Common Sense with Paul Jacob

The current stretch of history dominated by Trump, war, a reverse in fortunes in the culture war, and AI, have the Greta Thunberg brigades champing at the bit to bring back “climate change” as the main driver of conversation and policy.

So gird up your loins and remember the real big picture in climate change: the regularity of the cycle of glaciation/deglaciation in our current era, the current interglacial of the Ice Age.

And of course there is always John Stossel to throw some cold water on global warming:

South America’s 21st century boom in socialist politics is going bust all over the continent. The latest case? Bolivia. See the terrific article in Reason:

Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, has turned fiscal shock therapy into a political calling card, and the payoff is visible as inflation cools, poverty falls, and growth returns. In Ecuador, Daniel Noboa secured a second term by blending tough security policies at home with pragmatic economic partnerships abroad, striking new deals with China while maintaining close ties to the U.S. Colombia is poised to move sharply to the right in next year’s election, with one leading contender, the conservative journalist Vicky Dávila, sounding a lot like Milei.

The most recent reversal is happening in Bolivia, where voters just rejected democratic socialism by a lopsided margin. The results mark a sharp turn away from the policies of former President Evo Morales, which have brought immense suffering to the country. In last week’s election, the once-dominant Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) barely cleared 3 percent of the vote.

César Báez, “Socialism Just Imploded in Bolivia,” Reason (August 21, 2025).

Socialism is inherently unstable, contra all the leftists in first world countries who apologize for it. Why is it unstable? Well, the key argument was developed by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek: complex systems like large societies gain much by distributing responsibility widely, so that diverse knowledge from all sources can be leveraged with minimum of coercion and maximum of efficiency; the industrial society that tries to provide a wide array of consumer goods must fail, because the central planners cannot calculate value without markets in production goods.

Socialism as a universal mode of production is impracticable because it is impossible to make economic calculations within a socialist system. The choice for mankind is not between two economic systems. It is between capitalism and chaos.

Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and the Total War (1944).

There are many other arguments as well. Ayn Rand famously said that though one can vote oneself into socialism, one must shoot one’s way out. That appears to be the case in Venezuela, but not, thankfully, Bolivia. “The socialist project ‘imploded by itself,’ Bolivian policy analyst Rolando Schrupp” explained, according to the Reason article, “citing public exhaustion after nearly two decades of rule.”

This is the problem with democratic socialism, as Irving Kristol noted: “Every social-democratic party, once in power, soon finds itself choosing, at one point after another, between the socialist society it aspires to and the liberal society that lathered it.”

Thankfully, Bolivians are choosing democracy by voting out the socialists.