytheist).
To paraphrase Churchill, free markets are the worst economic system, except for all the others.
The flaw in your argument is that even under Thatcher and Reagan, the government never actually lifted its boot. It simply rearranged its footing slightly to favor other sectors of the elite. The Federal Reserve is worshipped by both branches of the Party, and its counterparts across the pond likewise promote market distortion. Never was Austrian economics actually applied, just given lip service and distorted to fit the Keynesian model.
The reason that wealth remains focused at the top is that the government is in partnership with the select producers, a system basically fascist in construction. That system absolutely requires that individual wealth be limited and the lower tiers remain dependent on the masters. An increase in individual wealth invariably is anathema to the existence of pervasive government. Reagan got one thing right, at least in words if not in practice. Government is not the solution to the problem, it is the problem
Additionally, who do you think created the Fed and the income tax? It was the wealthy, in concert with the elected. The monetary system and taxation structure are designed for the benefit of the elite. that system considers people to be resources, tools for use until they are no longer of use. Anyone who thinks they actually care about the individual has been had.
The original income tax only applied to the super wealthy. Only a handful of individuals in New York and California made enough money to trigger the income tax.
The majority of people believed that they were voting for a tax that they would never have to pay.
Of course today we have the case where the top 10% of earners pay close to 90% of all income taxes.
Who do you to grow bigger?
A business that pays wages or a Government that takes wages?
So much socialist claptrap, so little actual facts.
Out here in the real world, the data shows that people who have money do one of two things with it.
They either spend it, or they invest it. Scrooge McDuck, keeping all of his money in a big vault, may tickle the fancies of those who have hatred of people with money as their driving force, but it was never a reality.
BTW, trickle down has worked every time it has been tried.
Your solution of using government to steal the money from those who have earned it so that government can the votes of the people who would rather not work, has never worked, and has never improved the lot of the average citizen.
What is it about socialists and their desire to lie about everything.
Economic growth exploded during Reagan and Thatcher’s tenures. It slowed in the years following as the socialists regained power and started increasing taxes and regulations again.
Other then the fact that this “manifesto” offends your socialist sensibilities, I don’t see that you have done anything to refute it.
“As has been shown in reality people who get the money, keep it. Unless society forces them to pay for everything else though regulation and taxation.”
Some do keep it. They have right to keep it.
But many, at least here in America, rich and poor alike have proven they are willing to give to those in need.
Charities and individuals can choose to cut off those “milking the system”.
Enter the Government, the milking becomes a flood.
I worked with a guy with 5 kids. Good job. Lots of overtime available. (We were “essential” even before Covid.) He knew to the dime what was the max annual income to be disqualified from get money from the various Government handouts.
So, what he did was take all the overtime he could but take it in comp time, that is, OT was paid at 1.5 hours pay OR 1.5 hours off. He had an “off the books” income.
He’d use his CT to not work his regular hours (forcing the city to pay OT to someone else) and/or cover for this MFLA time. (He exhausted his MFLA every year once he was off probation.)
Such should not get cash from the Government.
PS He told me once that when a church would cut him off, he’d switch to a different church.
Fifty years ago my friends and I learned enough of these socio-economic matters to put them in the category of self-evident truths proven by example.
For reasons unknown, there it stopped. John Citizen was not informed.
Since then, we have seen wave after wave of second class folk intent on countering their lack of self-earned money with expanding personal greed.
The benefits of the free market are not in question but the motives of those opposing it are. These non-thinkers by nature have more numbers, so they have won and spoiled a wonderful world. Geoff S
The ideology of 50 years ago is not remotely close to reality today.
Free markets have their place, but oligopoly/monopoly/monopsony are also a reality in free markets.
Ultimately it boils down to: do governments that are representing the fiduciary interests of the people governed, do their jobs or is the private sector allowed to do whatever it wants even if it harms people overall?
Fair comment. I think wealth does “trickle down”, but the question is how quickly does it trickle and what makes it trickle faster or slower?
I used to read that excessive investment in property (i.e. land) was held to be a contributory factor to recessions or slow growth. Accumulated wealth is a precondition for investment, but if it is not invested in genuine productivity increases then what does it achieve?
We can’t get collectively wealthier by selling and re-selling houses to each other at ever increasing prices.
And in order for that model to remain practical, there has to be more demand than actual houses. Should anyone actually succeed in building the umpteen thousand homes here in the UK that would satisfy demand, those with existing mortgages and houses would likely boot out the government that allowed it to happen, as the housing market collapsed.
Just because you heard something doesn’t make it true, or even sensible.
Every time it’s been tried, cutting taxes has resulted in an increase in the economy. If you think that such an increase doesn’t benefit everyone, then you really need to read some real economic theory, not the nonsense socialists put out to impress each other.
As to your worries about land, when a person buys land, where do you think the money goes? Are you under the impression that the person who sells the land just buries the money, or hides it in his mattress? No, that person either uses the money to buy something he wants, or he invests the money. Either directly, or indirectly by depositing it in his bank.
Not true, and never was true.
In a free market, monopolies etc are impossible. It takes a government to create a monopoly, and only government can create a monopoly.
As long as there is competition, a monopoly cannot form. For the simple reason that as soon as a monopolist tries to raise prices, the competition immediately swoops in to take away his market share. Sometimes the competition is in a direct competitor. Sometimes the competition comes in the form of a product that can be substituted for the monopolists product.
If a monopolist tries to lower prices in order to drive the competition out of business, all the competition has to do is reduce their own production and wait for the monopolist to run out of money. Then they can rejoin the market and take advantage of a competitor that has just finished bankrupting itself.
The only way for a monopoly to form is for government to outlaw competition and use it’s monopoly on force to protect the wanna be monopolist.
Government regulation is a tool used for that purpose. Nothing removes competition better than expensive regulation or regulatory apparatus that is selectively applied. Think “Save the Whales” or bird kills.
Thanks for the link to the “climate industrial complex”. I’ve send that link to everyone I know here in Wokeachusetts.
God forbid that anyone should offer any ideas contrary to the prevailing dogma of that group!
YES!!!!
How do I vote for this?
Who is willing to say that the EPA’s excessive regulations of radiation are not only wildly unscientific, but are effectively a war crime against all humanity?
When the regulations were science-based, nuclear energy was the least cost resource. Cheaper to build than coal plants with no emissions controls and almost free to operate.
If that energy system had been allowed to spread over the world, many millions or billions of people would have been saved from grinding lives and deaths in poverty.
How can we take even one step in that direction today?
Vboring,
Spot on.
I have an awful mental image that we, in Australia at least, are on a path to the future where the workforce is mainly one group of baristas providing coffee to another in mornings, with the reverse in the afternoons.
Far too much of my career in mineral resource discovery was spent fighting an ever growing regulatory mob of people who had neither the skill nor the understanding to have a clue about what we did or what they were regulating. Their focus was and is on the art of regulation, not on the art of production of goods that society demands.
But they do drink coffee with adequate skill.
Geoff S
All I know is tax cuts and regulation cuts cause the economy to thrive.
It happened when President Kennedy cut taxes, and when Ronald Reagan cut taxes and when George W. Bush cut taxes and when Donald Trump cut taxes.
It works every time it is tried.
Biden should cut taxes and regulations if he wants a thriving economy. But he, and the Democrats are too delusional to do something like that. So, instead, we get this pathetic excuse for an economy that we have now.
Uh, no not really.
The greatest period of American prosperity was during WW2: massive spending, massive inflation but also massive wage increases. Decade plus of Great Depression economic issues washed away in just a handful of years.
The issue with taxes isn’t that taxes are automatically bad – the issue is how taxes are being used. Does the spending make people’s live better or is it just a piggybank for bureaucrats to line their pockets via the revolving door?
Even then – the bugbear of taxes is ridiculous. The greatest single financial impact on Americans today is not taxes – it is inflation and dollar purchasing power devaluation as a direct outcome of money printing.
And just as with taxes – it isn’t that money printing is automatically bad if the printed money is used for something positive. WW2 spending was money printing that makes today’s look like nothing, but that money was used to build industrial capacity, grow jobs and make things whereas the money printing of today is spent on junk.
No, during WW2, mainly weapons and ammunition were made. At the home front, there was rationing, recycling out of necessity, and most people could not buy new cars, washing machines, refrigerators, etc. as very few of those were even made as the military had priority. After WW2, when the government spending went way down and we downsized the military and the pent up demand for goods that could not be built during the war was able to be satisfied (i.e. the 50’s) was a very prosperous time.
THe idea that it is even possible for government to spend money wisely is one of the stupidest notions that socialists have ever foisted onto the masses.
Government WILL ALWAYS spend money in ways that benefit the politicians. If that also benefits the citizens, that’s more by accident then design.
No, the war did not end the great depression. That myth is old and persistent, mostly because it fits the narrative that the socialists have been trying to sell us.
If war time spending was sufficient to create a post war boom, then every country that fought the war should have benefited. Simple reality is that the US was the only country to experience a post war boom, and that was because the US was blessed with just about the only first world country that hadn’t seen their industrial capacity flattened during the war.
The US was able to quickly turn factories away from war time production and back to civilian production by virtue of the fact that all of our factories were still standing. Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan all had to rebuild their factories, and they did that by buying stuff from the US.
This is what caused the economic boom during the 50’s. As the 60’s rolled around, and the rest of the world got their economies humming again, the post war boom ended.
Also, the more money government has, the lower the chances that any of it will be spent wisely.
Building the interstate highway system was a military project for the benefit of the military. It was never sold as something that would benefit the economy and nobody at the time had any idea how such roads could benefit the economy. Back then, if you wanted to ship something long distance, the go to technology was railroads.
People also like to claim that NASA was a boon to the economy, that is also claim that is entirely self serving and has little basis in reality.
Miniature circuits? Were already under development by the electronics industry for the simple reason that such circuits were smaller, faster and consumed less power than individual transistors. The tiny increase in demand created by NASA might have advanced the advent of new products by a few days or weeks, but the products were already in development.
Heck, even Tang was a product that already existed when NASA decided to start supplying it to astronauts.
Beyond that, NASA did its best not to put bleeding edge products into it’s space vehicles. They wanted products with proven track records.
I was alive in WW2. It is hard to compare with other periods of similar length because of a likely, but unmeasurable factor, motivation. Men and women worked extraordinarily hard and reduced the handicap of groups like unions. Orders made by military are more often obeyed than orders made by regulators.
The post war 20 years were marked by steadily increasing private enterprise in Australia and hence higher productivity as in USA. The bureaucratic whiteanting accelerated after the mid 1970s and is now unbearable. See Covid lockdowns, Melbourne the world’s toughest. Geoff S
It’s even better than that! Expanding wealth in a society reduces population. A recent example is Bangladesh whose economy has grown at double digit GDP rates for the past decade and a half. In 1970, the fertility rate was 6.5 children per woman. Today, it is just below 2 children per. In the last several years they have built two large clean coal fired plants with more on the drawing board.
Tiger populations have expanded by 15% in the delta (and 30% in India).
https://database.earth/population/bangladesh/fertility-rate
Economic growth is even a blessing for Malthusians! Free enterprise reduces metal and other commodity use per unit (first computer an airconditioned room, now fits in a shirt pocket.
Private enterprise bets against the public circus-
Gas Deals Beyond 2050 Show Reality Gap on Europe Climate Goals (yahoo.com)
This makes sense to me.
It makes sense to anyone who has any sense.