Bad Science Fails Like Bad Business

Our friends in the mainstream media were eager to regale us with stories of the failure of Enron and other overleveraged corporations in the 2001-02 recession.  It just showed, they said, the need for robust government regulation.

Actually, it showed nothing of the sort.  It showed, if anything, that crony capitalist outfits like Enron that seek the favor of the great and the good are a menace.  Enron was also making a big play in carbon offset trading.

Our liberal friends are a lot quieter about corporate corruption when we are talking about bailouts for auto companies.

The point is that, when things go south, and in this vale of tears they often do, then you will find out who are the fakes and who are the real thing.

The current moral meltdown is the FakeGate affair in which global-warming enthusiast Dr. Peter Gleick seems to have obtained internal documents from The Heartland Foundation and maybe faked an additional document to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing statement.  (That's what the government employees talked about in The Mikado when they had been ordered to produce an execution).

That's what a lot of folks do when they realize that their hopes and dreams are going up in smoke. That is why J.P. Morgan told the House of Representatives a century ago that the big thing in loaning out money was the character of the person seeking a loan.

Morgan knew, as a veteran of life as well as numerous railroad bankruptcies, that when things get rough, a lot of good people get tempted to cheat.

Let us turn this around.  When you see a lot of cheating going on then you know that things are going wrong.

Everyone makes a mistake.  Everyone misreads the weather forecast.  Anyone can hit an iceberg.  But not everyone shoulders aside the women and children in order to get a seat in a lifeboat.

But we are getting close to Goldfinger's Rule in the climate racket.  Climategate, you may say, was Happenstance.  Fakegate, you may claim, is Coincidence.  But one more warmist-gate means Enemy Action, Mr. Bond.