China – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

October 3, 2022October 5, 2022

“Fumes Never Smelled So Sweet”

See the source image

Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow enthused about receiving her new electric car (EV) by saying in a June 7 Senate hearing, “I got it [EV] and drove it from Michigan to here [Washington DC] this last weekend and went by every single gas station, and it didn’t matter how high it was.” Adding, “And so I’m looking forward to the opportunity for us to move to vehicles that aren’t going to be dependent on the whims of the oil companies and the international markets.” Well, the Wall Street Journal had eight of its reporters in four countries, most in the U.S., spend three weeks of their lives in reliance on an EV as their principal mode of personal transportation (watch below). One main conclusion: Don’t underestimate the ability of partisan ideology to cloud a senator’s mature judgment. Either that, or she’s lying.

Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democrat from Michigan, speaks during a hearing in Washington, D.C., US, on Tuesday, June 7, 2022. (Photographer: Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Here’s some takeaways from WSJ’s experiment. First, some of the people with power in the corporate boardroom are looney. Take GM’s Rick Spina, VP of EV Infrastructure. He details three reasons for the shift to EV’s in the industry: (1) “public opinion, public awareness of climate change”; (2) “there’s legislation around the world supporting the move”; and (3) “in the long run, electric vehicles are going to be cheaper to own and operate”. Two of the three reasons are political, not empirical, in nature. The highly touted wave of climate change concern might show in opinion polls, but it hasn’t translated into a rush to the showroom to buy them. Why? They’re impractical . . . as you will see.

Spina’s claim of the supposed rise of “public awareness” in climate change ranks a fourth-place tie with health care behind the economy, immigration, and abortion in a recent University of Massachusetts Amherst survey. And “awareness” doesn’t mean a broad public embrace of the EV as the solution. The public is simply not buying them in sustainable numbers. The climate change concern could just as easily translate into greater support for the increased use of natural gas and nuclear power than a willingness to pay a $10,000-$20,000 premium on a car of limited practicality. GM is making a bet on something that isn’t a clean match with the so-called “awareness”.

#2 in his rationale is purely political. Legislation is politics pure and simple. Politics has never been shown to bring the greatest good to the greatest number. When politics becomes the arbiter to separate winners from losers, life quickly becomes a zero-sum game: some people win only at the expense of others. Boat loads of subsidies, cash, capital, tax preferences, and punishments for making the politically incorrect decision deprive resources to other pleasant and more appealing alternatives. The economic concepts of opportunity costs and tradeoffs explain the reality. People are herded like cattle down the wrong chute, or the chute that they wouldn’t take voluntarily. Free markets do that – operate on voluntarism, that is – but people like Stabenow and her colleagues want to substitute their judgment for ours. The result is the Soviet world of central planning, queuing up, shortages, and junk nobody wants, and no amelioration of “climate change”.

The last of Spina’s justifications is based on hope, the wishful thinking that the things will be cheaper . . . in the future. They might be more affordable if we sink enough government coercion and largesse into them, but remember, you’ll never realize the things that you gave up (after all, the government aborted them before they were allowed to be real) as gazillions are pumped into making the EV work. It’s like taking one step forward and then three steps back in terms of prosperity.

Enough of Spina. Back to the real world. Notice the appearance of “range anxiety”, the worry that you’re running low on juice and may be stranded before you get to a charging station? It’s much more than a shortage of charging stations. It’s the whole technology. More charging stations means more opportunities to wait hours. It might mean spending a Michigan winter night in the car waiting for a station to free up and charge the batteries so you can get to safety. Speaking of those outside temperatures below freezing, those lithium-ion batteries don’t like the cold. They take even longer to charge. And don’t forget, the batteries that power the wheels energize the heater element and blower to keep you and your kids from hypothermia. More anxiety. A 10-hour trip quickly became 30-hour one.

Which brings up another matter: “gaming” the technology to get more range out of it. What does that mean? You’ve got to turn off all systems to free up more power to the wheels making for an interesting experience driving from LA to Las Vegas in 100+ degree weather on Interstate 15, not to mention a winter drive up the MIchigan peninsula. Range anxiety is instantly transformed into survival anxiety.

Another interesting aside is the identification of EV success with tyrannical regimes, like Red China, the only place with fewer complaints in the test. It makes sense for a system whose stock-and-trade is social engineering. The politburo can simply order an all-EV existence, no great surprise for a Big Brother regime controlling individual conscience, religion, massive surveillance of the population, and genocide, with a gargantuan secret police to make it all happen. Pushing EV’s is small potatoes. But still, if you watch closely, the air is filthy as an American auto exec in China is driven around Shanghai or Beijing. The totalitarians may be shoving their people out of gas cars, but they aren’t so deluded as to think that windmills and solar panels will be sufficient to charge the all-electric things. They are a prime customer for American coal. Imagine, if you will, EV traffic jams in polluted air basins. Has anything about climate really changed?

The WSJ report proved that the EV is almost purely an urban artifact. They’re great for people who live their lives within the city limits running errands. Get out on the open road and range and survival anxiety overhangs the excursion. Plus, unsurprisingly, the published 250–300-mile range is a fantasy. Due to weather and the use of the car’s other system’s such as cabin climate and entertainment, the purported range evaporates. All of this doesn’t matter to a person whose idea of a road trip is to the airport. The EV is a car for a strictly urban life. Outside of that, life is riskier in it.

That’s why some participants in the test suggested a gas-powered car to supplement the EV. So, in Stabenow’s version of the proper life, a one-car purchase is suddenly a two-car purchase. For a family struggling to make ends meet in an existence crafted by Stabenow’s policies, a $40,000 compact EV requires an additional $30,000 fossil fuel sedan if the family wants to have a vacation and family visits beyond the city limits. Maybe in the millionaires’ club called the U.S. Senate, living in domiciles with multi-car garages, having two SUV’s in both modes is pro forma. For the rest of us reeling from inflation, crime, high taxes, rampant homelessness, skyrocketing housing costs, spikes in utility costs, poor schools, and transgenderism threatening to change the lives of our kids forever, an additional car purchase to make the first one practical is lunacy.

That’s why one of the reporters exclaimed in a sigh of relief after the test that “Fumes never smelled so sweet.” First, watch the video if you’re inclined to heed the advice of Gavin Newsom. Don’t say that you haven’t been warned.

RogerG

The Error of Following a Person and Not What They Say: A Lesson that the Right Needs to Relearn

We are in an age of personality cults. Maybe we always have been to one extent or another. Regardless, we are in one, big time.

The decline in religiosity could be a partial explanation for people who need something to look up to after they have relegated heaven to myth. It’s easier to replace God with a human being. It’s evident across the political spectrum. The Left has theirs in the many academic offshoots of Karl Marx. On the Right, icons have arisen in the person of people from Jordan Peterson to Donald Trump. They may be correct in much that they say, but being human, they occasionally step on a rake. Then, the followers parrot the mistake while jettisoning their brain, the same brain that God gave them, that they don’t recognize that it was God who gave it to them.

Today’s brain is ill-informed of history. The schools have failed. We study history for what it says about human nature. And, yes, there is such a thing as human nature. Many won’t recognize the errors of the present because they are unaware that we’ve committed the blunders many times before. For instance, some of what today’s Right seems to be saying about the Ukraine War is an imitation of the rhetoric of the 60’s radical Left. Jean Kirkpatrick, a longtime Democrat and a defector from the looming socialistic, neo-Marxist takeover of her party, spoke to the 1984 Republican Convention nominating Ronald Reagan for a second term (see below). Her speech was a bold rejection of the “San Francisco Democrats” (Sound familiar?) and the Left’s “blame America First”.

Today, you’ll hear echoes of the same condemnable language of the 60’s radical Left coming from the likes of Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, and their media apologists.

Trump introduced the Left’s oratory to the Right when he morphed the Left’s “blame America First” into “American First”. His 2015-2016 bombast against the Bushes led to a harangue about “endless wars”, i.e., the War on Terror, almost identical to the Left’s complaint about the Vietnam War. Trump made the chant of “America First” and its cousin “MAGA” into a reflex for isolationism, something ever-present in the GOP going back to 1940 and Lindbergh’s America First. Don’t’ forget, implicit in “Make America Great Again” is the claim that we aren’t great, which for the Right is due to our decadence. For the Left, we are censured as “exploiters”. As decadent or “exploiters”, the Right has made common cause with Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda.

See the source image

Seemingly taking their cue from Trump in his odd admiration for Putin, some on the Right chide our support for Ukraine. The culture war is used as the excuse to criticize support for Ukraine. Tucker Carlson is scornful of the Zelenskyy government for its alleged autocratic tendencies; Laura Ingraham complains of our aid lost in purported Ukrainian corruption; and Jordan Peterson provides an alibi for Putin’s invasion as Putin fending of western decadence, a decadence resplendent in transgenderism. He comes close to aligning with Putin and when confronted backs off. The quote that got him into trouble was as follows:

“The culture war is now truly part of why we have a war [in Ukraine]. It is certainly the case that we do not therefore have all the moral high ground…. In fact, how much of it we have at all is something rightly subject to the most serious debate.”

In my view, transgenderism is a civilizational catastrophe, but to mingle it with Ukraine is sophistry. That puts Putin as a defender of goodness and light. If so, where does that put the CCP’s Xi? After all, Xi is leading a campaign to stop the feminization of men. Have you seen those PLA recruitment ads? They’re nothing like those gushing rainbow LGBTQ+ ads by our Marine Corps. Carlson, Ingraham, and Peterson would find themselves boxed into the corner of opposing US support for Taiwan against a Red Chinese invasion just to remain consistent. What kind of world would we have if our decadence or any other domestic policy failing is a straitjacket on our ability to stop this generation’s fascist and communist aggressors? Look to history for the answer.

Jean Kirkpatrick in 1984 outlines the stakes of a Trump/Carlson/Ingraham/Peterson foreign policy. It’s the same one advanced by the “San Francisco Democrats”. If you have 21 minutes, please listen to her riveting speech. It’s the antidote to the bile in this new era of personality cults.

RogerG

Sources:

*”Jordan Peterson claims Russia attacked Ukraine to stop the spread of ‘degenerate’ US culture wars. . .”, Daily Mail, July 12, 2022, at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11005863/Jordan-Peterson-says-Russia-attacked-Ukraine-culture-wars-left-degenerate.html
*Transcripts of Jean Kirkpatrick’s speech to the 1984 Republican Convention at https://speakola.com/political/jeane-kirkpatrick-blame-america-first-gop-1984

August 7, 2022August 7, 2022

When Buffoonery Infects the Right

May be a cartoon of standing and text

Republicans are bedeviled by the spawn of Trump and Democrats are enthralled by neo-Marxism in their combination of rank socialism and malignant identity pandering. While Democrats engage in a headlong rush into college-campus extremism, many Republicans seem intent on adopting the philosophy of Smoot-Hawley, ignoring Adam Smith’s lessons on the inherent foolishness of politicians managing trade or the general economy, shunting Hayek’s knowledge problem to the corner, and an emulation of Soviet Gosplan (central planning) only with them in the catbird seat. As a Republican in the Buckley-Reagan tradition, it’s galling. Trump is responsible for unloading this hash of blustery claptrap on the sole remaining party that should know better.

The steamy love affair with government by some of today’s Republicans shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. Every politician loves to bring home the bacon, so politics can make hypocrites of us all. Yet, this is different. An orthodoxy developed around Trump’s buffoonery. Suddenly, Republicans and others on the Right started walking around proclaiming the evils of the free market.

It’s not surprising that Trump should be their spiritual leader. Here’s a man who made fame and fortune in real estate, the economic sector most debased by politics and government at every level. Government can help you make millions, indeed billions. Government is a partner for a big developer who needs local potentates to eliminate competitors, get approvals, and steamroll recalcitrant homeowners. Trump happened to have a career in an industry that found government not necessarily an obstacle but just another factor of production. The transition from Big Government Developer to Big Government Republican is easy in that matrix. Add a little 60’s Queens street tuff to the public persona and you too can have people walk over broken glass to attend your rallies.

See the source image

The Republican slide into incoherence came to the fore at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s American Economic Forum on July 29. Billed as the antidote to Davos’s left-leaning World Economic Forum, it interestingly emulated Davos. Both confabs provided ample grist for government control of the economy. The only difference is the targeted beneficiaries.

A defensible role for government as referee against brute force and monopoly in the market is one thing. It’s quite another to play Karl Marx in distorting economic activity to the advantage of one class. For Rick Santorum, it’s blue-collar workers – not much different from Marx’s Cinderella class of the proletariat. Subsidies, the tax code, and regulatory powers should be geared to cementing the working class to the GOP in Santorum’s grand design – admirable as a political goal, but lousy economic advice. Did it ever grace his mind that blue-collar workers need blue-collar industries? And blue-collar industries need investment, i.e., capital, i.e., Wall Street. The economy is a synergistic whole. The only answer from Santorum and company is to grease the skids for manufacturing, mindless of the effect on the rest of the economic web.

May be an image of 1 person and indoor — Rick Santorum

It doesn’t work. Thomas Sowell’s famous dictum cannot be repealed: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” The reality is that some manufacturers get favored treatment over others. Some get the resources that are sucked away from others.

And what of those labor unions who turned themselves into the false champions of those blue collars? Remember, the same unions that drove two of the big three automakers into the arms of a government bailout in 2008-9 are manifestations of the one currently aggravating the supply-chain crisis at west coast ports, the featherbedding International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union. Anchored cargo ships are visible over the horizon. A blue-collar organization meant to benefit blue-collars does so at the expense of every other facet of economic life, and other workers. Government has a congenital habit of only turning its gaze to the squeaky wheel and to heck with the other three. Try driving a car with three flat tires. Trade-offs anyone, aggravated by government winner-picking?

May be a cartoon of 1 person, standing and text

How do tariffs fit into Santorum’s quest for the blue-collar vote? Good question, but another participant at the talkfest, Trump’s trade czar Robert Lighthizer, is a fanboy of them. He is a practitioner of economic snake oil, just like his patron, Donald J. Trump. With “balanced trade” as code for tariffs, he proclaimed that they wrought “astonishing results”. Really? I hear “post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy” (two events happening chronologically with the earliest one mistakenly assumed to be the cause) in the bombast. So many reforms were swirling around in 2017-2018, thanks to a Republican Congress, to overwhelm the impact of the tariff silliness.

May be an image of 1 person — Robert Lighthizer

Thus, attributing the so-called “Trump economy”, pre-COVID, to the orange man’s tariffs is demagogic self-puffery. Take the “Trump” tax cuts. They were really the Paul Ryan/Republican-caucus tax cuts, a distillation of ideas running around Republican policy circles since at least the 1990’s. Trump just happened to be in office to put his signature to something that was mostly the work of others. The business tax reductions were testosterone for economic muscle growth. And it showed according to AEI’s James Pethokoukis. Let’s just call the “Trump” tax cuts what they really were: the “Paul Ryan/Republican” tax cuts.

Oftentimes, cutting regulations can act like tax cuts. Remember the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996? It codified a Congressional veto power over the administrative state’s rule-making juggernaut. Keep in mind that the Democrats love the administrative state going back to Woodrow Wilson so don’t expect them to exploit the power. Thus, Congress’s successful use of the CRA is dependent on the vagaries of presidential elections. A repeal requires a president’s signature like any bill. From 1996 to 2001, a repeal succeeded only once when a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the Oval Office. We’d have to wait another 16 years for a Republican-controlled Congress to remind itself of its power. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in 2017 jumped at the chance and sent to Trump’s desk 14 veto resolutions bringing to heel the federal eco-agencies, FCC, Department of Labor, SEC, the Ed Department, etc., of our community-organizer-in-chief, Barack Obama. Trump simply put his signature to a political impetus that began elsewhere by other people.

For Lighthizer to bully his way to the podium at the American Economic Forum to take credit brings braggadocio to new heights, like his mentor, the prince of Mar-a-Lago.

The tax cuts, reining-in the pit bulls of the Left’s administrative state, and unleashing American energy production have long been Republican talking points and planks in the party platform, and not the lab creatures of Trump, Robert Lighthizer, or Peter Navarro (by the way, a former SoCal Dem no-growther). The GOP has long been a booster of opening up ANWAR, fracking, horizontal drilling, pipelines, refineries, offshore platforms, things that would incite conniptions in Silicon Valley lunchrooms. Trump just happened to be the sympathetic warm body to not stand in the way of affordable energy.

As for Trump’s beloved tariffs, they are sand tossed into the economy’s gears. They are a drag since tariffs are taxes. Surprise! Impose them and you just increased the burden on consumers and businesses. The Trump 25% tariff on imported steel slabs is a case in point. American steel producers remanufacture these slabs into sheet metal for fenders and appliance housings among other American-made desirables. Well, guess what? Since March 2020, the price of steel ballooned by 215%. While Biden’s eco-craziness and socialism has a role, Trump’s contribution to our current travails is his mindless worship at the altar of “balanced trade”, i.e., tariffs. If business tax cuts are testosterone, then tariffs are a flesh-eating virus. Give ‘em a little time before we end up in intensive care. The Republican Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 showed the way.

Not only that, tariffs needlessly make enemies, especially at a time when you need allies, unless, of course, you want America First to be America Alone. Red China has discovered its inner hegemon. Many Pacific countries are fearful of entering the maw of the CCP and are turning to the US as the only counterforce. The relationship between trade ties and military ones is well known. Just as we were about to draw much of the Pacific rim into a closer cooperation with us, 2016, a presidential election year, came upon us. The Dems practiced their usual fealty to the AFL-CIO and Hillary trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), something negotiated across multiple administrations. Not to be outdone, Trump in his usual bombast blasted the deal as “a continuing rape of our country”.

Well, what is this “rape”? The pact would slash tariffs all around the Pacific rim from the US to Brunei to Chile. For an America First/Alone enthusiast like Trump, the TPP is the perfect whipping boy. He torpedoed the deal and then boasted about it, repeatedly. But he made it harder to begin a “pivot to Asia” by initiating a trade war with our natural allies. His economic advisors must have been aghast and suggested their own pivot from “rape” to “bilateral”. The rhetorical gimmick was to disparage the adjective “multilateral” (TPP) and substitute “bilateral” in agreements. So, Trump’s people scrambled around the region to cement a smorgasbord of individual pacts to substitute for the omnibus one, all to save face from admitting to the slander.

One way to prevent the much-hated “forever wars” and bankruptcy of the US treasury is to have many allies. Their contributions may be small but together think of them as forcing upon Red China a weakening by a thousand cuts. We provide the biggest military piece but it’s better than having to pay for the whole piece which would be the consequence of the America Aloners.

The Aloner evangelists such as Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, or even the conservative Tom McClintock (R, Ca.), stray into the logical dead end of more-allies-means-more-wars. Actually, that is only one possibility, and the least likely one. More allies mean more deterrence. A worse buzzsaw cannot be imagined for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s CCP for them to venture into an attempted reconstitution of the USSR and a Red Chinese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO intensify deterrence on Russia and trade pacts with miliary cooperation in the Pacific rim makes Xi’s Middle Kingdom dream seem more like a nightmare.

Coups are frequently associated with costly adventurism by despots. Everyone does cost-benefit analysis, unless they’re crazy. Even then, deterrence raises the costs to prohibitive levels for any compadres-of-convenience in the regime to continue to follow the lunatics. Still, anyway, if the crazy should practice a Nigh of the Long Knives (Hitler’s 1934 elimination of his rivals), you’ll definitely need those allies more than ever.

Foreign relations and a nation’s economy are intricately connected. Our national prosperity cannot survive a world with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency, the World Bank headquartered in Beijing, the world’s shipping lanes policed by the PLA Navy, a NATO decaying in its nearly vacant Brussels headquarters, and a new USSR bullying its way westward and southward. Then we will be really alone. And it begins when we start to mangle economics and our recent history to fit the ambitions of narcissists and the hucksters of economic nostrums. I am worried that we are seeing too many of both among the people who should know better.

Specifically, the golden years, pre-COVID, from 2017 to early 2020 should not be referred to as the Trump economy. It was the Republican economy, all of it emanating from the Republican “establishment”. Anyone but Tucker Carlson fanboys should realize it.

May be a cartoon of text

RogerG

Sources:

*“Did the Trump Tax Cuts Work? The Answer May Not Be What You Think”, James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, at https://www.aei.org/economics/did-the-trump-tax-cuts-work-the-answer-may-not-be-what-you-think/
*” Trump’s Steel Tariffs Still Harming Producers and Consumers”, Bob Luddy, Brownstone Institute, at https://brownstone.org/articles/trumps-steel-tariffs-still-harming-producers-and-consumers/
*”Congressional Review Act”, Ballotpedia, at https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_Review_Act
*”Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on Obama’s legacy trade deal”, Business Insider, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-tpp-2016-9
*” Central Planning with Conservative Characteristics”, Dominic Pino, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/central-planning-with-conservative-characteristics/
*Tom McClintock’s vote against support for adding Finland and Sweden to NATO in “One California congressman voted against Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Here’s why”, in the Sacramento Bee, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article263626043.html

January 12, 2021January 12, 2021

Big China, Big Bust

Slum dwellings in one of China’s cities.

Is China about to overtake the U.S. as the world’s number one economy? Looking at the question closer, the answer is a resounding “No”. The problem for China is the same problem inherent in big government anywhere. If there is one thing glaringly true about China, it is still a communist country with government, government everywhere, overt and covert. The economic reality is that jumps in productivity produce the real growth, but government is about politics, not productivity. Examples abound. It’s a powerful lesson beyond the imagination of our ruling revolutionary-Left Democratic Party.

Our new viziers need a walk down memory lane. The various iterations of the 1930’s New Deal mucked with the economy to such an extent that the Depression lingered and lingered for a decade, and was ready to resume after the War. WWII was a recess that only replaced one kind of misery for another. Finally, a stake was pounded into the heart of some of the New Deal by the ’46 and ’48 Congresses and the 50’s boom resulted.

Remember the 60’s-and-beyond War on Poverty, Urban Renewal, and the Fed’s management of the money supply as it opened the money spigot to grease the skids for them and war? Many of you weren’t around in the 1970’s; I was. It was a disaster. Today, huge portions of our cities and hinterlands are ghastly places.
That’s not all. Look at government’s mucking around with the schools. Once again, I was there. They’re still screwing with them. “Reform” and bucks flow in and ignorance flows out. Now, we are likely to get more of the opinionated ignoramuses, the kind who torch our cities and mutilate free speech.

One of the biggest boondoggles of recent memory are the massive governmental crusades to deal with the hyped “climate change” (previously “global warming”). Does Solyndra remind you of anything? California – with the highest utility rates in the country and can only fill its energy needs with large infusions from other states – is scarred with vast tracts of windmills. Homeowners, schools, businesses are under the gun to strap solar panels to their roofs. If you don’t play along, you’ll be bankrupted. All this for essentially nothing.

I could go on, but why bore you.

Red China, like Red California, is a bust. The ChiComs spout big numbers for the opinionated ignoramuses in our media, but the truth lies somewhere else. In many ways, they follow Stalin’s gambit of spewing big numbers, real or imagined. Mostly imaginary. There’s quite a different reality behind that Potemkin Village. Watch the video below from the American Enterprise Institute. It tells the truth about China.
Sadly, in the global competition, wreckers are in charge on the U.S. side of the divide. Maybe I should hedge my bets.

RogerG