In Blinkered View the sordid history of leftist embrace of both communism and fascism was likened to current events. Fascist supporter Heidegger's views of agriculture were cited and placed in current context.

Not long after the end of World War II, here is what Heidegger had to say about modern technology:

Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and death camps. The same thing as the blockades and reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

This infamous passage, which generated immense criticism upon its eventual publication in the 1980s, immediately came to mind when I read James Hansen’s own (in)famous claim in The Guardian (February 15, 2009) that,

The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death.

The disease is endemic.

The food industry is on the defensive, hit hard by nutrition groups and public health professionals, the press, parent groups, child advocacy organizations, and state and national legislators sponsoring bills that could have a powerful impact on business. Popular books like Fast Food Nation (Schlosser 2001) and movies like Supersize Me have sensitized the public to industry practices. In turn, the industry has had to react to claims that it seduces children into a lifestyle of unhealthy eating, infiltrates schools, buys loyalty from scientists, and pressures administration officials into accepting weak and ineffective nutrition policies (Brownell and Horgen 2004; Nestle 2002).

To the extent that these charges are fair, the analogy with the tobacco experience is inescapable. Seducing children? There is no better example than Joe Camel. Buying the loyalty of scientists? It happened time and again with tobacco. Using pressure to stall or prevent needed policy change? Few industries have been more effective than tobacco (Advocacy Institute 1998).

A first step is to understand the industry players. Unlike tobacco, with one major product and a handful of companies producing it, food involves an immense array of products made by thousands of companies worldwide. The industry is diverse and fragmented in some ways, counting as its players a local baker making bread for a few stores; a family running a convenience store; an organic farmer; mega companies like Kraft, McDonalds, and Coca-Cola; and even Girl Scouts selling cookies. The same company making fried foods laden with saturated fat might also sell whole-grain cereal.

There's a direct link from the fascists of the 1930s to the food fascists of today, but the problem is far older. Adam Smith spoke of it in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

In this passge Smith was concerned about wresting liberty from the clutch of kings and princes, but I suspect that were he writing now instead of in 1759 he might still say the same but direct it at the fools who are still wise in their own conceits.

The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation. For reputation in his profession he is naturally disposed to rely a good deal upon the solidity of his knowledge and abilities; and he does not always think of cultivating the favour of those little clubs and cabals, who, in the superior arts and sciences, so often erect themselves into the supreme judges of merit; and who make it their business to celebrate the talents and virtues of one another, and to decry whatever can come into competition with them. If he ever connects himself with any society of this kind, it is merely in self-defence, not with a view to impose upon the public, but to hinder the public from being imposed upon, to his disadvantage, by the clamours, the whispers, or the intrigues, either of that particular society, or of some other of the same kind.

If there is any lesson that I think we should glean from the horrors of the twentieth century it is that these type of people are endemic and that they are a perpetual threat to humankind. This is especially apposite given the current failures of governance with which we are afflicted, and may provide some insight into the steps required to extricate ourselves from this mess.

Update:

Said another way.

The only institution that really counts is trust, if you like. And something’s got to allow that to build. Property rights are just another expression of trust, aren’t they? I trust you to deliver this property to me. I trust somebody else to allow me to keep this property if I acquire it from you.

But human beings are spectacularly good at destroying trust-generating institutions. They do this through three creatures: chiefs, thieves, and priests.

Chiefs think, “I’m in charge, I own everything, I’m taking over, I’m going to tell everyone how to do it, and I’m going to confiscate property whenever I feel like it.” That’s what happens again and again in the Bronze Age. You get a perfectly good trading diaspora and somebody turns it into an empire. . .

Once you’re unified, people keep imposing monopolies and saying there’s only one way of doing things and you’ve got to do it this way. . .

If you want a recipe for how to shut down an economy, just read what the early Ming emperors did. They nationalized foreign trade. They forbade population movements within the country, so villagers weren’t allowed to migrate to towns. They forbade merchants from trading on their own account without specific permission to do specific things. You had to actually register your inventories with the imperial bureaucrats every month, that kind of thing. And they did the usual idiotic thing of building walls, invading Vietnam. . .

Thieves—one of the reasons for the growth of the Arab civilization in the seventh and eighth centuries must be the fact that the Red Sea was increasingly infested with pirates. It became increasingly difficult to trade with India. Byzantium was having a real problem doing it, and the Arabs had come up with a great new technology for crossing the desert called the camel train. So the rule of law to prevent thievery is also important; but the rule of too much law, to allow chiefs to take everything, is equally a risk.

The chiefs problem - "you’ve got to do it this way" - can be seen in another social poison: political markets.

Political markets -- less enabled by government than made by it -- operate according to fundamentally different, and less trustworthy, principles. Propped-up by subsidy, structured by central diktat and created ex nihilo by edict, political markets may arise from noble aspirations but in the end are instruments always of the privileged and powerful. . .

In political markets, the battle for competitive advantage is in part a battle over the rules of the game. That, in turn, is a battle for the hearts of minds of regulators, who generally know less, and are far less motivated, than the industry insiders they regulate. It is no surprise when regulators come to confuse the interests of the powerful (for whom they might someday wish to work, after all) with the interests of the public. As we have recently witnessed, the heavily regulated nature of our financial markets did not keep them from going haywire and taking the entire economy down with them. Appointing a better breed of bureaucrat fixes nothing. Even now, in the morning of the Obama era, Washington remains convinced that the country is best served by "rescuing" its self-immolating Wall Street wards.

It is the failure of this capitalism that accounts for the suffering of millions and explains our bitter decline. Yet President Obama asks for more. The controversial cap and trade scheme for limiting CO2 emissions is perhaps the most striking example. A cap and trade system would introduce a new market fabricated by government to regulate the entire economy of mundane markets. Cap and trade is based on the political invention of scarcity. But the problem of determining the ideal supply of emission permits is much like the Federal Reserve's problem of determining the ideal quantity of government money. In both cases, bureaucrats must appeal to dubious mathematical models and pronounce on questions that remain the subject of raging scientific controversy. When the Fed produced the wrong answers, it helped inflate the housing bubble, which led to the ruin of our economy. Do we trust the government climate bureaucrats to do better?

"The only institution that really counts is trust", but our chiefs in their zeal to impose their views on society have greatly reduced trust. Creating political markets in food where the battle for competitive advantage is a battle over the rules and influence over regulators causes the problems we experience. It does not help to shift subsidies and regulations that favor one set of players to another set of players. What would help is to reduce subsidies and regulations and allow real progress to occur, though it is unpredictable and out of control.