Obama's Science Czar's Embarrassingly Dumb Interview

CNS is reporting on a video interview with Obama administration science czar John Holdren. CNS asked him about satements in his 1973 book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions. He explained.

Holdren: “What we meant by that was stopping the kinds of activities that are destroying the environment and replacing them with activities that would produce both prosperity and environmental quality.”

When asked how this would be achieved, Holdren responded, “Through the free-market economy.”

CNS further reports,

Resources must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries,” Holdren and his co-authors wrote. ”This effort must be largely political, especially with regard to our overexploitation of world resources, but the campaign should be strongly supplemented by legal and boycott action against polluters and others whose activities damage the environment. The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.

This guy understands free market economics even less than President Obama does. "De-develop"? Could any goal be dumber?

It is antithetical to free market economics to talk about diverting resources from activities that the elites consider to be "frivolous and wasteful." is to Holdren engages in Orwellian 1984-speak. ("War is peace")

Free market economics orders resources in an economically rational way, only if there is NO outside force (e.g., the government) diverting resources. Any such diversion is, by definition, economically irrational.

Either Holdren is dumb-as-a-rock stupid, or he thinks the American people are.