You've got my vote Peter. A most interesting discussion.

Peter

I am not ready to concede anything, yet- particularly if your language continues to slip into insults and inuendoes. Let's keep the party clean and focus on the topic- which I see as AGW- and what, if anything, to do about it.

Your repeated claim is that governments shouldn't get involved at all, because they never provide net benefits over a completely laissez-faire economy. You also claim that this can be proved by the critique of pure reason, where the theoretical can bridge to the empirical. Theory can act as a metaphor for empiricism, but not replace it.

As an empiricist, I ask you to show me even one completely laissez-faire economy, and if you can, show me that it has performed better than a (reasonably) comparable economy with a government that exacts some taxes and provides some services. I await your evidence with great interest.

If you can't, we are left with the (to me) sensible issue as to whether government intervention can improve the situation. This can't be "proved", because we have to wait until (say) 2050 to find out- and even then, we won't have had the privilege of comparing a statistically significant number of worlds in a double blind test.

However, we can either take the approach of "likelihood based on past performance". Here you might have some traction, but I have pointed to some positive examples, too.

That is why I have proposed an approach that has Government only making macro-economic settings (1% surplus, no expansion of credit) and leaving the community (the major players in the economy) to do what they have done for a long time- try to improve their lot by efficiency gains.

Peter, Keynes said "we can't eat gold". I say "we can't cook with Aristotelian syllogisms".

..and Cheryl, while Peter's sophistry may be more "interesting" than my appeals to empiricism, does that make it true, or at least more useful?

"Your repeated claim is that governments shouldn't get involved at all..."

I have not made that claim, because I haven't had to. We are all still waiting for the AGW policy advocates to establish a rational justification for policy in the first place. We have not yet got to the stage of establishing the initial claim, and therefore we are not yet at the stage of requiring a rejoinder.

Facts do not interpret themselves. That requires theory. For example in the AGW debate, the raw data are simply reams of temperature records - pages and pages of numbers - for places and dates. No-one can, and no-one claims to be able to, interpret them in their raw form, because of the great complexity involved. The whole point of rendering them in statistical analyses, is to be able to identify significant generalities by omitting detail judged to be relatively insignificant. But that act of interpretation is not given by the data themselves, and requires reference to theory. If the theory is not sound, the entire conclusion will be unsound.

To be scientific, the underlying theory must at the very least be logically cogent. *After* the theory has satisfied that minimal test, we may then proceed to empirical observation and statistical analysis of data which *are* historically contingent.

But the only theories you have advanced, that 'government must do something because government must do something', or that 'government exists therefore government must do something', being circular, do not satisfy that minimal logical test.

Therefore you should be taken to have conceded the general issue and ordered to pay me for a year's supply of beer and dancing girls.

Peter
At his stage of my metaphorical evening, I only have flat beer and the only dancing girls left are flat-footed. But if you are claiming that my argument is circular, I am aguing that yours is flat wrong.

Of course, as Kuhn and Quine asserted "all data is theory laden", but some theories are "better" than others in that they can more accurately predict future events. This is where the AGWs have it over the anti-AGWs.

Be that as it may, you claim that I support government action on the basis of circular justification. I don't think so. It's been by a process of elimination of the contenders.

As I've said before, AGW is a "free-rider" problem, exhibited at three levels. At the personal level, most people aren't really motivated to reduce carbon consumption as there are benefits to not and they don't believe that their "defection" will make a significant difference. Similarly at a corporate level and an individual country level. That only leaves collective global action, or sufficiently widespread global action that the "defectors" are a minority that can be isolated or compensated (if they are small and weak).

As to the "iatrogenic" possibility, again as a "probabilist-empiricist" I look at the likelihood of success vs failure. Governments have failed frequently, but they have also succeeded often as well. The baic question is whether my theory of "carbon reduction by deflation" is robust.

Will we ever know? Probably not. The spectre of deflation is haunting Europe- and the USA, because inflation has been used for a long time to reduce real debt at all levels.

However, as government subsidies have stimulated the green energy supply sufficiently to get them close to the "grid parity" threshold, there is a chance that the "energy dividend re-investment" problem could slowly go away, particularly if carbon supplies remain so politically and environmentally problematic.

The present round of subsidy reductions probably won't affect that outcome.

I can hear the strains of a Kris Kristofferson song:
"The shutters are closed and the ladies are leaving."

LOL

Smacks of magic pudding to me.

Peter

As that old empiricist Bunyip Bluegum would say, "the proof of the pudding is in the eating".

May the Force of Reason be with you- always.