I have been complaining for some time about the EPA and the Green movement. I have always felt that they had it all wrong and now I think that I have stumbled onto the correct argument. I think that we all have the same objective and what is that? Life expectancy!!! We are always hearing how this or that "saves" lives and for that reason it is "good" and we should do it not matter what it costs. Isn't that right? The claim is that pollution kills thousands of people every year. Is that really true? If you look deeper into the claim, the claim is that people do not live as long due to pollution. This could be a valid point. It leads to the next question and that is, "how much is it worth to add 6 months onto the average life?" Note also that this additional 6 months is on the "end" of life. What if we adjusted that last 6 months by a "quality of life factor"? Then how much is that extra 6 months worth. This is not my real argument, it is only a set up for the real thing and what is that?
I checked a few life expectancy numbers for different countries around the world and what was their trend. The USA is 78.1 and China is 74.7 and Taiwan is 78.6. All of these numbers have been going up and have been going up fast in the past 100 years. Prior to that, in the past several thousand years the life expectancy for most of the world was "flat". That means that the life expectancy has really gone up only in the past few hundred years. I think it was because Columbus discovered America and took back the potato and corn, but that is a different story. What really happened and Columbus had an important part in that was world wide wealth and trade. As countries became more wealthy, the life expectancy increased. Now what if that wealth had a down side in pollution? Was it worth it for us humans to be able to live on average 25% or 30% longer? Wasn't that objective of the Green movement? If so, then why does the green movement and the EPA work so hard to make it more difficult to create wealth? I know!!
What the Green movement and the EPA want is the "perfect" solution where there is no pollution and at the same time we maximize wealth creation. Nice idea, but that is all that it is, an idea. There are always trade offs and that is why most of us have brains. That is to make decisions about these trade offs and come to the correct logical conclusion. Obama and his "none" decision on the Canada pipe line will make it more difficult to increase life expectancy here in the USA. That is because we will not be as wealthy in the future as we could have been had the pipe line been approved. If it is approved later, there is no way that the affect of the delay can be made up. I dealt with the fallacy of being able to "catch up" in a prior blog. You can never catch up from a bad decision.
Remember that one of our most important national objectives is "live expectancy" and "quality of life" and that means the creation of wealth. If you don't think that wealth is the most important factor in life expectancy, check this out. Switzerland has the highest life expectancy and they have the highest per capita income and look at Haiti, one of the poorest with a life expectancy of only 51 years. Africa is one of the worst places on Earth in terms of life expectancy and they are the poorest. Is their problem pollution or inability to create wealth? When Columbus discovered America, the life expectancy of Europe was about the same as Native Americans, but Kings and the nobility lived almost twice as long as the average person. Now why was that? This was well before modern medicine. It was the big difference in wealth. If our society needs a cause it is not the green movement or the attack on Wall Street or business, it is that we need to figure out how to create more wealth. We are talking about average or per capita wealth and redistribution does not increase total wealth. If anything, it reduces total wealth and thus per capita wealth. I predict that what you are going to see is a flattening out or a decline in life expectancy here in the USA if these Greenies and liberals get their way. Sorry, but those are the facts.
