I suggest that G H Gilmour (“Taxing subject”, Letters, July 26) consider the following.
Firstly, Winston Church-ill’s words “I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle”. Churchill’s colourful description actually understates the absurdity of a tax as a wealth generator. This is because, even without other problems a tax requires the deadweight of a bureacracy to administer it and to redistribute the funds it raises. History shows that he only way that governments increase prosperity is by getting out of the way of enterprising people building businesses. Socialist redistribution of wealth by taxing makes everyone poorer in the long run.
Secondly, in the 116 years since Arrhenius invented the “greenhouse gas” theory, no-one, anywhere, has ever found even a hint of evidence to support it. This consequently applies to the man-made global warming hypothesis. Incidentally, this is the same Arrhenius who proposed the “directed panspermia” theory, that life on earth originated by aliens “seeding” earth.
Indeed, the fact that the earth hasn’t warmed for 16 years, despite the increases in carbon dioxide, is one of the many pieces of evidence which discredits this theory. In any case, the idea that doubling or trebling a trace gas in the atmosphere could cause dangerous warming of the rest of the atmosphere, some 2500 times the volume of the trace gas and with a specific heat capacity 20 per cent greater, and of the entire land surface, and of that great heat sink, the oceans, with a thermal capacity 3300 times that of the entire atmosphere, is plainly absurd.
The only reason government climate modellers predict warming is that they feed that carbon dioxide causes warming into their models in the first place, despite the lack of evidence. Garbage in, garbage out.
Governments should stop squandering taxpayers’ money on the silly global warming superstition, and spend it to benefit the Australian people.
John Rodda
Cabarita Beach
