The Worse-Than-Medieval Economics of Climate Technocrats

November 16, 2023

by Ryan Turnipseed Mises.org

Throughout my life, a specter developed by the state has been used to haunt and cajole the world’s politics to favor centralized technocracy. I remember it first being called “global warming,” complete with apocalyptic prognostications meant to occur by specific years. Sometime after those predictions failed to materialize, it was rebranded as “climate change,” and the technocratic class’s predictions became more ethereal and vague.

The craze made its way into the discipline of economics, where mainstream theories of externalities are used to justify state intervention into the lives of their subjects under the guise of solving climate change. Despite their aspirations to be forward-thinking and progressive, medieval thinking would be preferable to the reasoning used by technocrats and mainstream economists.