Social Entrepreneur: more like a Robin than a Batman

All the hippies/leftists/socies/dems/donkeys/obamas are all up about this "social entrepreneur" upholstery.   Which didn't really hit me as anything strikingly different from your normal entrepreneur in a venture except the former is slightly more in touch with their feminine side.  Today someone mentioned in passing that the social entrepreneur is actually taking up the role of government in the private sector by providing a social service.  This idea is great!  I'm all about the social entrepreneur now!  Momma Gov.  is finally sharing some of her pork.  Thought she never would.   

Trust in society.

America we have trust issues!

...or so they tell me.

I was in this really quaint book store the other day looking for some good reads and I happened upon a conversation with one of the locals. She was a sweet well-read girl who had a surprisingly impressive intuition for economics. Need I say anymore, she was attractive! She said something that struck a chord for me. We were discussing the pros and cons of cap and trade and she said, in reference to the need for policy creation, that she didn't trust society to determine the outcome of an issue as important as those posed by global warming. She didn't trust society! (hold the phone!) Honey, humans are durable beasts! We flipping survived an ice age without metal! The one thing we can rely on, the one constant, when addressing something so vague as human nature, is that when an environment throws up constraints, we survive. Society/humans/not government is the only thing I trust to actually yield a solution to global warming. Policy is not an ends. Policy is a means, and not very good one at that. (here I go now repeating myself) The solution needs to come from entrepreneurs and buying power. These things move society. Policy is as much an ends to a problem as the levees were for New Orleans.

To Crap and trade or not to crap and trade (thus is the question of every 4th grader and politition)

Cap and trade is the only model for environmental regulation that promotes solving the knowledge problem at the same time.  It allows for companies purchasing the quotas for emissions to bargain and determine the price of their deemed proper emission standard.  

this all roughly according to Lynne Kiesling (she is awesome) and her studies promoting cap and trade as the best alternative in an attempt to make Air into a property.  

This is all true but an argument that has not been addressed by academics in the grand battle existing between carbon tax vs. cap and trade is that the act if seeking tradable quotas is a zero sum game.  All revenues delegated to seeking and purchasing quotas are locked out of any competitive industry and hurtled into the public sector.  Specifically what they intend to do with those collected revenues is another can of worms.  More importantly is the fact that those revenues are not set to creating the most real value within a competitive enterprise.  Some may say that they could be delegated by the federal government to fund research projects in energy efficient technology.  To which I would respond--in accordance with previous posts--that is a load of crock!  Innovation comes out of competition and the private sector can innovate two dollars on every dollar created by the public sector any day.  

 

Bigger question being do we need a policy and I think we do...   Air is a commons, commons need to be owned before they are respected.  Granted there is no easy way to do that.  Lynne Kiesling mentioned in a debate published in Reason Magazine that if we could put a bubble above everyones head and call it owned air this would be easy... but we can't.  

I'm interested to see where this debate goes.  

Here's a list of fun some fun plays-on-words relating to the topic:

-Cap and burn

-More like "Carbon 'Jack" us out of our money. 

-Crap and trade

got any ideas, let me know.

Spontaneous order vs. natural selection (same thing?)

The principles of "spontaneous order," "extended order," "invisible hand"... etc. (as explained by Hayek Adam Smith and many other economists)  are the same as those that govern a natural ecosystem--natural selection.  Those shinning principles that most economists point to be the most efficient means of allocation of resources... the free market, the price system.  If not disturbing the natural flow within a market place: allowing for resources to distribute themselves based on pure supply and demand and limited government that protects life liberty and property, is the most ethical means of approaching the knowledge problem, than is it essentially unethical to take a similar regulatory behavior towards the environment?  Uni-cropping, preventing the flow of species onto a property or landscaping.  How far does the ethic of supporting spontaneous orders extend?  Self benefit plays in. That is to say when it stops benefiting me, than I place restrictions on my yard and regulate my env.  

This is an interesting intersection between The Land Ethic by Aldo Leopold (an extreme environmental philosopher from Wisconsin, and Hayek.   Maybe it means nothing but I think they are applying the same idea in two different directions... It's like turn around Dorothy! your sister's right behind you! but they both walk opposite directions down the same yellow brick road.