Logic would solve a lot of problems

Steven Horwitz, an economics professor at St. Lawrence University, posted an interesting blog comparing the “liberal” global-warming-freaks to the “conservative” let’s-go-kill-all-the-terrorists-freaks. The post is relatively short, and I recommend you go here to read it, but the main point, I think, is this:

More generally I would ask several questions of people critical of the War in Iraq but gung-ho about a War on Global Warming. Should we not be asking the same deep, critical questions about what we do and do not know about climate change and environmental issues more broadly, and how we acquired that information, as we should have asked about Iraqi WMDs before we go rushing to “war” on global warming? Though the earth has been warming, it is not at all clear that the consensus on the causes and consequences of said warming is as widely shared among scientists as Al Gore and others would like us to believe. Should we not also be asking the same questions about the effects that such a war will have on innocents in the third world as dissenters did with respect to Iraq? After all, the environmentalism-driven rush to biofuels appears to be a significant contributing factor to the run-up in world food prices, which is causing great harm to the poorest folks on the planet. And shouldn’t we be asking what the consequences of this “war” will be on our own freedoms and our own standard of living, just as critics of the War in Iraq have rightly drawn attention to those same issues in the context of that war? Finally, is it really all that much more imperialistic to try to create democracy at the point of a gun in Iraq than it is to tell the Third World that they must abide by high Western standards of environmental regulation in the name of a war on global warming and environmental destruction, when the consequences of doing so are sure to prolong their poverty?

I have frequently thought the same link also lies between conservatives who recognize that welfare programs only keep people dependent on the system, yet think staying in Iraq indefinitely will help out the Iraqis. Obviously it’s not the same situation, but there are enough similarities to reach the conclusion that people just don’t think about things logically.