TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

(Note; tongue firmly in cheek: see my straight post earlier.)

Well, maybe they weren’t WISE to build a row of nuclear power plants on a coastline known for earthquakes and a history of prior massive tsunamis, but surely the earthquake and tsunami are not TEPCO’s fault, right?

And it’s not THEIR fault that

• their founding shareholders took advantage of Japanese limited liability incorporation laws that free shareholders from any concern about personal liability (and, as TEPCO’s shares are “fully paid-up”, from any future cash calls by management) that would otherwise exist for private enterprises;
• the Japanese government allowed them to qualify as a ‘public company’ and thus widely raise capital from the public, under regulations that isolate managers from shareholders and create barriers to entry);
• the Japanese government licensed TEPCO as a public utility, effectively granting it a monopoly in the greater Tokyo area,
• the Japanese government ensured that TEPCO could raise the long-term capital necessary to fund the nuclear power plants,
  • by authorizing to set rates guaranteeing TEPCO’s returns on its investments by government,
  • by licensing the power plants themselves and approving their location, suppliers and safety, and
  • by giving TEPCO express liability caps for damages that radiation releases may cause others if an “act of nature” occurs?

And surely none of the concatenation of these acts of government, the construction of the plants and the earthquake or tsunami is the PERSONAL responsibility of any of TEPCO’s emploees, managers or executives, right? (Much less of the poor shareholders!) After all, having a corporation means that we get to embark on mega-projects that pose mega-risks, all without any real people being  personally responsible! How else, without these layers of protection for personal responsibility provided by government, would progress ever be made?

Thus, we can see clearly that this was all nothing more than a simple ACCIDENT, in which “TEPCO” – whoever the heck we consider that to mean – is the BIGGEST VICTIM – both of the earthquake/tsunamis and of Japanese silly government and citizens and customers who now clamor for TEPCO to pour more BILLIONS down a money hole! Outrageous – all of these snivelling people should just go away, and lump it, so that TEPCO can more easily figure out what it should do next. Cleanups are for governments and the smaller victims.

Such a wonderful system, allowing such marvelous works! Though unfortunate calculations might be made, the system allows us to quickly move ahead, as if nothing had happened. Naturally, TEPCO might require further assistance from government and government-protected banks, so that TEPCO can build more engineering marvels.

Boy, aren’t Austrian insights wonderful?

[Those of you who missed or who wish to refresh your recollection regarding my posts last year on a very related case, might enjoy the following link:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=victim+bp.]

I recently ran across excerpts to what looks like an interesting essay by F.A. Hayek; I copy them below for the benefit of interested readers.  (I could not find a  complete or.pdf version.) [Update: At my request, Jeffrey Tucker kindly tracked down the rest of this essay and put it up here.][Links may be broken due to migration of blog.]

I ask readers to ponder the relevance of Hayek’s remarks in light of the huge expansion of government and of manipulations by the Fed, the growth of large and statist “public” corporations whose executives are free from shareholder control (because limited liability incorporation statutes free shareholders from personal concern about risks of injuring others), and of snowballing moral hazard (particularly obvious in connection with our heavily regulated banking sector).

It seems to me that one can as easily lay blame for our current problem as much at the feet of statist corporations and excesses of government – of the sharp elites who take advantage of both – as one can on “socialists” and “envirofascists” who either want to rein in corporations or are looking for what they see as their “fair share” from a now bankrupt government. http://bit.ly/9oBkC7  http://bit.ly/fDoROa

F. A. Hayek, “The Moral Imperative of the Market” (in Martin J. Anderson (ed.) The Unfinished. Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government, 1986)

Emphasis added:

Until 130 or 150 years ago, everybody in what is now the industrialised part of the Western world grew up acquainted with the rules and necessities of what are called commercial or mercantile morals, because everyone worked in a small enterprise where he was equally concerned with, and exposed to, the conduct of others. Whether as master or servant or member of the family, everybody accepted the unavoidable necessity of having to adapt himself to changes in demand, supply and prices in the market-place. A change began to happen in the middle of the last century [1800s]. Where previously perhaps only the aristocracy and its servants were strangers to the rules of the market, the growth of large organisations in business, commerce, finance, and ultimately in government, increased the number of people who grew up without being taught the morals of the market which had been developed in the course of the preceding 2,000 years.

——–

For probably the first time since classical antiquity, an ever-increasing part of the population of the modern industrial state grew up without learning in childhood that it was indispensable to respond as both producer and consumer to all the unpleasant things which the changing market required.

This dichotomy explains the increasing opposition to the market system that has expanded far beyond the specifically socialist parties of the last century. In the course of history almost every step in the development of commercial morals had to be contested against the opposition of moral philosophers and religious teachers – a story well enough known in its outlines. We are now in the extraordinary situation that, while we live in a world with a large and growing population which can be kept alive thanks only to the prevalence of the market system, the vast majority of people (I do not exaggerate) no longer believes in the market.

It is a crucial question for the future preservation of civilisation and one which must be faced before the arguments of socialism return us to a primitive morality. We must again suppress those innate feelings which have welled up in us once we ceased to learn the taut discipline of the market, before they destroy our capacity to feed the population through the co-ordinating system of the market. Otherwise, the collapse of capitalism will ensure that a very large part of the world’s population will die because we cannot feed it.

We can nonetheless demonstrate that unless people are willing to submit to the discipline constituted by commercial morals, our capacity to support any further growth of population other than in the relatively prosperous West, or even to maintain it at its existing numbers, will be destroyed.

Grim words, that loom large these days.

Thanks for indulging the rambling title, dear readers. My thoughts wander even as try to gather them.

I thought I would share with you some of the observations I’ve been making – tweeting, largely – on the troubled nuclear reactors that TEPCO so thoughtfully lined up on the Fukushima coast to meet the massive tsunamis on March 11.

A environmental journalist who posted the Atomic Boy’s Upset Stomach YouTube video called it “little more than government-industry propaganda that glosses over the colossal abrogation of responsibility that led to the Fukushima crisis.”  While I don’t think the video was government- or industry-sponsored, I share his further sentiment (emphasis added):

there’s a gaping omission right at the beginning. Nuclear Boy has a stomach ache. No kidding. Why? …. Could it be because the government of Japan let the Toyko Electric Power Company build a series of nuclear reactors next to a seismically active fault line?

Sticking with the bowel-malfunction metaphor, perhaps the video’s creators could have produced a few frames testifying to the reality that Nuclear Boy’s parents fed him some poison because they forgot to read the label carefully. Something along those lines.

Is that too much for Japanese kids to swallow (so to speak?) I don’t think so. Responsibility is something we all try to teach our children as early as possible. It’s important that Japanese leaders acknowledge the real reasons why they (and their children) are going to have to spend tens of billions of dollars to replace the Fukushima reactors years earlier than expected. Reactors that require an independent source of electricity to maintain coolant levels are, of course, a bad idea, and one that today’s generation of reactor designers have abandoned. But building them in an earthquake zone is tantamount to lunacy.

This prompted me to leave a comment with some of my thoughts (emphasis added):

 James, your criticisms are almost spot-on.

The risk-shifting start with ‘limited liability’ corporations that frees shareholders from responsibility, escalates with ‘public companies’ (regulations isolate managers from shareholders and create barriers to entry), and is ramped up even more for utilities, which are effectively granted monopolies and guaranteed returns on investment by government. Operators of nuclear plants are then given express liability caps for damages that radiation releases may cause others.

None of the utility managers/executives will have PERSONAL liability, of course.

Given all of these government policies that truncate responsibility, can there be any surprise that risk analysis and decision-making produces obviously flawed results — and ongoing efforts to cover up and hide blame?

Here are some recent tweets on this:

Nagao versus TEPCO:Case of now dead nuclear worker reveals how Japan protects corps that exist to fulfill state policy http://bit.ly/hModQE

Japan megabanks to extend TEPCO $25 billion lifeline,as Govt is sure to limit TEPCO’s liability for damages http://bit.ly/e9tBnw #eqjp #p2

These days,it’s ‘capitalists’ who r the biggest socialists:’Japanese Gov prepares to protect TEPCO frm liability’ http://bit.ly/hpx8Eb #jpeq

Moody’s on the obvious:”business risk of operating nuclear pwr plants in Japan is higher thn previously contemplated” http://bloom.bg/e8TIlm

Cato’s Jerry Taylor: Nuclear power is “solar power for conservatives”+needs “a policy of tough love” TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/h07XHj

Posted by: TokyoTom | March 25, 2011 9:12 AM

More in posts to come.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s a very popular little little video that an artist put together a week and a half ago, in an effort to help kids get a handle on all of the nuclear news:

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5sakN2hSVxA:550:0]

We’re still not out of the woods here; let’s hope the s**t doesn’t really start flying. In any event, the situation REALLY stinks!

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2000/11/27/60II/main252545.shtml

http://truthiest.blogspot.com/2009/08/freedomworks-in-depth-astroturf.html

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011031120/koch-and-native-american-reservation-oil-theft

Thank you, dear readers! 

Looks like some of you missed me while I’ve been distracted here in the Land That The Hand of God Smote:

I alerted readers in January to a blog post on libertarianism and the environment by Dr. Judith Curry, who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and is known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics.

Scientific American  noted last October, in “Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues; Why can’t we have a civil conversation about climate?“, that:

over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Black­board. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science, no matter how well established it is. Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points—and by lumping the good with the bad, climate researchers not only miss out on a chance to improve their science, they come across to the public as haughty. “Yes, there’s a lot of crankology out there,” Curry says. “But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right, that is time well spent because we have just been too encumbered by groupthink.”

While I recommend that interested readers review the whole thread, I copy below my comments and some related:

TokyoTom | January 7, 2011 at 2:52 am | Reply

Judith, a climate scientist friend kindly gave me gave me a head’s up to your post.

I have been blogging and commenting for quite some time on environmental and climate issues from a libertarian perspective, and have also spent considerable time on trying both to help libertarians engage productively on environmental issues and to help leftist-environmentalists understand where libertarians are coming from.

Sadly, it’s largely a messy tale, reflecting how fights over government policy tend toward zero-sum games that blunt cooperation, the success that fossil fuel and other corporate interests have had in gaming the system, and how our tribal human nature leads many to abandon critical thinking in favor of choosing and reflexively defending sides and positions.

I have been highly critical of many libertarians in perpetuating unproductive discord, and have been the resident environmentalist pain-in-the-neck at the Ludwig von Mises Institute (for libertarian economics), which kindly hosts my blog. In particular, even while try to build bridges I have been critical of the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and MasterResource, which I view as being skewed by donations toward corporate agendas. There are of course some highly productive libertarians working on environmental and conservation matters; Terry Anderson and others at PERC (Properrty and Environment Research Center) have led the way on fisheries, water and other issues. (And then there are quasi-libertarians like Elinor Ostrom.)

Since you’ve expressed interest, allow me to load you up with a few links, to my exchanges with others such as John Quiggin, to my cajoling and castigating of libertarians, and to some of my views on climate/environment issues :

“Towards a productive libertarian approach on climate, energy and environmental issues ” http://bit.ly/ab3xJB

“John Quiggin plays Pin-the-tail-on-the-Donkey with “Libertarians and delusionism” ” http://bit.ly/8Zv5Y6

“A few more comments to John Quiggin on climate, libertarian principles and the enclosure of the commons ” http://bit.ly/eXaTKI

“A few more “delusional” thoughts to John Quiggin on partisan perceptions & libertarian opposition to collective action”http://bit.ly/f0FQ6K

“To John Quiggin: Reassuring climate “delusions” help us all to avoid engaging with “enemies” in exploring common ground ”http://bit.ly/eIFr4e

“The Cliff Notes version of my stilted enviro-fascist view of corporations and government ” http://bit.ly/9oBkC7

The Road Not Taken II: Austrians strive for a self-comforting irrelevancy on climate change, the greatest commons problem / rent-seeking game of our age http://bit.ly/14n6G0

For climate fever, take two open-air atom bombs & call me in the morning; “serious” libertarian suggestions from Kinsella & Reisman!?http://bit.ly/f2bRUr

Thanks, Dr. Reisman; or, How I Learned to Hate Enviros and Love Tantrums http://bit.ly/h4BI0B

“Escape from Reason: are Austrians conservatives, or neocons, on the environment? ” http://bit.ly/cJhov2

“The Road Not Taken V: Libertarian hatred of misanthropic “watermelons” and the productive love of aloof ad-homs”http://bit.ly/cqFlzh

OMG – those ecofascists hate statist corps, too, and even want to – GASP – end that oh-so-libertarian state grant of limited liability!http://bit.ly/gjJFnv

“Who are the misanthropes – “Malthusians” or those who hate them? Rob Bradley and others resist good faith engagement despite obvious institutional failures/absence of property rights ”http://bit.ly/hbONhd

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=ostrom

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bradley
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=manzi
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=michaels
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=lewis
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=horner
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=penn
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bailey

On non-climate issues:

“Too Many or Too Few People? Does the market provide an answer? ” http://bit.ly/8zlecI
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=BP+oil
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=Avatar

Sincerely,

Tom

• curryja | January 7, 2011 at 7:32 am | Reply

  Tokyo Tom, thanks much for your input. your post originally went to moderation owing to the large number of links.

  • TokyoTom | January 7, 2011 at 10:15 am | Reply

    Dr. Curry, thanks for your indulgence on this; given the time differences (bedtime now!) and my schedule tomorrow, I thought throwing out a few links might be useful (though I may be mistaken!!).

    Tom

  • TokyoTom | January 7, 2011 at 10:24 am | Reply

    If I can add one further thought before I head off to bed, it would be that a key prerequisite (as Ostrom points out) for tackling commons issues like climate change that involves many players and countries is the need for TRUST, an element that is sadly lacking (a resource that libertarian analysis indicates is destroyed by squabbles over government) .

    Bill Gates, Roger Pielke, Avatar & the Climate (of distrust); or, Can we move from a tribal questioning of motives to win-win policies? http://bit.ly/912Xkj

    On climate, myopic progressives console themselves by pointing out fossil $ behind science “skeptics”; but miss the same from left and ignore middle ground http://bit.ly/arSX5G

    ‘Night.

    Tom

• Vaughan Pratt | January 8, 2011 at 6:04 am | Reply

  TokyoTom, take care that your fellow libertarians don’t label you a LINO: “Libertarian In Name Only.”

  Libertarians have a reputation for objecting to anyone messing with their access to fossil fuel . If you’re messing with it, the label “libertarian” may be working against you.

  Anyone undertaking to change the spots of the libertarian leopard may be biting off more than they can chew.

• gryposaurus | January 8, 2011 at 12:42 pm | Reply

  Tom, thanks for the links to your blog. It’s interesting to see Libertarians that are publicized outside of the corporate funded Beltway groups that have hijacked the movement. I’d love to point to you and think that there is still something useful with Libertarian thought, but you seem to have been relegated to a minority within a minority. Good luck and here’s hoping your message gets through to your fellows.

  • TokyoTom | January 8, 2011 at 8:27 pm | Reply

    Grypo and Vaughan:

    Let me note that though I don’t include myself among them, there are ‘left-libertarians’ and ‘anarcho-libertarians’ who are consistently quite critical of corporate statism and pro-environment (though they haven’t been too outspoken on climate.

    See, for example:

    http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/06/16/a-bp-reader-statist-corporations-quot-the-environment-quot-and-the-tragedy-of-the-government-owned-managed-commons.aspx

    http://aaeblog.com/2010/06/08/roundup-on-bp/comment-page-1/#comment-356997

    http://c4ss.org/content/2446

    On climate, I have linked to various sympathetic libertarian comments at “”Towards a productive libertarian approach on climate, energy and environmental issues ” http://bit.ly/ab3xJB

    Ron Bailey, science writer at Reason Online, is also worthy of mention:http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bailey

    TT

Yes, I’m Worried in Tokyo, as I keep running across tweets like this:

Should Residents Of Tokyo Be Preparing For Massive Radiation Exposure? 12 Disturbing Facts To Cons.. http://bit.ly/ebOw6n

But a rare comment to my recent, Yes-I’m-Still-Alive post asked me to comment on something the poster recently wrote regarding libertarian views on climate policy. As this is a topic that I have, with no great reluctance, addressed from time to time, I felt compelled to respond — and thought that some of you might be interested.

The comment I received:

Tuesday, March 22, 2011 8:21 PM by gryposaurus

Hey Tom, If you get a chance, please check out this blog post I wrote about Jonathan Adler’s paper on climate change.

www.skepticalscience.com/Libertarian-Climate-Conundrum.html [Note: this site hosts many layman-friendly explanations of climate science and reviews of arguments by ‘skeptics’.]

Thanks.

(I note that I have referred to libertarian law prof. Jonathan Adler several times.)

My response:

Thanks so much for your visit to LvMI – just to give me a comment?? – and your cross-link to your interesting post at Skeptical Science.

I’ve taken a quick look; my chief comment would be that you and the ‘libertarians’ you discuss have all missed that the status quo favors massive corporations whose very status is suspect from a libertarian standpoint: they are creatures of government that could not exist without govt in their present form, and that embody moral hazard via the govt grant of limited liability to shareholders.

Cato and other vocal ‘libertarian’ organizations are in fact corporate fronts and won’t bite the hand that feeds them, and thus avoid delving too deeply when they defend a ‘free market’ that is predominated by organizations that are not controlled by shareholders or communities and that are dedicated to extracting gains irregardless of costs that others may be forced to bear.

I also think a significant problem is groupthink – all around – as I’ve discussed w John Quiggin.

Here are a few places you can look to get a better handle on my thinking

The Cliff Notes version of my stilted enviro-fascist view of corporations and government

Judith Curry, climate scientist who is controversial because she talks with ‘skeptics’, wonders about “Libertarianism and the environment” (look for my comments in her linked post)

My posts re: Rob Bradley‘s ‘Master Resource’

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=quiggin (interchanges w John Quiggin)

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=climate+religion (is climate a religion, and whose?)

Probably another two related points worth making are that (i) our governments today richly deserve the mistrust that makes collective action impossible, and (ii) those interests which benefit by the most from the status quo are quite busy with the cynical game of sowing such mistrust and confusion (of course the “warmers” doo this too).

I tweet here: http://twitter.com/Tokyo_Tom

Since The Earthquake, I’ve managed to irk a liberal or two; see this “FEATURED” tweet at HuffPo:

news broken on twitter via @Shoq…

.@Tokyo_Tom Please take your pretentious Mises rhetoric and shove it up your ass. You people have ruined America. Fuck you.

LvMI President Doug French brings us an interesting paean to specialization, cooperation and free markets, Plastic Surgery: A Free Society Is a Beautiful Society, that my cussed and contrary nature balks at.

Says Doug (emphasis added):

Cosmetic physicians don’t necessarily specialize in the procedures that are demanded by people of their own ethnicity, illustrating Ludwig von Mises’s point that the division of labor is a unifying influence. These doctors and their patients are comrades seeking beauty, just one tiny example of the division of labor making “friends out of enemies, peace out of war, society out of individuals.”

Plato couldn’t have fathomed cosmetic surgery or certainly the ability of working-class people being able to afford having their looks altered surgically. However, his insight assures us that, in a free society, the cost of cosmetic surgery would fall to allow everyone to have the body and face they want, making society free and beautiful.

While beauty IS definitely in the eye of the beholder, it ain’t skin deep. Chiselled bodies and naturally attractive faces tell us something about the physical, mental and genetic fitness of the individuals who sport them. There’s reason why we find beauty and being in good physical condition attractive (this is more or less encoded in our genes, though our fashion sense may differ somewhat by culture and era).

As we live in a word of others, it is not surprising that we may make efforts to “look good” – but those efforts that go beyond personal efforts to stay fit, or to be in top physical shape for a particular sport, can pose personal and social problems.

Should we likwise cheer on doping or surgical enhancements in sports, and cheating in school and business, or developments in cooperation and specialization that make smooth-talking and lying easier and harder to detect?

Even as I leave choices on cosmetics and cosmetic surgery to those providing and vending it, and have to say sorry, but I prefer to cheer on honesty and hard work over deceipt, in all its seductive forms.