Economics – Page 4 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

August 19, 2022

Going Green Had Many Fathers But Watch It Be Orphaned.

See the source image — Pres. Biden signs the Green New Deal LIte, also grotesquely misnamed as the Inflation Reduction Act.

“There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.” It was the response of President Kennedy to NBC reporter Sander Vanocor at a press conference on April 21, 1961 as his way of taking responsibility for the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. Where did JFK get it? The line of descent can be traced to the movie “The Desert Fox” and before that to Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s Foreign Minister.

Why mention it? It could apply to popular manias and their failures. A fashionable idea is embedded in the imagination of a sizeable segment of the population, i.e., fathers, and once it falls out of fashion due to its real-world effects, its parentage is forgotten, i.e., an orphan. It disappears into deep space.

The paramount craze of today is “going green”. It is both science and anti-science: a blending of real science – but without cost/benefit modification – and many pop-culture phobias. They are sourced in ideological, theological, and secular-utopian notions. We are experiencing the frenzies in everything from forest management, food production, energy renewables, zero-carbon, and the eco-iconic electric vehicle. We are quickly learning unfortunately that, contra to a one-with-nature ecotopia, the reality is obsolete water projects, massive fire storms, an unreliable grid producing rolling blackouts, decaying energy infrastructure, skyrocketing energy prices, outrageously expensive grid-dependent and unreliable personal transportation, and a smaller and more costly food supply. If you haven’t noticed, some of this “future” is playing out in Sri Lanka.

Protesters in Sri Lanka in July 2022 force the resignation of the country’s president after the onset of an economic collapse due to the adoption of many green policies such as bans on the use of many ag chemicals.

In many conversations going back decades, I’ve heard people express the most fanciful beliefs. Do you remember the cliché of those fleets of oil tankers anchored of the coast during the oil embargos of the 1970’s supposedly as part of the oil companies’ conspiracy to jack up fuel prices? It’s baaaack! Or how about the Non-GMO, Whole Foods fever of today? Or the fanatical and popular in elite circles preservationist forestry policies that produced vast landscapes of dead trees in a drought-prone, dry-summer climate, just waiting for the poorly maintained electrical grid or dry lightning to spark a conflagration? Or the popular war on herbicides, pesticides, and synthetic fertilizers that promises famine and economic and social collapse (once again, Sri Lanka)? Or the pricey but government-preferred electric vehicle running low on juice that’ll ensure that you can’t get out of the path of a hurricane because of the blackout from category-five winds and a monstrous sea surge? Or the huge forests of windmill towers and seas of solar panels scarring the landscape that can’t keep the lights on? “Going green” is a rediscovery of life in the Middle Ages. It’s a future of going backwards.

May be a cartoon of text

Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez

The Dark Ages looms as we fancy a food supply without Safeway – or Kroger, Albertsons, Walmart, General Mills, the Great Plains ocean of grain, and meat packing plants, etc. Anything produced on an industrial scale whether it be lettuce, eggs, bacon, burgers, fryers, Minute Rice, or bread is made suspect. But anything “free range” means less of it and more expensive. Ditto for Non-GMO. The world cannot be fed with farmer’s markets and Jeff Bezos’s boutique Whole Foods. The eco-stuff rots which limit its range of availability. It may taste better and be marginally healthier, but what difference does that make if you can’t get it, or is priced out of the family budget? How are barren cupboards healthier?

Do you think that the equivalent of victory gardens will make a dent? Farmers markets would collapse and quickly run out of product if the throngs who filled the parking lots of Walmart flocked to the stalls and easy-ups on a few acres off I-95. Some actually think that we ought to live on what we personally grow. To do that, everyone must have the equivalent of “40 acres and a mule”, er, tractor (Civil War Order No. 15, Gen. Wm. T. Sherman). But what eco-nut would tolerate the invasion of 330 million people scattered over their wilderness hiking paths? They’re already up in arms about people choosing to live in the land of bears and chipmunks. They even have their own arcane vocabulary for it: Wild Urban Interface (WUI). In other words, places where you oughtn’t be if they get their way. Of course, the irony is that all places at one time or another were WUI’s.

Anyway, who could afford the real estate? Let’s face it, these are the fancies of a hyper-wealthy society with a large cohort of people who can afford to live expensively. Coincidentally, small family size tracks the lifestyle: the fewer disruptive mouths to feed in the family unit, the easier it is to indulge in eccentric, pricey, and ideologically laced lifestyle choices. Speaking of fewer mouths, guess the demographic with one of the lowest fertilities. Non-Hispanic whites dredge near the bottom of all groups at 1.64 children per woman (2018). Non-Hispanic whites in the District of Columbia are even less productive at 1.012, demographic suicide levels. This element – government workers, white collar and overwhelmingly college educated – has much in common with the residents of college communities, bi-coastal exclusive developments, Silicon Valley, and other areas of like complexion. Maybe this is the reason for their enthusiasm for massive immigration, legal or illegal, since they can’t rely on their own organically produced offspring to provide the medical supports and entitlement contributions to keep them comfortable in the autumn of their lives.

So, they grow old and are free to wallow in the hang-ups of their youth. Prominent among them is the “nuclear” bogeyman. A steady diet of movies (“Them”, Godzilla, The China Syndrome, et al) and classroom atomic bomb drills in their youth nurtured nightmares of looming apocalyptic dooms. The boomers and X’ers transmitted the aversion to their sparse offspring. A nearly permanent political base against nuclear power has arrived.

See the source image

“Nuclear” was a monster like Godzilla, but their depiction of it is in open conflict with the worship of the newest deity in an increasingly secular age, Gaia. Combine the fear with the climate-change hype and we have only the latest in a long line of self-negating philosophies. Don’t like nuclear power because characters played by Jack Lemmon, Jane Fonda, and Michael Douglas said so in a movie (The China Syndrome)? Well, we still can’t have it even if it’s carbon-free and safe and will help address all manner of Chicken Little catastrophes that’ll befall mankind like category ten hurricanes and the oceans lapping onto the Obamas’ estate on Martha’s Vineyard, and further reinforced in another movie (An Inconvenient Truth) produced by the politician-Moses of our time, Al Gore, and followed by a steady stream of more (The Day After Tomorrow, etc.).

So, the message is no abundant and affordable energy, and we must accept less and live with more aggravation and disruption in our lives. We are told that we can’t have fossil fuels, which is plentiful in our own backyard. Thoughts of R & D in carbon capture are verboten, still born in the crib. And don’t dare build those efficient, safe, cost-effective Small Modular Reactors (SMR’s) for carbon-free and plentiful electricity. Instead, it’s small in everything from calorie intake to living space to appliances to travel distances.

With the political assault on more land for housing, we’ll be crammed into more Hell’s Kitchens, infected with crime due to DA’s who are committed to ending incarceration, infested with pandemic-level contagions, and public transportation where the filth, threats, and smells of the outside envelop you on the inside. Is this where Pete Buttigieg plans to bike to work?

Going green isn’t a better world. If we’re not careful, the DNC plans to give it to us. We may wake up one morning with the urge to escape the workers’ paradise, but the all-electric Chevy Bolt is dead because of the regular blackout from a grid connected to overburdened windmills and solar panels. Anyway, where are you going to go? The roads are unpassable because of striking road workers and less of the infrastructure money going to asphalt and more to expanding the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Department. You’ll have to invest in a Sharpie and carboard to beg your way to the expanding homeless camps on the outskirts adjacent to the lavish, walled, and secure estates of the DNC donor class.

Now, all of this assumes that you still have a job in a country governed by the fairy tale principles of Modern Monetary Theory. And if you did, would it make any difference in the chronic inflation from the fire-hosing of the country in paper money? What began as a scheme with many fathers will soon be orphaned. The parentage relegated to the misty past.

Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez

RogerG

Sources:
* “Fertility Rates In The United States By Ethnicity”, World Atlas, at https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/fertility-rates-in-the-united-states-by-ethnicity.html

July 29, 2022

Recession or No?

See the source image

Today’s hot question: Are we in a recession? My gut says “yes”; and if not, we’re on the cusp.

One thing needs to be made clear, though. Rational cognitive activity in an election year is as common as “father’s milk” – which, by the way, is seriously presented by some as something other than an oxymoron. After all, this formulation alongside menstruating and pregnant men became artificial possibilities once partisan hucksters succeeded in rhetorically establishing a wall of separation between gender and chromosomes. Do you think that the rest of the language will escape the mutilation?

Yesterday, the demigods of the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced a .9% decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the second quarter (April to June) to go along with the 1.6% fall in the first. Two consecutive quarters of falling GDP, a widely accepted marker for a recession by many who are denying it today. Magically, legacy media has discovered a complex answer because . . . it suits their biases. In 1991, when it was George H.W. Bush, an R, in the dock for a slight dip, the “two consecutive” was all the craze. And we got the sex addict Bill Clinton. Ditto for 2008 with W, another R. And we got the Alinsky protégé Barack Obama. It seems that the recession definition is fungible to the advantage of only one side.

Now, the near-octogenarian Biden, a Democrat, is at the Resolute desk and they’ve discovered “it’s more complicated”. Economist Brian Westbury, no shill of the Left, generally agrees with the complicated explanation. It’s a basket of indices that show a decline in business activity. The GDP numbers are only one part of the picture. The GDP numbers could take a dip if the trade deficit rose; they are subtracted from the general production number. Of course, the trade deficit is just one component of the more significant balance of payments. GDP could fall if consumers coming out of a pandemic lockdown with savings and government debit cards go on a spending splurge, which they did in a binge for all those imported goods from China and other exotic ports of call.

Where does that leave us? Still, in a recession, or awfully close. Bluntly put, it just feels bad. Supply chain problems are still not cured. Climate-change zealotry is still rolling out in executive orders and administrative agencies while playing havoc with utility bills. The war on fossil fuels is rupturing family and business budgets. Rents are skyrocketing. People not living in the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, or Malibu, nor able to fly first class, are battered from so many different directions. There is no recession for those who regularly view the country from 35,000 feet.

There is a recession for the moms and dads feeling the pinch of today’s milk prices. For anyone not named Warren Buffett, who’s in a mood to upgrade the kitchen stove? A recession is a broad attitude to hunker down. The Democrats came into power in 2021 with a whip to regulate, ban, and tax their way to their nirvana. That means that they don’t like you. They don’t like the idea of you having a 1,500 square foot suburban ranch house with air conditioning. They have many more “don’t likes”: that you might be white and/or male, that you might own an SUV, that you have a problem with vandals and own a gun, your “heteronormativity”, that you might actually want your children to learn the 3 r’s and to love their country in school, that a family bar-b-cue in your fenced back yard is a cherished moment. Looking around you, after all that’s happened under their watch, what’s there to look forward to? Who’s in a mood to be upbeat and work and spend like it? This isn’t “Morning in America”; it’s the world of Mad Max.

Welcome to the recession, or the onset, and I don’t care much about the musings of the chattering classes on the matter. They sacrificed their credibility long ago.

May be a cartoon of text that says 'THUD The U.S. HAS the FASTEST GROWING ECONOMY in the WORLD... oww!'

RogerG

July 23, 2022July 23, 2022

Making Energy Sense, Not a Biden Skill

May be an image of 1 person

President Biden is noticing the inverse relationship between gas prices and a politician’s approval rating: one goes up, the other goes down. So, what does he do? Sacrificing intelligibility, ignoring human nature in the laws of supply and demand, and contradicting the crux of his green-energy agenda, he spirited off letters to energy company CEO’s on June 15 haranguing them for taking his war on fossil fuels seriously. He attempted to strongarm them into dropping prices at the pump by threatening,

“. . . at a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable. . . . I request that you provide the Secretary with an explanation of any reduction in your refining capacity since 2020, and any ideas that would address the immediate inventory, price, and refining capacity issues in the coming months — including transportation measures to get refined product to market.”

For decades now, our cultural hegemons have inundated the whole of humanity with climate-change doom. The drumbeat is everywhere; can’t miss it. Now, we have a government of doomsayers, who have put combative policy teeth to the apocalypse story. The hostility to the CEO’s principal product – fossil fuels – is impossible to avoid, even for the pressed suits in the c-suites. They’ve adjusted to the cultural lynch mob by running ads touting their greenie bona fides and a redirection of investments to match. They see what’s in the wind. They see a government on an eco-jihad. Cancellation of pipelines, ending new leases on federal lands, greenie Bolsheviks in charge at the EPA, greenie Bolsheviks running the show at Transportation and Energy – indeed, throughout the Article II branch – and the regulatory and permitting process under the zealous gaze of a greenie Cheka (the forerunner to the KGB), isn’t exactly a green light to increase production, “to get refined product to market”. What Lord Biden taketh away, he expects them to give.

May be an image of outdoors and text that says 'Snack Shop Regular 579% 589 599% Plus V-Power Gasoline' — Gas prices in Los Angeles in May of 2022.

Just think like a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar energy behemoth. He or she would be crazy to commit years and $5-15 billion into building a new refinery or maintaining an existing one, which mostly explains why we haven’t added a new one since 1976 and some are closing. Additionally, why commit millions – without commitment to an asylum – to exploring and extracting the stuff that is constantly portrayed to be the environmental equivalent of monkeypox?

Why do that when Biden’s commissariat, and the sub-commissariats in the blue states, have adopted the Stalinesque “Energy Portfolio Standards” (EPS)? EPS’s are Five Year Plans to shoehorn the entire population into the greenie utopia of blackouts, cramped and overpriced housing, expensive ev’s, and filthy, crime-ridden, and time-guzzling public transit, specifically subjecting it on the most hesitant in the aspiring middle class and proletariat (regular or lumpen). Imagine your standard of living being forcibly molded to fit the conscience of the Sierra Cub executive board, or the lunchroom at Google.

Don’t be a bit surprised that your life takes on the appearance of the beneficiaries – err, victims – of the New Deal-inspired urban renewal extravaganzas of the last half of the 20th century. Is Chicago’s Cabrini Green our future writ large?

May be an image of train, railroad and text that says 'not onter ΔE enter tracks' — A key goal of the Green New Deal is to herd the population into mass transit like this in NYC.

May be an image of sky and skyscraper — Another key goal of environmentalists is dense housing, much of it public, like this one in Chicago. It became a hive of crime and drugs and was demolished in 2011.

May be an image of 4 people and people standing — A policewoman searches the jacket of a teenage boy for drugs and weapons in the graffiti-covered Cabrini Green Housing Project.

So, we are set to replace $2-per-gallon gas and air conditioning for the “intermittency problem” of windmills and solar panels, which means regular episodes of things going dark and summer sweltering. The polar vortexes present particularly vexing problems for a grid with an irregular heartbeat. Be prepared for forests of windmills and seas of solar panels to mar the views during the family drive in the expensive ev, which could be a dangerous activity if no one thought to plug it in the night before.

And where will the electricity come from to charge the thing? Not much chance of charging the ev if the town went dark. I always thought that a continuous flow of electricity, one that can be ramped up as needed, was preferable to one interrupted by clouds, the rotation of the earth, or the lack of air movement. If we are so paralyzed by the thought of burning coal that we are willing to rush into the arms of “intermittency”, natural gas and nuclear could offer a way forward without upending the entire system from the generating plant to coffee maker. Building new gas and nuclear plants to power the grid makes more sense than trying to repeal the laws of physics regarding intermittency, energy density (remember the vast panoramic expanses of windmills and solar panels – the very opposite of density), and the dumping of trillions into R and D to make something work that by nature is inclined not to.

May be an image of cloud and twilight — Intermittency in action: Rolling blackouts in Southern California, 2021

May be an image of standing, nature and text — A picture of intermittency: Mojave Desert windmills, California.

May be an image of outdoors — Another picture of intermittency: Solar farm in California’s Mojave Desert

We know much more about natural gas and nuclear generation and the necessary tweaks to make them safer and more efficient. Instead, we are offered the huge opportunity costs of the Green New Deal. Money sunk into this basket of extravagances is money not available for the obvious and accessible. In fact, the obvious and accessible is sacrificed on the altar of will-o’-the-wisp “renewables” as gas-powered turbines are shut down and nuclear power plants closed. Oddly, the most emissions-friendly one, nuclear, has been especially targeted. Globally, nuclear power accounted for 17% of total energy production in 1996. Today, it’s 10%. The picture in the U.S. isn’t any better. Nuclear’s contribution to our energy total is scheduled to fall to 11% by 2050 from the 20% of today. The scare stories of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and the damage to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plants in 2011 are dredged to make the inefficient – the aforementioned “renewables” – seem plausible.

May be an image of coast and nature — Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, California, scheduled for decommissioning in 2025.

It will turn into the classic example of government-engineered socio-economic devolution. Where will this lead? Think of the Middle Ages, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Venezuela, North Korea, anywhere coercive utopians seized absolute control of the government to compel others to build their dreamland.

Meanwhile, two words – “carbon” and “capture” – go down the memory hole. A fraction of the money going into R and D for overturning a civilization’s entire way of life could be devoted to “carbon” and “capture” with a much more salutary effect. The remainder of the GND price tag could remain in the pockets of the people. But all that makes too much sense.

And making sense is not the forte of eco-zealots drunk with power in the age of Biden.

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:

* Biden’s Full Letter to Oil Companies Demanding Help on Gas Prices, https://www.mediaite.com/news/read-bidens-full-letter-to-oil-companies-demanding-help-on-gas-prices-historically-high-profit-margins-are-unacceptable/
* The Global Nuclear Power Comeback, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-global-nuclear-comeback-green-energy-fossil-fuels-supply-climate-mandates-power-generation-11658170860
* The Blue-State War on Nuclear Power, by Nate Hochman, https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-blue-state-war-on-nuclear-power/

May 26, 2022

Batty Elites at Davos 2022

May be an image of 9 people, people standing, screen and indoor — A gathering of eminences at Davos 2022.

In a previous post, I complained of the embarrassingly poor quality of our current elites, calling them dunces. The latest gathering at the World Economic Forum in Davos is proving the point. Their prattle was full of advocacy for a distasteful future. Snooping from outside and within our bodies, lifestyle controls in minute detail, living on less, and an overall abysmal existence, while calling it progress, were an important part of the gaseous blather. Of course, don’t expect these people to relinquish their private jets, mansions, and second-home paradises.

La Rochefoucauld once said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. I rework the aphorism for the present moment: hypocrisy’s tribute is actually the price the rest of us must pay for living their conscience.

Absurdities rolled off their tongues in an endless parade at Davos. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in glorious rapture, spoke of swallowing pills with chips to alert God-knows-who about what passes through our digestive tract. The complete lack of self-awareness was astounding.

Indeed, an absence of self-awareness is at epidemic levels among these plutocrats. China’s multinational Alibaba Group president J. Michael Evans talked of an “individual carbon footprint tracker” to monitor everything from our kitchen cupboards to our travels to the multiplex. Stalin would be proud. Xi is beaming.

That grand eminence, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, was gushing in his praise of artificial intelligence as a “co-pilot of every cognitive task”. Is he so certain that it will make us better or just more controllable? The possibilities are endless in the campaign to eradicate the next class of kulaks, or the Joes and Jennies who love RV’s.

The luminaries at Davos preened each other with prognostications of growing veganism and the eradication of borders. The sanctification of German industrialist Klaus Schwab as the patron saint of the Great Reset – which is a Soviet Gosplan for our future – proceeded apace. Make no mistake about it, this is a totalitarianism of smiley faces in expensive suits.

They are billing themselves as Plato’s philosopher kings, but are proving to be the latest gaggle of fat cats with an unbounded yearning to be taken seriously on matters beyond their ken. Every time that they gather and open their mouths, they are proving that they don’t deserve it. Please, go back to your c-suites and do what you do best: make oodles of cash for spreading prosperity. Prosperity isn’t a dirty word. Drop the hectoring nanny routine.

May be a cartoon of text that says 'THOSE GUYS IN DAVOS HAVE THEIR HEADS IN THE CLOUDS. MORE LIKE UP THEIR... LEE'

*Kudos to Michael Brendan Dougherty for inspiring this piece.

RogerG

April 12, 2022April 14, 2022

What Gives? Don’t We Have Anybody to Defend Free Markets?

Yes, we have defenders of the proven economic creed of free markets. It’s just that it’s not evident among the high-profile windbags who inhabit today’s soapboxes, left and right. Go down the list from Trump to Bernie, Tucker Carlson to Rachel Maddow, France’s Marie Le Pen to French socialists, etc. All of them built fame and fortune on bashing free markets. For them, it stinks!

We should recall that old style conservatism in Europe meant a defense of feudalism, aristocratic prerogatives, and throne and altar. The old Right came by their distrust of the then-voguish ideas of free markets of David Hume and Adam Smith honestly. Choices in life were made to fit the prevailing order for these defenders of the status quo. It worked for a time. In Britain, the Parliament had its rotten boroughs (districts dominated by powerful gentry), an omni-powerful House of Lords (till the 17th century), the preeminence of the established Church and hostility to religious upstarts, its guilds to regulate labor, and taxes and legal privileges to favor local and national producers (Corn Laws, etc.). This web of government and custom restricted personal career choices and the basic staples of life. Competition and free mobility of labor and product were anathema. As such, putrid feudalism earned its reputation.

Corn Laws 1815 — A critical illustration of the British corn laws from the 19th century.

The conservatism of Reagan was originally the platform of the 18th century British Whigs, the other party vying for public support. Liberal meant Adam Smith and free markets, not the pablum of today’s faculty lounges.

In contrast, the old Tory attitude was reflected in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, whether in the books or Peter Jackson’s film adaptation. Saruman’s and Sauron’s industrialized machine of war and subsequent despoilation of nature are the principal means to seize the ring and envelop Middle Earth in the Dark Shadow.

Catholic social teachings (Tolkien was a Catholic) abides criticisms of free marketeers. Protestantism wasn’t far behind. Concerns for the plight of the poor and condemnations of crass materialism, a la Dickens, while understandable, provided cover for government intervention. Religion wasn’t even necessary. In fact, for many critics of a free economy, the religion was left behind but the hostility remained. The modern Left was born. Marx showed how, and some Christians noticing the symmetry between their readings of the Gospel and the scribblings of this atheist revolutionary gave to us the Social Gospel movement. Marxist instigators in the raiment of the clergy became a fixture around the world.

Take Bernie Sanders, socialist and paragon of the modern Left. His faith commitment slinks into a word salad. One has to wonder if his belief is of a kind that requires nothing of him, the lazy man’s faith. He explains,

“I am not actively involved with organized religion. I think everyone believes in God in their own ways. To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”

Previously, in response to Jimmy Kimmel, he was even vaguer: “I am what I am. And what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.” Whew, hiding your beliefs so as not to be repellant to the still-sizable Christian chunk of the electorate leads to a ramble through mind-numbing Bernie circumlocutions. But it works for him to advance “Workers of the world unite!” – “we’re all tied together.”

If you think that the Bernie of the Left can’t come around to meet someone on the Right, well, I give you Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s rants against billionaires could have easily emanated from AOC’s Twitter feed, or Bernie’s stump speeches . . . and maybe did. Not to say that the corporate suits’ propagation of the vile identity politics and race essentialism isn’t deserving of condemnation, but that’s not the only cause of Tucker’s bloviating. His is AOC’s gripe: the rich exploit the worker. Watch him from 2018 castigate the rich, play lefty class warfare, and embrace Bernie, while tossing into the spiel a few throw away lines for his right-leaning (me included) Fox News audience (below).

And then we have Trump. MAGA has become a cliché, a banality meant to push the view of a floundering America in need of Making America Great Again, meaning Trump. The “Again” part is a nostalgia for the 1950’s; however, it isn’t as simple as that. The 1950’s weren’t a time without troubles: massive pockets of poverty, Jim Crow, dead lakes, filthy air, filthy streets, filthy water, and society-wide health problems.

That’s not all for MAGA. For Trumpkins, the sight of too many Toyotas on the road is proof of the death of American manufacturing. The MAGA mantra is manufacturing good, fewer manufacturing workers bad. But chants only have a superficial truth to them. The decline in factory workers is real but not overall manufacturing. Technological innovation made each worker more productive and freed up others to seek fortunes in other lines of employment, as it did at the dawn of the industrial revolution when people left the farm for jobs in the cities and subsequently created a dearth of rural workers which spurred innovation on the farm. An economic need is filled by invention in much the same manner as nature’s disposition to fill a vacuum.

Contra Trump, 2016, the year of Trump’s ascendancy, set an all-time high for American manufacturing. And manufacturing’s prospects look bright if our government gets out of the way. Off-shoring may have lost its luster as more American firms see that life in kleptocracies and totalitarian nightmares isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. In addition, off-shoring is a two-way street for foreign companies. Taiwan Semiconductor, the world’s largest chip producer, sees the Taiwan Strait as not much of a shield from an increasingly bellicose Xi and his People’s Liberation Army and Navy. They’re opening up shop in Arizona. Those Toyotas are increasingly coming off American assembly lines – the Tundra from a Texas one. Do I need to list all the other foreign nameplates?

But our government won’t stay out of the way, even for my friends on the Right. Trump has tariff-love and an unstated affection for a form of central planning called industrial policy. Enthusiasts of the so-called populist right have allied with Sanders to stiff our biggest companies with the cost of any employee on the dole. Unbeknownst to the goofs is the fact that the labor market is righting itself as companies compete for workers and come to realize that the costs of a constant churn in the payroll is deleterious to business health. The chest-pounding of Trump, Carlson, and congressional lackeys is a sideshow to more fundamental economic trends. True to form, though, that won’t stop them from taking credit for any good news.

The Right under the rubric “populists” has rediscovered its vintage inner-feudalist with their frozen-in-amber economics, but nothing at this moment can compare to the state-aggrandizement of the Left’s greenie zealotry. Here’s where the two sides part company.

Our nation could be crippled in a haze of the Left’s greenie visions. A Green New Deal (GND) in a totality or in pieces would turn off-shoring into one-way street out for anyone with a bottom line. The critical mass for the suicide pill has been building for decades. Relentless pounding in the schools and media has prepared the generational ground for greenie flights of fancy from boomers to millennials to gen z‘ers. Gavin Newsom’s “California Way” – the combination of high taxes, regulatory minefields, and gauntlet of greenie infatuations touching nearly all activity – once brought to the Beltway, will only imitate the state’s outbound migration crisis of business and the middle class on a national scale.

So, Tucker, Trump, and their sycophants will accomplish little with their tariffs, subsidies, and tax bribes if firms are forced to face a firing squad of the EPA, SEC, IRS, DOJ, and state counterparts back home. If you want more on-shoring and less off-shoring, then put Leviathan on a leash. Fact is, we’ve got a free-range Leviathan. A hellhole of Jacobins awaits them. Instead of Make America Great Again (MAGA), try Make America Competitive Again (MACA).

Congressional Republicans began the process with the tax reform of 2017 and their vetoes of Obama-era regulations by means of the Congressional Review Act. The whole country will take a leap backwards if the clumsy populist Right, intent on castigating “neocons”, joins hands with the clumsy populist Left.

Hoping for prosperity by bashing job-creators is an endorsement of masochism as an organizational principle. Slavery, besides being immoral, is the height of economic masochism: the belief that owning and beating people is sufficient to make them produce. Don’t expect the turning of the men and women of commerce into bondsmen of the state by regulation, prosecution, and taxation to be any more fruitful. Sen. Liz Warren and the Bernie bros will need a new Fugitive Slave Act to go with their wealth tax and coercive ecotopia to stop capital flight.

It comes down to the clown-theory of pain as pleasure in the junk-thought precincts of economic policy. It didn’t work for the American South and won’t work for the Right’s pining for the 1950’s or the Left’s eco-nuttery. The foolishness of economic masochism is a lesson that needs to be relearned by the Right and abandoned by the Left.

See the source image

RogerG

March 26, 2022March 26, 2022

A Religion for High Prices and Neo-Feudalism

An electrical contractor repairs a sign with gasoline fuel prices above six and seven dollars a gallon at the Shell gas station at Fairfax and Olympic Blvd, near a billboard of John Oliver, in Los Angeles, California, on March 8, 2022. (Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP) (Photo by … — Changing prices at a Shell station in Southern California, March 22, 2022.

Economic inelasticity: a measure of an economic activity’s responsiveness to price changes. Inelastic supply is production made unresponsive to price fluctuations.

Market: the spontaneous arrangements that brings buyers and sellers together. Markets can be constrained by natural barriers (geography, availability of resources, etc.) and interventions (government).

*************

Some elements of the Right are deserving of condemnation for their forays into imbecilic isolationism. Their tariff nationalism and sophomoric hostility to our present and natural allies stagger the mind. That said, the biggest and most persistent threat to the welfare of the nation by far is the Democratic Party and its congregation of the Left.

Nuttery has little effect without powerful, organizational patrons. The donkey party has turned itself into the institutional home of the Left; the faculty lounge is the home seminary of the Left; and the seminary’s gospel is a fanciful, semi-religious, but material and messianic apocalyptism. Don’t mistake this for the traditional Second Coming. This endtime arises from glib Gaia-worship, a faith that angles to translate prophesies of doom into power. Its doctrine is in actuality an ideology and the attendant politics amounts to a missionary zeal for conversion, forcible or voluntary.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) introduces her Green New Deal, translating alarmism into policy, 2019.

But the appeal of this new faith is limited. Unlike Christianity that has a natural allure to all groups – the equality of all souls – this substitute creed is most attractive to the demographic product of its seminaries (college graduates), who are most prominently, but not solely, the degreed halfwits in the super zips (codes). Their half-wittedness is the fruit of the degraded and narrow education in the tenets of this debased secular faith. These people aren’t trained to question their assumptions. They are zealots that occupy the cultural commanding heights to influence and obtain office to force their form of salvation on the reluctant.

See the source image

Church/state separation be damned, they declare war on prosperity, independent consumer choices, entire industries, and the Constitution while they herd the population into cramped dwellings, ev’s, and mass transit. Freedom is the freedom to live only their way. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984:

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”

And so the zealots march off and into elected office, the staffs of the elected, government employment, techie enterprises, the corporate boardroom, ad agencies, the press, law firms, Hollywood, and into the teacher corps of our schools – what G.K. Chesterton called the “chattering classes”.

The fruit of their endeavors, among other things, is a disfigured economic life, and more misery than what would occur without them running the show. Supply and demand get malformed, made inflexible to the unexpected twists and turns of existence. A pandemic hits and, voilà, we have empty store shelves, supply chain disruptions, inflation, a suppressed work ethic, fiscal insolvency, and the doldrums’ persistence into the foreseeable future.

That’s the thing, it doesn’t take much to maul the gears of an economy and hamper recovery. Demand remains pretty consistent (inelastic) for things like fossil fuels, rising with growth, and only declining when a recession hits, with its lost jobs and business closures. Not good. Supply is hamstrung (made inelastic) to respond to the demands of prosperity after the imposition of utopia. Not good.

And utopia is what it’s all about. Wherever the Dems hold sway in the halls of power – local, state, federal – they are running full speed toward their mirage of eco-nirvana. Democrat state-level fiefdoms are famous for it. The grid is target numero uno. California concocted its 100 Percent Clean Energy Act to command the state’s electricity to be carbon-free by 2045. Washington State’s Clean Energy Transformation Act commands its utilities to be carbon neutral in eight years. New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that commands a net-zero economy by 2050. Hawaii jumps into the fray with its House Bill 623 that commands a 100% renewable energy grid by California’s year. They are declarations of war on fossil fuels, and the energy supply gets bulldozed.

Gov. Jerry Brown signs SB 100, mandating 100 percent renewable energy in California by 2045, on Sept. 10, 2018.

Notice the use of the word “command”, as in “command economy”? Karl Marx would be proud.

These lords of the state capital have jerry-rigged all manner of means to achieve the desired end. All of them, however, take the same tack of regulating traditional energy to death. Jerry Brown (as in jerry-rigged) and Gavin Newsom of the not-so-golden state are gung-ho. Brown, after signing the previously mentioned ukase, boasted, “California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.” There you have it: semi-theological apocalyptics combined with a newly inaugurated command economy.

Not to be outdone, Governors Cuomo and Hochul of New York read from the same prayer book. They, like the suzerains of the San Diego-to-San Francisco corridor (the rest of the state has little political pull), are enthusiasts for bans and regulatory dead weights. No fracking, no new permits, no new gas hookups for homes, and no pipelines. Thus, the residents of New York and anybody east of them get the privilege of paying six times more for natural gas than, say, the lucky folks of Texas or Louisiana. No pipelines are allowed across the empire state to possibly carry the fuel the 400 miles from the Marcellus Shale. Instead, it must be shipped from distant kleptocracies.

The same price penalty applies to everyone living in California. Like everything else in the state – housing, electricity, food, cars, you name it – gasoline runs at a buck-and-half clip above the national average ($5.85 vs. $4.33/gal.) for the commuters on Newsom’s roads, which happen to be among the worst in the nation. What a deal? The “bargain” combines a doom-premium (“existential threat of climate change”) in the form of high taxes and exorbitantly priced energy with crappy pavement. No wonder it’s hard to find a U-Haul to flee the state. Demand has outstripped supply.

If it’s obviously such a great deal for the country, with the utopians professing to be on the same team with the angels, why do they have to wallow in falsehoods? In Biden-speak, he said on March 14, “Make no mistake, the current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin — it has nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan.” Translation: It ain’t me! But it is . . . to a great degree. He’s doing his best to make energy supplies inelastic and prone to shocks, whether it be a virus run amok or Putin’s dream of a Greater Russia.

Biden blames Putin and his Ukraine war for the inflation rate and high gas prices. He won’t succeed. — Biden blames Putin and the Ukraine War for high gas prices, March 2022.

The only truism in his corner is cause-and-delayed-effect. Societies don’t operate like toggle switches – instant-on/instant-off. It takes time for policy changes to translate into behavior and effects, both positive and negative. Time is necessary for people to get their act together in the form of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Since California is his model, the complete effect of Biden’s pummeling of the energy sector will take years for the whole country to fully feel California’s chronically high energy rates, blackouts, shortages, stagflation, deteriorating roads, trains to nowhere, and bottomless spending on expensive-but-decrepit mass transit, and, lest we forget, the brewing campaign against homes with yards (single-family residential). No space privacy for you and your kids, peasants!

Likewise, it took a number of years for the widespread use of fracking beginning around 2011 and the repeal of the ban on the export of domestic crude in 2015 to turn into Trump’s bluster about energy independence and the US as net exporter. Sometimes, occupying the seat of power at the moment of good times is sufficient to enjoy the afterglow of public adulation.

But Trump and Congressional Republicans are actually deserving of praise because they greased the economic skids instead of throwing sand in the gears as Biden and the donkey party are currently doing. The thinking of Republicans is in the right place. For the R’s, pipelines (XL, Dakota Access) are a good deal. For the R’s, drilling on public lands is a great thing for supply and cheap prices. For the R’s, subsidy briberies for solar and wind and the purchase of Teslas are viewed correctly as an assault on freedom and the public purse, and move us closer to a grid that operates with all the reliability of a utility in Lagos, Nigeria, or California. Not good.

You can only get so much out of wind and solar. It’s called low energy density, an inherent characteristic of the two. As a result, low density must be compensated by the construction of vast plantations of panels and forests of huge propeller towers marring the earth’s surface. Lurking behind the scenes is natural-gas peaker plants to deal with the erratic production (the wind and sun are variable). The whole mammoth charade demands colossal sunk costs in redesigning the grid and the development of a storage system to make the massive contraption the complete energy source for your Netflix streaming addiction. Wouldn’t it be much easier with fewer lost opportunities (i.e., opportunity cost, the real meaning of the word “cost”) to clean up fossil fuels?

Certainly, Biden and the episcopate of the Church of Climate Change are aware of the monstrous costs and disruptions. It’s just that they don’t care. When you’re a believer, you’re a believer. And so, when American voters let Biden and company into command of the executive branch, they are going to get the full effect of the reunion of church and state, California style. It’s Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy all over again.

He didn’t disappoint the faithful from the get-go. Fresh from the chilly inauguration on the west front of the Capitol, Biden ordered an assault on domestic crude oil production by halting new leases, permits, and mining on federal lands, onshore, offshore, anywhere under federal control. Chad Padgett, former senior executive for BLM in Alaska, put it succinctly when he described an Interior Department memo, pursuant to Biden’s ukase, barring the issuance of “any onshore or offshore fossil fuel authorization, including but not limited to a lease, amendment to a lease, affirmative extension of a lease, contract, or other agreement, or permit to drill.” Half the 23 million acres of the Alaska National Petroleum Preserve was made off-limits. Authority over the process was centralized in the hands of Commissar Laura Daniel Davis, then-acting assistant secretary for Lands and Minerals at BLM, creating industrial death from bureaucratic atherosclerosis. Now, inelasticity applies to bureaucracy’s arteries as well as energy supplies.

Biden’s recent blame-Putin schtick to avoid responsibility for his stake in the mess rings hollow. Having spent his entire career in demagoguery and electoral pandering, the guy exhibits little understanding of enterprise of the free variety. People in the real world of business look over the horizon before they sink big bank on a venture. What they see into the near future, and maybe beyond, is Biden’s declaration in a 2020 debate:

“No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.”

Can’t get much plainer than that. The delay normally accompanying a policy is reduced when demagogic hostility is combined with the accelerant of pandemic-inspired cuts in production at a time of quick recovery from the nightmare. Why invest in an industry that the donkey party and its administration declared to be the equivalent of kiddie porn?

That’s not all. We’ll enjoy the benefits of California’s sclerotic supplies alongside California’s high-priced everything. All of this will be wrapped in an increasingly feudal way of life. As in the old Soviet Union, a new aristocracy of the party and its nomenklatura will ride on top of a beleaguered class of commoners. Thank you, Democrats.

RogerG

February 8, 2022February 9, 2022

We Picked the Wrong Time to . . . Fight Climate Change

See the source image

In case you haven’t heard, Biden is big on the fight against “climate change”. It’s everywhere in the earlier “bipartisan infrastructure bill”, the Build Back Better monstrosity, new EPA edicts, and in the travels of Biden’s roving climate change ambassador, John Kerry. We’re doing this as governmental Covid-panic bludgeoned the economy and the fed unleashed trillions of new dollars – 50% increase in two years – at a time when the economy registered only a 6-7% expansion. Something has got to give, and I think it’ll be our personal fortunes.

It’s a perfect storm, in the words of the economist Edwin T. Burton. You see, we need a leap in economic growth to absorb the tidal wave of new money. Don’t expect it from a greenie economy. A Greta Thunberg economy doesn’t work any better than a socialist one. On second thought, is there a difference?

Central planning, common to both, whether to eliminate differences in wealth or fit the fantasies of Earth First (and our 16-year-old sage), replaces the decisions of millions of free individuals with the commands of a few autocrats. Right now, as inflation is about ready to rage through the economy, these autocrats are working to cripple the economic lives of millions with expensive and unreliable greenie energy while at the same time they are trying to strip our freedom of movement in their war on fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine. Supply chain disruptions aren’t the only misery that awaits us.

See the source image

As President Obama was famous for saying when confronting congressional Republicans, elections have consequences. Yes, they do. This time around, we replaced mean tweets and insults at rallies with a basket of lunacies.

The whole situation reminds me of the Jeff Bridges character in the movie “Airplane”. We picked the wrong time to fight climate change while our practical lives are teetering at the edge of an abyss.

Watch the clip below. It’s a hoot, and also a bit more frightening if we realize that sniffing glue is not that much different from an enthusiasm for the Green New Deal: escapes from reality.

RogerG

February 2, 2022February 2, 2022

The Mendacious Scientific Consensus

In March of 2020, near the start of the government’s forceful reaction to the pandemic, I fretted that “We can’t do this!”, the this being the lockdowns and all the other strangulations of human interaction. I was worried that the virus would still get out and we would have nothing to show for it but a mutilation of our own well-being. Others more knowledgeable than I are starting to chime in. Most recently, a Johns Hopkins University study by Jonas Herby, Lars Jonung, and Steve H. Hanke paint a dismal picture of what we’ve done to ourselves in our COVID panic.

Cutting to the chase, the researchers concluded,

“They [lockdowns] have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. These costs to society must be compared to the benefits of lockdowns, which our meta-analysis has shown are marginal at best . . . . lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”

Hindsight has not been kind to the “scientific consensus”. Fauci and company, and hyperactive and panic-riddled governors and mayors, mostly in the blue bubbles, have soiled themselves, and continue to do so. As a consequence, many people are coming to the realization that “scientific consensus” is not science. It’s an easy cover for people who don’t know science to lay claim to it for political advantage. As such, when the opinions hiding under the phrase’s veneer get exposed for their erroneousness, it starts to lack credibility . . . as if it ever had any.

Beware, beware of the “scientific consensus” on climate change. It is bandied about by the same actors pursuing similar goals in similar organizations with similar backgrounds and homogeneous worldviews.

Some have complained that the pandemic shouldn’t be about politics. Really? When has a “crisis too good to waste” not been about politics? Of all people, Clausewitz gave us the proper insight: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Just replace “war” with “scientific consensus”.

May be an illustration of 1 person, car and text that says 'OFFICER, YOu DON'T UNDERSTAND. ICAN'T BE AT FAULT. I'M AN ExPERT. ONE WAY USA COVID POLICY PATCROSSCARTOONS.COM Rs 2022©'

May be an illustration of text

RogerG

December 28, 2021December 31, 2021

EVs: The Frivolity of Transportation by Fiat

Electric vehicle of the early 20th century.

EV: noun; abr.; electric vehicle.
Frivolity: noun; acting in a way that is silly or wasteful.
Fiat: noun; an arbitrary order. (arbitrary: based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system)

****************

Put the three words together: Turning all American car owners into EV proprietors in the span of 5-10 years by government fiat is an exercise in frivolity, and ruinous in the end.

Indeed, the whole campaign is arbitrary (fiat), totally lacking in sound reasoning. The end state of having all Americans junk their fully functional family sedans, minivans, and SUVs would turn upside down wholesale patterns of living just to satisfy a splinter group’s fantasy.

What prompted this observation? AAA’s “Via” magazine and its feature article, “Going the Distance: Tips and tricks from electric vehicle owners” (Nov./Dec. 2021). The splinter group in question is abundantly replicated in the article. The three profiled EV owners are full California urbanistas from the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California (Santa Rosa, Santa Clara, Irvine area). All are degreed in environmental studies, the Humanities, or digital tech. All are cloistered urbanites who visit rental properties, coastal B-and-B’s, the arts-and-crafts circuit, and venture into the forests for the snap visit to mother nature. Trip distances are short or limited in routes.

In other words, they represent the left coast fringe – socially, economically, and politically. These are the type of people who reflect the lives and norms of those who pursue an existence in rather exclusive suburban ranch houses, gentrified flats, landscaped yards, and aren’t likely to get their hands dirty working wrenches and equipment. The supporting cast of workers for this insular urban lifestyle has a separate life that is a world apart. Yet, the white collars want to force their preferences on everyone, no matter our circumstances.

Young people walking on top of canal boat

As such, one of the things that Biden brought to the White House was California, meaning its progressive personnel and monoculture. And that means the state’s eco-looniness. The EV-love in the administration’s ukases, like much that gurgles out of the left coast’s sunshine state, lacks any sound rationale, either environmental or economic.

The environmental justification is the easiest to dispense with. The ol’ bugaboo of climate change – as bellowed by that great thinker of our times, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg – is infected with leaps of faith and logic. The reality is that the atmosphere is too voluminous, its content too varied, and influences too multitudinous to justify Greta’s tantrum (Sept. 2021), “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood!” That should give you a flavor of the hysteria to force you out of your fully functional and efficient Chevy Suburban.

Greta Thunberg during her Zoomed UN speech on September 23, 2019.

What good is accomplished, though, by banishing the $40,000 investment in fuel, oil, metal, plastic, chips, and rubber in your garage, the euthanization of 2 million jobs in the fuel industry, and scotching the great advances in emissions and fuel efficiency down to the present? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Surely, Greta and her handlers in Big Environmentalism must realize that they have no street cred in Beijing and New Delhi – nearly 3 billion people combined and no desire to return to living in the dirt. Stack up their car fleets with ours. You would be replacing the cleaner things in our country with dirty cars, dirty power plants, and dirty air among these teeming hordes outside the developed world. Sorry, Greta, you’re nuts.

In the end, the amount of energy-trapping gases would scarcely budge, if not increase as capital seeking its highest rate of return rushes away from us to refuges of greater opportunity in places hungry to enjoy air conditioning. Dirty expands, clean shrinks. Punishing the clean is not a winning strategy.

So, why the headlong rush to the EV? Climate change doesn’t work for this lifestyle coup. Fact is, the campaign is a jumble of fantasies, fantasies about windmills, solar panels, and EVs. Greta’s fantasy sounds so simple. . . to the simple-minded.

The simple fact is that the EV is no practical substitute for the internal combustion engine. The infrastructure – repairmen, convenient and numerous charging stations, affordable parts and abundant retail outlets – will take multiple decades to arise. But the zealots are impatient: remember, 5-10 years to bankrupt you and the millions employed in keeping the existing fleet on the road. It’s reminiscent of the Stalin’s dekulakization campaign of the 1930’s. Eager to create forthwith Marx’s vision of the communal ideal, Stalin ordered (by fiat) the huge number of peasants in the Russian population – 82% of the total population – to give up their property and many of their belongings and herd them onto huge collective farms. The subsequent upheaval led to massive starvation and a huge expansion of concentration camps. An epidemic of death was inflicted on the bread basket of Russia. Similarly, lifestyle choices outsourced to the federal apparatchiks of Build Back Better will fare no better than Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.

Scenes from the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3.

Why should the infantile ramblings of Greta and The Squad have greater weight than my own? Their dream has incompatible elements. Hitched to universal EV ownership is windmills, solar panels, and any energy scheme conjured in a gentrified Brooklyn flat. Sadly, the lab rats who are Californians show us the results. Blackouts and the high cost of energy are the outcomes. So, just as we are bribed and whipped into EV’s, they are making the grid more expensive and unstable. Picture this: you rush out to get to work and find your Nissan Leaf with too little juice to make it to the office or get the kids to school. Blackouts just blacked out your car.

Okay, you and your kids can always Zoom . . . if the lights come back on. The pandemic lockdowns showed how that worked. More than the grid was destabilized.

As for that holiday visit to grandma’s house of 300 miles one way? Think about it, 250 miles is the likely limit before your wheels come to a dead stop. Of course, you know that ahead of time. If the grid hasn’t gone dark and you have the 6-8 hours to charge the thing before departure, you still have to restrict your route to the availability of chargers. Let’s just hope that you chose right and the plug-ins are operational. If not, expect a motel expense and an overnight layover.

If something mechanically should go awry, well, you’re stuck. The ubiquitous shade tree mechanic or guy who built a top fuel dragster won’t be of any help. The ready availability of parts and community knowledge is decades into the future. Hope that the diesel bus or train stops at the nearby hamlet.

If, by chance, you get the thing to the dealership, they might discover that the huge lithium battery pack is plated over and in need of replacement, a $20,000 part. The battery’s life was apparently cut short by all the 30-minute fast charging, a necessary activity due to much long-distance commuting or forgetting to plug the thing for the safer 6-8 hours of overnight charging. The 10-year lifespan was turned into 6. Normally, you’ll notice the deterioration in shorter operational distances as you begin to panic in the desperate search for a charge in the many and expanding derelict urban districts along the way. Maybe the thought of being held up at gunpoint disabuses you of that short excursion to Walmart.

Chances are, if you’re so into EV’s, you’re also apoplectic about open pit mines and polluted air and water, just the type of thing that inhabits third world kleptocracies, Putin’s Russia, and Xi’s China. That’s where we find the rare earth minerals for the batteries of your feel-good EV; however, rest assured that your EV won’t be responsible for inundating the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Everyone else in the mass of humanity will, thanks to your insatiable appetite for lithium batteries.

The utopian rush to the EV has consequences, many of them not pleasant. It’s what happens when adults turn over governance to childish and monomaniacal fanatics. Their tunnel vision becomes our tunnel vision, their leaps of logic become our leaps of logic. It’s a lesson that the editors of AAA’s “Via” magazine – Whitney Phaneuf, Katie Henry, Mandy Ferreira, and Rebecca Smith Hurd – should take to heart before they fob off on us their niche proclivities.

**********************

Watch a Norwegian Tesla owner destroy his Model S because of the prohibitive $22,000 cost to replace the car’s battery pack.

***************************

RogerG

December 9, 2021December 9, 2021

Ink on Paper

The lower house, the House of Representatives, of the Montana legislature in Helena in 2019.

A measure before the Montana legislature (LC 1551) would add Montana to the list of states calling for a Convention of the States to write and approve a Balanced Budget Amendment to the US Constitution. Once again, if the legislature approves the resolution, and two-thirds of the other states agree, we’ll put our faith in ink on paper to resolve our fiscal ills. If successful, watch the whole endeavor not change things a twit.

The principal problem with our federal government isn’t some structural defect in our Constitution. It’s the people that we elect. It would be true with or without the constitutional addition. Right now, littered throughout our federal behemoth are progressives who are dyed-in-the-wool evolutionists when it comes to words. Look at what they’ve done to the commerce clause and due process/equal protection provisions of the 14th Amendment. Limited and enumerated powers nearly became unlimited, with any enforceable restrictions hanging by the narrow thread of a black-robed jurist’s opinion. Ink on paper hasn’t stopped these people.

The fact of the matter is, if you want a better government, elect better people. Ink won’t correct for incompetent electoral choices.

Many jurisdictions have elected hordes of these linguistic gymnasts (progressives). When a convention is called, guess who’ll attend? It won’t be only people like you or me. Included will be people from AOC’s Twitter feed and all those from the many deep blue satraps. Any amendment will be massaged by this crowd’s fingers. Watch a balanced budget become a warrant to raise taxes. It’s the only reason that they’ll agree to the thing. Remember, a conservative’s goal is to restrain the federal government. Their ambition is to inflate it. The middle will be a license to increase taxes. In the end, we’ll be back to where we started. Depending on who is in power, we’ll still have either a bloated or restrained government. Nothing will have changed.

Structural gimmicks never work! California is a prime example. Reading parts of the California Constitution reads like a conservative’s dream. They’ve got a state balanced budget amendment, approved as Prop 58 in 2004 by a hefty 71% of the vote. It’s all just smoke and mirrors. Just reclassify legacy costs and debt out of the equation, along with a few other pricey tidbits, and a powerful progressive is home free. The highest taxed state became also the most fiscally incontinent.

They’ve got a “bi-partisan” redistricting commission that rubber stamps Democratic Party hegemony in the state for perpetuity. Prop 13 didn’t curtail the tax burden. They just inflated all the others. The state has terms limits written into their framework. It only replaced simple progressives with the zealous and foolish kind. Bad was made worse.

Conservatives won’t gain anything from adding more words to the Constitution. We’ll have wasted immense political capital on a wrong-headed endeavor, instead of increasing our presence in those blue enclaves to change their hue. Chasing mirages won’t change a thing. The facts on the ground remain the same. If you want a better government, elect better people.

RogerG