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Russell Roberts and Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek are just so damn good at coming up with pithy metaphors, thought experiments and reductions to absurdity that really open up the mind to their arguments. Here's Roberts with a great one:

It's a one question quiz:

Suppose we discovered that the earth was cooling rather than warming due to a natural cycle. Would you encourage people to drive more and use more carbon-based energy as a way of warming the earth?

I suspect that some people's ideal policy towards the earth's climate is that it should be whatever it would be if people didn't exist. Or whatever it would be if people lived in loincloths without fire. That is, the ideal climate is the natural one, because our species is unnatural. In this world view, humans are a poison on the earth and the reason we should put on a carbon tax or discourage fossil fuels is that our use of the earth's resources is somehow immoral. Obviously, not all people who worry about global warming feel this way. That's the point of the quiz.

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