The cartoon below captures the delirium of our times. It’s safetyism run amok. The obsessive/compulsive nature of safety-at-all-costs is destroying us.
It took a virus to expose this latest contagion (pun intended) of the mind. We’ve lost all sense of balance. Safety-alone in all instances is as silly as having to wear a seat belt after a bad sunburn in a mad rush to the hospital for my wife to deliver our baby. No weighing of cost and benefit, comfort and discomfort, likes and dislikes, and personal assessment of risk. Somebody else – the government or the population of ninnies – claims the power to force us into their phobias.
If you really want to know the reason for the broad loss of credibility on the part of government-deputized “experts”, just look at their abundantly displayed lack of recognition of any other consideration other than the factoids of their narrow specialty. Fauci and Walensky wail about infections in a carpet-bombing of all the other things that make us human. Close the schools or open them with the kids isolated in pods, masks, plexiglass, and jabs; the germophobes screaming at other airline passengers for their refusal to continue suffocating behind a mask while eating; politicians ordering universal vaccination when the vaccine neither prevents additional infection nor its transmission; make it as difficult as possible for anyone to earn a living; prevent us as from seeking fellowship in worship; and effectually banish two thousand years of Christmas. Shocking and amazing.
The vaccines armor the many from hospitalization, but they can only do so much. They are not the “philosopher’s stone” of immunology. In fact, the unvaccinated 18 to 29 cohort run about the same risk as the vaccinated 50 to 64 according to OSHA’s own assessment (see https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/scotus-should-nix-bidens-vaccine-mandates/).
All the advice for sensible policy making isn’t limited to the kind coming out of a room full of lab coats. Their contributions are necessary but not sufficient. Necessary/sufficient isn’t a cliché. It’s a fact! I only wish politicians weren’t so eager to use the factoids of science as arrows in their political quiver. They end up besmirching themselves and science.
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)
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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.
Tesla Model S battery pack
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.
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Watch a Norwegian Tesla owner destroy his Model S because of the prohibitive $22,000 cost to replace the car’s battery pack.
A shopper walks past empty shelves where bread is normally displayed in a supermarket, Sunday, March 15, 2020, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
The April, 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine had as its cover story “Is God Dead?”. No, He isn’t dead but increasingly many have relegated Him to the attic with the rest of the old bric-a-brac. Nature hates a vacuum and so do we in our lives. When God is dethroned, the state will be enthroned. Well, alas, it came fully to pass, thanks to the pandemic.
If we should have learned anything from the 20th century, we should have grasped the obvious reality that the state is a very poor repository of our hopes and dreams. Central planning was a catastrophe both in material and immaterial ways. Most of us knew this; yet here we are: galloping inflation, a labor supply willingly eschewing labor, authoritarianism everywhere, and empty store shelves. We’re starting to look like those 1970’s photographs of the Soviet people queuing up to enter Soviet stores to find . . . nothing much.
Soviet citizens waiting outside a Soviet store in the 1970’s.1970’s Russian shopper looking at an empty meat cooler.
How did we get here? Look no further than the frantic reaction to the virus. Please excuse me for crowing a bit but back in March 2020, I bellowed that we ought not be doing this. The “this” is the extended lockdowns, the silly parsing of “essential” from “nonessential”, universal and mandatory masking, rampant social distancing, business and school closures, and an end to social and organized religious life. We are now paying the piper for this sin, and a host of others which accreted like barnacles to our ship’s hull.
We got to central planning through the back door. The Bolsheviks, instead, simply banged down the front door. We nurtured ours over a century-plus, and when COVID hit, the “crisis too good to waste” brought out in full regalia the inner autocrat. Concentrating power over things large and small in the hands of a Bill DeBlasio, Gavin Newsom, or Joe Biden runs square into Hayek’s knowledge problem: no small group of people has the knowledge and expertise to manage something as varied and multitudinous as a nation’s economy. In the end, crap will happen. And it did.
Ships waiting for entry off the California coast.
Some blame the 95 cargo ships lining up outside the ports of Long Beach and San Pedro on the Longshoreman’s Union. Granted, their featherbedding and labor contracts can make life a living hell. Some mention the neglect of our nation’s ports. Some could rightly point the finger at the eco-craziness of California’s war on diesel trucks and trains – and anything fossil fuel that keeps us warm and gets us to work. I don’t know of many interstate truckers who relish driving in the state. All true, but all of it preceded the current mess and shelves were brimming at the time.
Biden and company have hit upon the canard of trying to convince us that a mess isn’t a mess, but is actually a sign of good times. It’s gaslighting as state PR. This headscratcher ignores his role in bribing workers to stay home. Drive around in that over-priced electric car of yours and you’ll see Help Wanted signs as ubiquitously as Biden/Harris 2020 yards signs in the DC metropolitan area. Employers will take anyone breathing, and maybe not.
Need more be said?
What of his – and the rest of the Democrat gubernatorial lineup – mandates and threats? It’s hard to run a business when suffocating the workforce behind masks and forcing unwanted vax jabs on the 30% who are reluctant. Who’d want to come back to work? Better to take the unemployment comp festooned with an extra $300 a week and enjoy the extended staycation.
Economic life is disrupted. And once down, overburdened with a dump truck load of taxes and regulations, it can’t get up. Like the weightlifter, we can add the weights to the bar when he’s already erect with it. But from a deadlift? The hysterical reaction to the virus knocked the economy down and they piled dumbbells on the corpse. The result is the long line of ships waiting offshore and ships’ anchors tearing holes in pipelines, which will be used to further the war on fossil fuels. Go figure.
Go ahead, don’t let God get in your way, continue to replace the old priesthood with the credentialed “expert” and their computer models, and welcome to the Soviet lifestyle.
Intentional blackouts caused widespread damage and outrage throughout California over the past couple of years. (photo: JOSH EDELSON/AFP )
Part I in this series was about hysterics over the virus driving a people to mommy-state absolutism and the consequent slide to greater poverty, and a Medieval life. Part II concerns the climate-change delirium that promises to depress much of what’s left of our generally benevolent quality of life.
I’m reminded of Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell”. Shortly after the 1996 bombing in Atlanta’s Olympic Park, the FBI and a big-city newsroom moved from “lone bomber” to “hero syndrome” to Richard Jewell, the man who discovered the bomb and saved hundreds by evacuating the area before the explosion. Instead, he was turned into the lead suspect, which was broadcast to the world for months. Later, after months of FBI aspersions and negative press coverage, he was finally cleared and the actual culprit convicted.
Why mention this? Simple, organizations exhibit psychoses like individuals. Call it a social psychosis. An erroneous idea enters the organization’s social bloodstream, is reinforced by the mores of the group, and is hard to shake despite little evidence. It is so entrenched that caution and humanity get tossed to the wind. It is an alternative reality for them. The effect is magnified when allied organizations, such as a big-city newsroom and the FBI in the case of Jewel, feed each other’s prejudices.
Today, instead of some organizations’ blind embrace of the “hero syndrome” to guide their judgments, we’re experiencing another socially entrenched idea, climate change, that promises to deliver much greater and longer-term harm, and not in the ways intended by Earth First.
As before, allied organizations intensify a belief’s impact. These entities are less independent of each other as they reflect more homogeneous backgrounds such as college, intermarriage, and family status. Background examinations of the membership and employment lists of the Ford Foundation, Sierra Club, Department of Energy, US Forest Service, EPA, and much of the administrative state, etc., including the desk jockeys in national security, are an excursion from campus to campus and white collar to white collar. Increasingly, social homogeneity means a greater ideological homogeneity. The same mental bugs, such as the supposedly imminent threat of climate change, has resonance and force.
EPA employees joined the People’s Climate March rallies in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Denver as part of the 370 events held April 29, 2017. The AFGE in the banner on the right stands for American Federation of Government Employees which is the largest federal employee union representing 700,000 federal and D.C. government workers nationwide and overseas.
We everywhere hear of climate change as a “fact”, hidden under verbal constructions like “scientific consensus”. Science isn’t about “consensus”. It’s about research, labs, and the constant testing and reformulation of hypotheses, not Gallup opinion surveys. A majority opinion is just another thing to be tested, not an end to the process so activists can rush off to write The Green New Deal.
What do these prophets of climactic doom have in store of us? Hmmm. It’s obvious they don’t like people or individuals organized in free societies. They’re utopians in the mold of Karl Marx with all the “alienation” nonsense (human alienation from nature) and the militant reflex to engineer a “better” person. Their 20th-century literary and ideological Trail of Tears goes from Rachel Carson’s fear of chemicals (’62, Silent Spring) to Paul Ehrlich’s fear of more people (’67, The Population Bomb) to Charles Reich’s greenie-Marxist totalitarianism (’70, The Greening of America) to Murray Bookchin’s open advocacy of eco-socialism (’86, The Modern Crisis) to Michael Mann’s graphic global temperature “hockey stick” (’98) to AOC’s declaration of the end of the world in 12 years. Rhetorically, they went from legitimate concern to doomsday in the span of 60 years, all in the campaign to impose their control over the most intimate details of our lives. Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot would be envious.
As in the devastations of Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot, little good and great harm will come of it. Take a look at what sits before Congress today. In the mold of “the power to tax is the power to destroy”, the Democrats’ budget monstrosity of $3.5 trillion ($5 trillion by sober analysts), the reconciliation bill, is chock full of tax increases, all excused under “fair share” rhetoric. Hikes are to occur nearly everywhere in the tax code: capital gains, inheritance, the income tax’s top rate, business taxes, retirement savings, almost anything material and immaterial. If that isn’t enough, they’ve got a carbon tax bouncing around to hike the cost of your commute, keep the lights on, and prevent you from freezing this winter.
Democrats in Congress push their massive greenie social engineering scheme in a presser at the Capitol.
The tax haul is hawked by Democrats at $3.5 trillion so they can astoundingly claim “zero cost”, or as they euphemistically say, “paid for”. Odd, how so terribly odd. Taxes aren’t about “zero cost”; they’re about making somebody pay, and pay a lot, $3.5 trillion a lot.
Do you actually think that the Dems’ math calculations are an accurate depiction of reality? Under their greedy eye shades, they make some artificial sense, but that assumes people won’t try to avoid the whip hand of the IRS, who, by the way, will be given an additional $78 billion to hunt us down. In the real world, they won’t get that much, but the money spigot will still be cranked wide open from the Treasury Department to the Fed’s open market operations to a flood of dollars chasing fewer goods. Meaning . . . i-n-f-l-a-t-i-o-n, big time.
We don’t need Milton Friedman to remind us “inflation is the cruelest tax of all”. We’ll live it. So, add this monster extraction on top of all the other abuse. You’ll wake up one morning with a phone call from your accountant frantically advising you to change your portfolio, pronto, as your wife discovers at the grocery store that the price of everything in the basket doubled.
Scratch that long-planned family vacation to Disney World.
Why are we being forced to live this way? The answer lies deep in the synapses of the Democratic Party. For them, no social problem can be addressed without more government welfare spending. Also, their inner eco-totalitarian can only be satisfied with more crony capitalism and the power to coerce the population to live according AOC’s tweets, Congress’s airhead-in-chief.
Commissar Ed Markey (D, Mass.) put it quite succinctly, “. . . the Green New Deal is in the DNA [of the reconciliation bill].” For instance, the greenies get their own version of the Young Pioneers (official USSR communist youth group), or Red Guards (of Maoist fame), called the Civilian Climate Corps, to conduct unspecified “green” actions. It could mean anything from door-to-door canvassing to pressure residents to turn down their thermostat to Portland-style “peaceful” protests.
And trillions of dollars in giveaways for electric bikes, solar panels (of course), advocacy of “environmental justice” (anything “justice” in their mouths means CRT), university grants to push the agenda, massive greenie “weatherization” campaigns, worker retraining away from the things people actually want (cars, trucks, air conditioning, single-family homes) etc., etc. Combined with the tax punishment, we’ll end up with a life of California-style energy prices, California-style capital flight, California-style welfare dependency, California-style shortages and inflation, California-style dirty commutes in gang-infested mass transit, and the rest of the social and economic miasma that is California. And our airhead-in-chief will call this Shangri-La.
Do you think that they’ll stop with the federal budget? Hogwash. Remember, they’re totalitarians, and, as such, they care just as much about what you think as what you do. The indoctrination will be pressed into the minds of the kids by curriculums and teachers. Nothing will escape the commissars’ gaze. Criticism of your diet will be part of the lesson plans: meat bad, veganism good. Just picture the teacher in her reading session with the kiddies seated around as she reads “Heather Has Two Vegan Mommies”.
The way is gradually being set for a Stalin-like war on the peasants, or actually the farmer, for producing the stuff that goes into my burger-and-a-Bud. Cattle flatulence, stockyards, farming the plains and woodlands, production of implements and fertilizer, and much more, disrupt the greenie utopia. So, expect the now-common shaming campaigns, penalties, and bountiful awards from the public treasury corrupted by gazillions of meaningless dollars. “Let them eat cake” is readjusted to “Let them eat tofu”.
Is this any way to live? Our economic and social lives are wrecked by COVID-hysterics, the public fisc of a drunken sailor that is an insult to drunken sailors, and militant social engineering based on the loony platitudes of The Squad — and the rare pleasure of a cheese burger and fries will be treated as deviant as pedophilia. My only solace lies in the fact that the Russian people managed to put up with it for 80 years and survived . . . albeit with a Putin helmsman-for-life, rampant alcoholism, a stagnant economy, and a disappearing birth rate.
Reading time for the kindergarteners might be better served by preparing the kids for a life of perpetual COVID shutdowns under an eco-Politburo. “Heather Lives with Her Mommies in a Dirt Floor Hut and Her Sisters Died in Infancy” might be a better choice for reading time. By the way, Heather cries a lot.
Ii comes down to a basic question: How many body blows can a nation endure before it is irreparably damaged? I don’t know, but these hits come from the worst possible source: our wildest imaginations put to practice absent much restraint.
“Before you become too entranced with gorgeous gadgets and mesmerizing video displays, let me remind you that information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight. Each grows out of the other, and we need them all.” — Sir Arthur C. Clarke and in the prologue of the documentary film, “The Creepy Line”
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I’m of a mixed mind on whether to post this. It’s about the whole gaggle of social media biggies and Google. They might flag it for “misinformation” and I’ll end up like Dennis Praeger or Jordan Peterson taking a timeout in the mass emptiness of internet cancellation.
Today’s film recommendation: “The Creepy Line” on Amazon Prime. The trailer is below. The title refers to the red line, once coined by Eric Schmidt of Google, that demarcates truly neutral internet platforms – like Facebook, Twitter, and Google profess to be – and censorship and manipulation of the mind. Have they crossed it? What’s happened post-2016 makes me wonder . . . a lot.
The film answers the question with a resounding “Yes”. The film proclaims that the internet giants engage in monstrous abuse of their legal immunity in Section 230c of the Communications Decency Act. Are they really “neutral” platforms or do they systematically engage in censorship and mind control through their algorithms, the biases of their staffs, and so-called policies? The film is a deep dive into Google and Facebook’s surveillance of our internet use for profit and, now, the direction of our preferences.
Their snooping, or surveillance, advances them far beyond the old Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose logo was the all-seeing eye, putting the “private” in private eye.
An even more troubling occurrence is the emerging alliance between their potential regulators, the federal government with its huge administrative state, and these tech monoliths. Press Secretary Jen Psaki let the cat out of the bag in a July 16 presser. She proclaimed, “… we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies [against “misinformation” about the vaccines] . . . . and of course promoting quality information algorithms”. Combine these comments with Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 admission before Congress that Silicon Valley is an “extremely left-leaning place”. A deep bias at the service of the federal Leviathan should send shivers down the spine of any thoughtful person.
Many of us are so wedded to our devices that we blindly accept what Google, Facebook, and Twitter are flashing before our eyes. When their algorithms and interventions work both to reinforce a left-wing bias and obedience to the state, we have crossed over the red line and past the borders into Orwell’s Oceania.
A sign calling for utility company PG&E to turn the power back on is seen on the side of the road during a statewide blackout in Calistoga, Ca., Oct. 10, 2019. (Photo by John Edelson/AFP)
In my mid-twenties, I was trying to find a way to turn my History/Religious Studies degree into meaningful employment to support what was to be a burgeoning family. While in grad school, and taking a cue from a friend, I explored two avenues of study for employment: urban planning and teaching. I ended up in teaching. It slowly began to dawn on me, though, that the education and training in these fields was a grand muddle. Delving into urban planning wasn’t really scholarship but indoctrination into an ideology. Teacher training courses were frequently excursions into Summer-of-Love hippiedom and John Dewey’s socialism – a socialism applied to the classroom.
Inside the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in its earliest days. The clinic opened on June 7, 1967. Many of these people would go into the college schools of education, the teachers of teachers.
Parents, beware, your schools are hip deep in the junk to an even greater extent today. The balderdash remains and accounts to some extent for our population of college snowflakes.
Muddling (i.e., the action or process of bringing something into a disordered or confusing state), in fact, is what we do. Take for instance the ideology/science muddle. It’s the essence of environmentalism, or the effort to stitch together science factoids in support of a political scheme – i.e., socialism. What happens in real life when a muddle is at the root of public policy? A mess!
No better example can be found than in the latest craze to sweep the hominid world: greenie (“sustainable”, “renewable”, etc.) energy. Toward that end, we have the crazy-quilt of “net metering”. What’s that? It’s a ploy to bilk one energy consumer to benefit another. How? Stay tuned.
I was reading about it this morning. 40 states plus DC have elaborate schemes to force utility companies to buy the extra and unreliable electricity from mostly rooftop solar panels of homeowners – net-metering. Sounds like a great gig for the soccer mom/dads of suburbia. Right? No, it falls into the too-good-to-be-true category.
The burlesque of net-metering.
The problem lies in the “unreliable” part of the ruse. No one wants to buy a good or service if it cannot be expected to be there when needed. It’s every bit as true when contracting for lawn-mowing service as it is for PG&E or, up here, Northern Lights. The sun doesn’t align itself to the wishes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). The utility must revamp it’s grid for the on-again/off-again nature of rooftop solar. The utility’s legal mandate to provide reliable 24/7 energy must be made to mesh with the unpredictable production of soccer mom/dad’s pigeon-shading solar panels. That’s expensive for the utility company to make work and maintain. It’ll show up in your bill, or in utility bankruptcy, or, also as in California, poorly maintained power poles going up in flames. The consequences of the muddling of “unreliable” with “reliable” will appear in many ways, many of them not good.
The alternative is simple. If you want the things, you pay and take full responsibility for them. Sounds like something that my dad told me when I was a teenager. Don’t try and get somebody else – the utility or the consumer who prizes simple reliability – to pay for your actions. But the allure of the seemingly something-for-nothing – either through tax rebates, subsidies, utility mandates, or all of the above – allows soccer mom/dad to delude themselves. The scheme is more productive of delusions than reliable energy.
For those attuned to the scam, the scheme is sold as a sacrifice for the good of the planet. Remember though, “sacrifice” is the very essence of utopia-mongering. You know, the ends-justify-means stuff. Or, as Nikolai Yezhov, head of Stain’s NKVD (Bolshevik secret police) would put it, “When you chop wood, chips fly.” AOC has interesting company.
Nikolai Yezhov, far right, next to Stalin.
Don’t buy into the racket. Furthering our descent into third-world status won’t alter India’s and China’s belching of CO2. The planet won’t be saved, our grid will resemble Venezuela’s, and we will have proven that a “smart” grid is essentially a “dumb” one. What does that say about us?
The Getty Fire burns near the Getty Center along the 405 freeway north of Los Angeles, California, U.S. October 28, 2019. (REUTERS/ Gene Blevins)
We aren’t well-served by the mass of our journalists or schools. Frequently as a simple reader or teacher I’ve come away from an article or textbook treatment of a topic with a lingering sense of bafflement. The stories don’t make much sense.
As a History teacher, for example, the common treatment of the Great Depression is awash in incoherence. Blame is placed on greed and “over-production”. What?! “Over-production” is everywhere present in an economy and is corrected by sell-offs with no hint of a depression, let alone a “great” one. As for “greed”, it’s been with us since Eve met the serpent, maybe before. It wasn’t invented by the 1920’s.
The New Deal’s answer for “overproduction” and the decline in agricultural prices.
Plus, the authors don’t attempt to explain why the thing lasted so long. The greed and over-production mantras are presented as a set-up for a love affair with FDR and all things New Deal. Interestingly the horror persisted and even worsened in ’36-’37. Textbooks and teacher training are composed of the long march of banalities, and we’re spreading the bunk to the youngins.
Ditto for news stories. Descriptions of today’s happenings are often muddled. Take for instance The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey in her piece, “California Is Becoming Unlivable”. The “unlivable” part of California is ascribed to the underlying factors of climate change and high housing costs. Both, according to Lowrey, led to California’s fires. The high cost of housing forced development into the wildland urban interface (WUI). Her answer is the totalitarian urge to herd people into apartment complexes, something the commissars in Sacramento have been trying to accomplish for at least a couple of decades. Could this have something to do with the high cost of housing? Something about the dementia of “doing the same thing and expecting a different result” comes to mind.
Could this be their vision for the future of California housing?
Mulberry Street, NYC, circa 1900.
Of course they won’t leave the topic without throwing the fire epidemic into the climate change vortex. But the climate change god doesn’t just pick on California. It’s a global phenomenon. What has turned California into matchsticks is a combination of its dry-summer climate, with its El Diablo winds, and the clowns in Sacramento. Wildland fire suppression tactics are so passé among the ruling class of lefties in Sacramento. Though, in the dry-summer chaparral biomes, it’s like playing with firecrackers in a refinery.
The clowns try to hide their incompetence behind a barrage of charges against the utility companies. They can only get away with it under conditions of collective amnesia. PG&E and the rest of the gang are under the PUC’s thumb and its lefty hobby horses. Hardening the grid in a dry-summer climate takes second fiddle to dreams of a greenie energy utopia. After piling up the firewood under the weakly-maintained power lines, the goofs are shocked that physics takes over. Astounding!
A power line goes up in flames along a hillside as the Cocos Fire continues to burn in San Marcos, California May 15, 2014. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)
Parents beware of the indoctrination of your kids. Additionally, you have to be leery of the network news and print and digital publications. I’m beginning to wonder about the benefits of ignorance when compared to propaganda. Mmmm, something to think about?
Think of this as a personal letter to Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. My purpose is to remind her that she’s 29, not 16, and should think like it.
Move over you establishment types, the youngins are elbowing their way in, and they fully intend to impose their fantasies on how the world works. Many happen to be Bernie-bros/gals/? and are fully marinated in identity pandering and socialism, the bane of millennials everywhere. The current sensation is Alexandra Ocasio Cortez (AOC), all of 29 years old and ready to lecture everyone on the need to reshape their lives to match her dream. Her beau-ideal is a hyper version of California – take California and sprinkle a heavy dose of the looney-left-on-speed. She wants to take this uber-cousin of California national, and international.
If you find this kind of thing appealing, sharp objects, intoxicants, and land salesmen shouldn’t be within reach. Personally, I think she is simpleminded. She’s proof that anyone can get a college degree and come out of it dense as granite. Oh, she can put a sentence together but it’s all so glib. She can’t help it since she knows and understands so little.
Her Path to an Erotic Relationship with Socialism
Her ignorance is only matched by her bravado, something common in a youthful zealot. There’s nothing in her background to prove otherwise. The Wikipedia bio on her reads like an inflated paper resume’. Look for yourself.
During her formative years, she was immersed in all things Hispanic. She was coddled and favored within the cramped confines of Hispanic activism. Not surprisingly, ethnic identity matters a lot to her and it shows in the inanities that roll out her mouth.
One of the oddities in social research is the fondness in the offspring of the comfortable middle and upper classes for lefty causes. AOC fits the bill since she was raised in a Westchester County, NY, a region with 2-3 times the per capita income of the district that she now represents. Things got financially dicey for the family upon the death of her father, but her general outlook had already been cemented by then. Once it had solidified, everything else would be funneled through the mental prism.
Her education didn’t correct for the silliness, and probably made it worse. Think of it: her Boston University BA in International Relations with a minor in Economics led her to … socialism. Socialism isn’t economics; it’s public administration. Socialism occurs when the government controls most of everything, ergo the public administration. Those decisions of buying and selling are taken from individuals and turned over to government bureaus. Does she know that? Was she ever schooled in its failures? Real economics either didn’t stick for Alexandra or it was the largest category of units to be cobbled together to make for a paper minor. Either way, her socialism is ipso facto proof that she doesn’t understand the subject.
A Primer for AOC
A stroll down memory lane would help fill her huge knowledge deficits, but she’s also got an experience handicap in having been born in 1989. Her mother gave birth as Reagan slipped off into retirement. The last dose of domestic socialism in the mid-60’s to the late 70’s would be only a history book recitation for her, if that. The horrors of the international variety likewise. In the US, the period’s skyrocketing crime, the pandemics of STD’s and drugs, a near decade of inflationary recession, the Sovietizing of housing in urban renewal, the dole’s destruction of the inner-city family, etc., would be conceptual at best and therefore easy to dismiss once she settled on a weltanschauung.
Overseas, the era’s wreckage was even more stark. Did it penetrate AOC’s brain? If so, there’s no evidence of it. There’s a reason for socialism’s black eye in the fall of the Berlin Wall, collapse of the Soviet Union, the Tienanmen Square massacre, the gulags and reeducation camps, the mass exterminations, and Eastern Europe throwing off its shackles and joining the West. She might have in mind the welfare states of Scandinavia as her template for socialism, but how much does she understand their situations? My guess is that she wouldn’t let any discomforting thoughts spoil the fairy tale.
Soviet-era housing in Latvia.
All the evidence points to deep and abiding ignorance. Take a look at this typical example of her airy pronouncements:
“When we talk about the word ‘socialism,’ I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day.”
She’s in substantial agreement with Marx when he once said, “Democracy is the road to socialism.” Alexandra just resurrected the old codger whether she realizes it or not. My bet is that she’s oblivious.
She can’t comprehend that mixing “socialism” with “democracy” is just introducing more politics into the provisioning of wants and needs. More and more of life is exposed to ambitious politicos, campaigning, political donations, busybody activists, lobbying, and civil service-protected government workers. It’s unavoidable. That’s AOC’s socialism, and that’s ruination. Come on, Alexandra, do we really need more of our existence to be put to a vote? She apparently believes so.
The resurgence under Reagan and the public intellectual debate that proceeded it appear to be beyond her familiarity. A new cadre of free-market economists at the time convincingly showed that the long-neglected production side of the economic equation was, and still is, an important answer to the doldrums.
It’s based on a simple truism: an economy’s good fortune doesn’t ride on the job-creating potential of poor people. You need rich people for jobs. Rather than fleece them and cause their dollars to go underground, reduce their punishment and allow them to keep more their earnings. Ditto for the rest of population. It’s called “tax cuts” and they were successfully implemented by JFK and Reagan. The AOCs of the world want government to abscond with more of people’s earnings so a collection of short-sighted and politically powerful activists can decide. It’s why they’re socialists, and it’s why they ought not to be trusted with power.
Others in this grand discussion of the 70’s and 80’s – before AOC was even a blastocyst – started to notice the social dissolution that arose during and after the Great Society splurge. Government largesse in entitlements seemed to foster a dependency that isn’t conducive to human well-being. Work requirements for welfare, broken windows policing, block granting to the states, and removing the subsidy for underage motherhood came out of this grand rethink. Words like accountability, responsibility, and self-reliance made a comeback. Though, not for Alexandra. She’s clueless.
Alexandra, watch this short report from 1970 NBC News on Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing project.
She in her makeshift reasoning unknowingly wants a return to those days of Carter’s famous one-word description, malaise.
Hardly is she forward looking. She’s stuck in the past. Ocasio Cortez and others like her are still planted in the mind of Bernie Sanders and his world of 1988 when he was 37 and honeymooning in the Soviet Union. Actually, her ideological lineage goes back further to Tom Hayden, the SDS, and Port Huron Statement. Her’s is a reactionary perspective, not a revolutionary one. Alexandra, here’s news for you: been there, done that. It’s old hat.
Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders visited the medical school on his trip to Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1988. PHOTO: COURTESY OF VALERY VOLOVENKO
Certain basic realities haven’t set into her brain about her favorite hobbyhorse. Socialism, for instance, has peculiar centralizing tendencies. You can’t have it without a central planner. If you allow freedom and pursue only a more local variety of it, the ensuing jurisdictional competition and free choice would kill it off with great fanfare as shortages and long lines cause rapid depopulation away from the grip of local zealots like her. The only way to implement the monstrosity is to nationally impose the misery from a central point under the sway of all-powerful ideological oligarchs. Lenin realized it, but he was smarter and more dangerous than her.
In the end, a Socialist someone with plenipotentiary powers has to decide the answers to the basic livelihood questions: (1) What is to be produced?; (2) How is it to be produced?; and (3) Who’s to get it? If you allow people to freely determine these matters, some will be better at it than others and get rich. Can’t have that in Alexandra’s fantasy world. Better we have equality and squalor than inequality and plenty in her twisted mind.
The wait in long lines outside a Soviet store, 1970’s.
Be prepared to be inundated with her inanities through a sycophantic media now that she’s moved her shtick to DC . Not long after arriving, she presented her latest foray into nonsense, something dubbed the Green New Deal. Don’t think for a moment the idea is original with her. She latched onto buzz words circulating the lefty hive.
Not that the first New Deal edition was any great success. A compressed summary of the 1930’s would be as follows: (1) a depression beginning in ’29-’32; (2) the New Deal of intense government intervention, following Hoover’s, inaugurated in ’33; (3) unemployment hovered between 33% to 14% throughout the 30’s; (4) industrial production similarly languished; (5) WWII was a recess with the depression getting set to resume after; and (6) a recovery finally took hold when Congress, starting in ’47, dismantled much of the wartime/New Deal political and economic machinery.
U.S. unemployment in the 1930’s. Notice that the unemployment rate never gets below 12% throughout the 30’s.
It’s a history that won’t comport with AOC’s clichéd version of it. For people like her, the War ended the Great Depression. Rubbish. The War was the excuse to continue a steroid-induced version of the New Deal. The unemployment problem was cured by putting much of the workforce in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese and herding what’s left over into factories to arm those in uniform to kill Germans and Japanese. Industrial production went up, but factories weren’t making cars and refrigerators for the average person to enjoy. They made the stuff that was useful in killing Germans and Japanese, with much of it destroyed on the battlefield or at the bottom of the ocean. What kind of “end” is it when unemployment is solved by making millions of soldiers – a good number of them killed or maimed – and a rekindling of industrial production that leads to shortages and rationing, a set of circumstances not much different from the years before?
Here’s an unsettling historical fact for Alexandra: the New Deal in one of its first incarnations, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), had a whiff of fascism about it. It attempted to militarize the US economy as Mussolini did in Italy. The taint isn’t surprising given the fact that Mussolini was lionized in the early 30’s for providing a hypothetical antidote to the failure of capitalism. FDR and the National Recovery Administration’s Hugh Johnson had kind words at the time for the tyrant.
Like Mussolini’s corporatism, the NIRA tried to concentrate all of economic life into 3 monolithic entities (government, business, labor) to set prices, wages, and production. The thing floundered not only because of its inherent contradictions but also because it didn’t jibe with our Constitution. The Supreme Court in 1935 put a stake through the monster’s heart when some Jewish butchers (the Schechters) challenged the National Recovery Administration’s attempt to fine and jail them for violating its ukases on chicken. Is this what Alexandra means by a Green New Deal? Her thoughts on the subject were likely shaped by the mental prison of people like Howard Zinn.
If the real New Deal, if she was aware of it, would be unnerving to AOC, wait till she finds out that the real recovery from the Great Depression occurred when the evil Republicans gained the majority in the 80th Congress (’47-’49) and began to dismantle a good portion of the administrative state and its nomenklatura. Down came the War Production Board, the War Labor Board, and Office of Price Administration. Government spending was slashed. Maybe as many as a million civilian government workers had to get out of the business of telling others what to do and get real jobs. After that, we had the 50’s boom. Surely deregulation and smaller government can’t be what AOC is talking about, even though that’s what worked.
Bad Ideas Are Immortal
Bad ideas are immune to death, mainly because a new generation of the gullible hears them for the first time and mistakes them once again for divine wisdom. Absent are the reservations and the caution of maturing experience and a lifetime of study. If you expect additional years in our bankrupt public schools to correct for the deficiency – K through grad school – you’re a fool. There, the mental bankruptcy will be reinforced, not cured.
Old lefty nostrums are recirculated and repackaged to the birdbrained innocent. Every generation when young will be rich in the species. For many in today’s youth cohort, the latest craze in junk thought is the “Green New Deal”. Nothing really new here that in many ways hadn’t already been touted by Eugene Debs, Gus Hall, Earl Browder, and the aforementioned SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) of 60’s radical-Left fame. Most fundamentally, it’s a return of central planning.
Since central planning is key to the scheme, the Left’s latest rendition of the New Deal moniker isn’t much different from anything that hadn’t already come out of Gosplan, the Soviet Union’s economic planning agency, or Stalin’s notorious Five-Year Plans. Only this one is in the service of international greenie fanatics, not the maniacs fighting some vague oppression of the international proletariat.
Step back, there’s elements of the latter in the former. The similarities of Five-Year Plans and the Green New Deal make them near identical twins of the mind. They are encrusted with lofty goals and then hemorrhage the spending and coercive means to achieve them.
But even prior to that, the plots hinge on a rigid conception of the world. G.K. Chesterton called it “the clean well-lit prison of a single idea”. It’s the notion that people need to be directed according to the likes of activists caught up in their own mental prison. Their cognitive jail is the relentless pursuit of oppressors, many invented to justify the means to the desired end. The would-be bogeymen are, for both Marxists and eco-zealots alike, capitalists or anyone who pursues a livelihood in ways the militants deem “selfish” or “greedy”. Welcome to the mental detention center lying between the ears of Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and others with the same hangup.
Those who disagree are more than opponents. They are “enemies of the people” to be vanquished. This wafts with the odor of totalitarianism. Their intense gaze isn’t just directed at what you do, but also in what you think and say. In the jurisdictional hothouses where this mental smog reigns – California, New York, and Massachussets, are you listening? – the odor has gotten stronger as powerful mandarins seek to outlaw the speech of anyone who dares to disagree with the high priests of Climate Change.
They won’t be satisfied with the chump change of subsidies and test projects for their utopia. They’re into lifestyle management. You must live, think, and speak like them. Already, the schools, with their lefty curriculum and lefty teacher training, and comrades in big city media have become the boot camps for generating the latest version of Stalin’s Young Pioneers. AOC would have fit in quite nicely.
Poster of Stalin and his youth corps, the Young Pioneers.
Young Pioneer walk during their school fest in Kemerovo, Eastern Siberia, 1981. The Young Pioneer Organization of the Soviet Union, also Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization was a mass youth organization of the USSR for children of age 10?15 in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1991.
It’s so reminiscent of Stalin’s collectivization of farming, extensive network of eyes and secret police covering homes and workplaces, and internal passports, leaving aside the gulags where malcontents – real or imagined – were penned. No wonder this is nothing but a prescription for producing refugees.
So, what’s in this latest edition of the 5-Year Plan … er, New Deal? Some sense of it can be found in AOC’s draft request for a “Select Committee For A Green New Deal”. (5) Here’s a taste:
A deadline of March 2020 for the House select committee to finish its Plan for a Green New Deal.
As in Stalin’s 5-Year Plan, you’ll find timelines/deadlines to achieve certain numerical goals. For example, in 10 years after passage, 100% of electrical generation will be commanded from the greenie favorites: wind, solar, biomass, etc. 100%!
A massive public works boondoggle to build the infrastructure to replace our current networks with one accommodating to the utopia. One hasty calculation by someone in the know sets the cost at $2 trillion. And I’m not taking into account the fact that much of the technology – such as storage – doesn’t even exist, and may not ever exist to any practical extent.
Mandates to meet the goals will fall upon businesses, farms, and homeowners. There will be a colossal reordering of life to achieve the targets.
The socialist dream of wealth equality will be pursued through the Plan. Lefty boilerplate like “just transition” [to the utopia] is scattered throughout.
What’s the upshot? What does all this really mean for all Americans? David Roberts in a sympathetic piece for Vox stated it quite clearly,
“… the GND is not just a climate change policy. It is a vision for a new kind of economy, built around a new set of social and economic relationships. It is not merely a way to reduce emissions, but also to ameliorate the other symptoms and dysfunctions of a late capitalist economy: growing inequality and concentration of power at the top.” (2)
The Green New Deal is a plot against the fundamental principles of our constitutional order and civilization. It’s in the same vein as the grand pronouncements of the Marxist scolds of the past. GND boosters are out to manufacture a new person for a new society. What will happen to those who resist? Well, coercion is absolutely essential or it won’t work – or, more accurately, it won’t work as the history of communism attests, but the utopian bullies won’t even get the chance if they don’t do some silencing. Monkey wrenches will not be allowed on the path to their heaven/hell on earth.
The Teenager in Central Planning
Alexandra’s belief system is a product of profound immaturity of thought. Her thinking is grounded only in Lefty boilerplate. In many ways, she acts with all the excitement of a teenager who was introduced to some factoid for the first time but lacks the seasoned judgment to process it. In a recent twitter storm with Republican Steve Scalise, the 29-year-old Alexandra tried to correct the 53-year-old Scalise by repeatedly instructing him on the meaning of “marginal tax rates”. I think that everyone in the capitol knows term, but Alexandra acts as if she only became aware of the concept in the past few days.
She can find no fault in a marginal tax rate of 70% for the “wealthy” since she’s blind to the 60-year public debate on the matter. Apparently, her economics education didn’t inform her of the dispute between Keynesian dogmatics and the free-market ideas of the Vienna School of Economics. Hayek and Milton and Rose Friedman weren’t on her reading list.
As such, she’s probably not aware that she’s gearing up to imitate Joseph Stalin. Because there’s not much rolling around in that head, the problems of our times seem so simple. They always do for the young when there’s nothing else in the cranium to cause pause. She’s the equivalent of a teenage central planner but is completely ignorant of the fact.
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez is proof that there is a place for people like her. It just shouldn’t be in a room with adults. She might be a great ASB president, but her flights of fancy disqualify her from babysitting.
RogerG
Bibliography and references:
“Bernie Sanders traveled to communist Cuba and urges a ‘political revolution.’ Will exile Miami take him seriously?”, Patricia Mazzei, Miami Herald, 2/29/2016, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article62748002.html
“The Green New Deal, explained”, David Roberts, Vox, 1/7/2019, https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/21/18144138/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez”
The Great Depression Was Ended by the End of World War II, Not the Start of It”, Peter Ferrara, Forbes, 11/30/2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/11/30/the-great-depression-was-ended-by-the-end-of-world-war-ii-not-the-start-of-it/#2f706afb57d3
“Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt”, David Boaz, Reason, October 2007, https://www.cato.org/commentary/hitler-mussolini-roosevelt
Alexandra Ocasio Cortez’s draft proposal for a select committee on a Green New Deal, and the rationale, can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jxUzp9SZ6-VB-4wSm8sselVMsqWZrSrYpYC9slHKLzo/preview#heading=h.z7x8pz4dydey
“Five things to know about Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal'”, Timothy Cama, The Hill, 11/24/2018,
Today’s environmental activist owes much to Stalin. Oh, this is not the Stalin of the secret police, gulags, and purges. No greenie would stand for that … I hope. Rather, it’s the Stalin of muscular and hypothetically rational central planning. The commissars, operating as “experts”, establish the goals that are deemed critical to national and world survival and then hector society to achieve it. In our country, the browbeating occurs without the mass arrests. Rather, the hectoring encompasses the carrots of bribes (subsidies) and the sticks of regulations and taxes to engineer the “proper” individual behaviors to reach the target. Though, the whip-hand of the state always lurks in the background. The zealots don’t give either the goal or the rationale behind it a second thought. It’s full steam ahead … until reality hits.
Not surprisingly, an unintended and unpleasant reality for the enthusiasts and the rest of us will eventually hit. In the meantime, play up an impending doom to stampede people into accepting the grand design. For today, the holy grail is “clean” and “sustainable” energy in order to avoid Earth becoming Venus.
An artist’s conception of the surface of Venus.
So the goal of 100% “clean” and “sustainable” energy by X date is popping up in deep blue states. How’s that any different from Stalin’s Gosplan (Soviet economic central planning agency) announcing X amount of steel and wheat for each of year of the 5-Year Plan?
1948 USSR propaganda poster. It reads, “Let’s carry out the five-year plan in four years”.
Corporate America, increasingly simpatico with Earth First, is all-in for the crusade, especially the tekkie companies. Watch Verizon’s latest ad now running on tv screens nationwide (https://youtu.be/Sv1OVlyUyNY).
To reach Hawaii’s centrally planned goal, the beautiful Hawaii countryside will be scarred with vast solar and wind farms. Enviros bemoan the loss of the rainforest, except when it comes to solar panels and wind turbines. Apparently, food production takes a back seat to energy utopia.
Not to be outdone by lowly Hawaii, Governor Brown and the rest of the California politburo have jumped in with SB100. It proclaims the state to be 100% carbon-free by 2045, like Hawaii – a twisting of the old and venerable 5-year plan into a 27-year one. Anyway, a central plan is a central plan.
How’s that to be actualized? Geothermal and nuclear might be accepted into the “clean”family, but they will be the red-headed stepchildren. Pride of place for today’s greenie central planners goes to wind and solar. To make it all happen, let’s not forget the plentiful taxpayer subsidies, rate increases, burgeoning regulations, higher taxes, and, oh, a little rationing thrown in for good measure.
Be prepared on your next Hawaii hike or excursion to Mammoth to run into the likes of the following:
Wind turbines dot the landscape in Mojave, Calif.
The 200-acre Waianae Solar Project in West Oahu, Hawaii.
Reaching the green goal will require an expansion of the forests of 300-foot towers with 100-foot blades – and their unceasing hum – and the Levittowns of black panels. Leaving aside the technical and cost burdens of the whole scheme, the landscape will be as different as Stalin’s Russia after the construction of his collective farms and contrived industrial projects … with similar results. More likely, prior to public and private bankruptcy, these efforts will begin to look like the abandoned towns and collective farms of Soviet Russia.
The abandoned Soviet city of Chukotka, eastern Siberia.
Abandoned Soviet-era collective farm.
Markets Do It Better But Don’t Tell the Central Planners
That appears to be a more than a rare outcome in these best-laid plans of mice and men (to borrow from the poet, Robert Burns). Part of the problem is the nature of the people who are commandeering society: utopia-mongering fanatics and politicized “experts”. In both cases, we have people who claim to know more than they really do. Couple this with the fact that no one person or small group can know all the details and circumstances to manage the thousands and millions (if not billions) of individuals interacting in a society. Millions end up doing without as they live among the sun-bleached bones of decaying grandiose projects.
Hayek addresses a class at the London School of Economics in 1948.
F.A. Hayek called it the “knowledge problem”. He wrote,
“The knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never [my emphasis] exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed [my emphasis] bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” (9)
Boy, that’s a huge slice of humble pie for our budding central planners in Sacramento, Hawaii, and Verizon corporate headquarters. Honestly, the Verizon folks are in it for a piece of the action, thereby affixing “crony” to “capitalism”.
What? They don’t know it all? Of course not, but that won’t stop them form forging ahead because they know the important stuff, or so they believe. If there are hiccups along the way and a few people get ruined, well, be like Stalin’s head of the NKVD, Nikolai Yeszhov, when he said, “When you chop wood, chips fly”. Eh, que será, será … and stay out of the way.
Stalin and Yezhov, 1937.
The chips?
The Holodomor, the Stalin-engineered famine in the Ukraine of 1932-33, as captured in an American newspaper from the time. Massive starvation was the result of a Soviet takeover of agriculture as per the 5-Year Plan, and the use of starvation as a weapon to quell opposition.
Hey, I Can’t Afford My Electricy Bill!
And there will be hiccups. Like the Ukrainian peasants in the Holodomor (see above), those wood chips will strike the most vulnerable: those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. The rich can always afford to go green. Boutique food stores and boutique energy, with a Tesla in the garage, easily fall within the financials of the well-heeled. But a person living paycheck-to-paycheck, or residing in a South-Central LA rental, must skip some things in order to pay the state-contrived electricity bill. By all means, get air conditioning but don’t use it. Sweat.
As for that utility bill in the mail, a visit to Southern California Edison website will give new meaning to the folly of the bake-a-cake-by-committee logic. There’s no simple answer to the question, how much do you pay per kWhr? The price is a “structure” with a morass of “tiers”, “time-of-use”, “baselines”, “incentives”, “high usage charges”, etc. The thing makes King Minos’s Labyrinth appear as straightforward as a Kansas highway. (1) Go to the footnote and see if you can make sense of it.
Example of a High Usage Charge on a Southern California Edison bill from their website.
The bloody thing, though, points in one direction: Californians pay 50-60% (depending on the calculations given the word salad of California regulations) more than the national average for seeking cool air, warmth, fresh food, and clean clothes. (2) You can avoid the whipping to your pocketbook by succumbing to solar panels on your roof. What you do at the end of their 10-15 year lifespan is hard to say. Still, you’ll get a ratepayer/taxpayer provided subsidy and the utility will be hogtied into accepting your feeble production into its grid. All of which means that somebody has to foot the bill. And that somebody is, as always, you, the ratepayer and taxpayer. Going green doesn’t mean going cheap, particularly if you want to avoid Lancaster’s 110° heat.
The Peasants Are Coming And They Look Angry.
The flinging wood chips don’t end with the heart-stopping utility bills. You’ve heard of racial disparities, right? Well, now we have greenie-inspired economic disparities which have a racial tinge. The poor, and really anybody below the per capita income of Malibu, will pay more as a portion of income to keep the lights on. And you know what? The peasants are looking for their pitchforks. The scene of a torchlight mob marching on Frankenstein’s castle may have some metaphorical relevance.
Not surprisingly, somebody has come forward to sue the California commissariat for its flirtation into greenie-energy wonderland. A consortium of civic-minded community leaders – The Two Hundred – has the gumption to sue the state for its bilge of laws and regulations that push the Sierra Club’s vision at the expense of anyone who won’t reduce nature to a Disney cartoon. (3) Expect the smear campaign from the usual suspects of powerful lefty hotheads in the state legislature, the well-funded collection of politically powerful environmentalist klans, not to mention the governor, to brand those who dare to rebel as greedy, self-serving Big Real Estate, Big Oil, Big Developers, Big Polluters, Big ….
Throwing out pejorative labels is a favorite tactic, that way they don’t have to be burdened with addressing the litigants’ arguments. Brand them and wait for the sympathetic legacy media to repeatedly broadcast the slander. It’s a well-worn script.
It’s interesting to ponder the rationale behind the lawsuit. The plaintiffs point to CARB’s recent greenhouse-gas mandates on new housing as having “a disparate negative impact on minority communities and are discriminatory against minority communities and their members”. One member of The Two Hundred, John Gamboa, put it more bluntly, “They [the state’s powerful green politicos and regulators] care more about spotted owls than brown babies”.
The logic is unassailable. Piling on the regulations and mandates will have a negative effect on the cost of everything from air conditioning to a bungalow to a pound of cabbage. The costs ripple through the supply chain of everything in the consumer market. No Mensa membership is required to foresee the pernicious impacts on anyone without an inherited portfolio. Already the state with the highest poverty rate (21%) – and ballooning to 8 million when housing costs are factored – California’s enviro extremism is slamming the already-exposed to even more exposure.
Germany’s natives were exposed to the ploy at the same time as it became fashionable in West Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Manhattan, Humanities Departments, and Fortune 500 corporate soirées. The Deutsche planners declared an 80% cut in demon CO2 by 2050, began closing down nuclear power plants, and went hell-bent into the dreamland of “renewables”. A hausfrau saw her electricity bill jump 50% in 10 years and realized that she was saddled with highest-priced juice in the EU ($0.37 per kilowatt-hour). (5) The road to ecotopia is paved with unpaid electricity bills.
Ecotopia?
Ontario, Canada, and Australia jumped on the same train to the asylum with ditto results.
So, seeking to end the slide to social and economic melancholia, The Two Hundred is suing the collective pants and REI-purchased hiking shoes off California’s eco-panderers in the state nomenklatura. It seems that the plaintiffs have available a whole bunch of laws to ban “disparate impacts”of a racial cast, and the laws are at the ready to weaponize legal briefs. The state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act and US Federal Housing Act stand poised to be used. If an employer can be dragged before the EEOC for too few hires in a “protected” category, why not haul into court for the same reason the gaggle of Sierra Club diehards in CARB (Calif. Air Resources Board)? Should eco-lefties with political power be immune to the identical sanctions faced by anyone else trying to make a living?
California Air Resources Board chairwoman, Mary D. Nichols.
Nichols’s inspiration? Nikolai K. Baibakov, head of the State Planning Commission (Gosplan) 1955-57 and 1965-85.
Success in court isn’t likely. The courts have a long track record of protecting government desk-jockeys from the consequences of their actions. Maybe that’s how it should be. If popular sovereignty means anything, we could simply vote the bastards out, except for the bulk of civil service and union-protected lifers in the bureaucracy’s bowels – and maybe that’s how it shouldn’t be. The growth of the administrative state has made the franchise nearly mute.
The empowered eco-central planners in the Dem one-party states only muck up the works. They claim to know what needs to be done and what is best for all 300+ million Americans as well as all other earthlings. Stalin would be proud of his progeny.
RogerG
Footnotes and Bibliography:
“Time-Of-Use (TOU) Rate Plans”, Southern California Edison, https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residential-Rate-Plans/!ut/p/b1/pVJNc4IwEP0tHjhiNgQl7S1tLcL4UcVW4eIEjEgHA0Ja2_76RseL06p1mtPuztuXt7sPRWiGIsnfs5SrrJA83-VRe-57Dwy7tuUNg4EDDAedvjvqkQ6zNSDUADjxGOz7MXVZ1wvAc59aNni-MwHHCTB9dNAURShKpCrVCoV1IuZJIZWQai6kAYfYgErU2UJHGc91wpWoj2pmmXO5IyqTbIHCFudtGtOlyTERpk1jbHJHpxQvktgWLRILfBB-RtmFwf1Lk-kPrKp_30-1LK5WZiaXBZr9UL1fwBHT2LE000unN7zDFlDrALhxodP1hxowGRHwyAgGAWMEoH0AnDmCFpvmRbw_aMhkTKhWVYmlqETVfKt0eaVUWd8aYMB2u22mRZHmopkUawN-a1kVtUKzYyQK9Uad0ysjKLjyROcJR3A1of8HN2evm03EtCd33vvQU_7PlOX6eU3JpxnF7XH3qyemJo8pkFaeNhrfvJkzbg!!/dl4/d5/L2dBISEvZ0FBIS9nQSEh/
“Californians are paying billions for power they don’t need”, LA Times, Feb. 5, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-electricity-capacity/
A description of “The Two Hundred” can be found from their website: http://www.ccbuilders.org/project/the-two-hundred-project/
“California Climate Policies Facing Revolt from Civil-Rights Groups”, Robert Bryce, National Review Online, Sept. 15, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/california-climate-change-policy-hits-poor-residents-hardest/
“Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future”, Robert Kunzig, National Geographic Magazine, November 2015, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2015/11/germany-renewable-energy-revolution/
“Why California Has the Nation’s Worst Poverty Rate”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute, 1/17/2018, https://mises.org/wire/why-california-has-nations-worst-poverty-rate-1
“On the relevance of Hayek: centralized economic planning is dead”, Alex Cartwright, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 6/10/2013, https://home.isi.org/relevance-hayek-centralized-economic-planning-dead
“Beyond Hayek: A Critique of Central Planning”, Tibor R. Machan, 6/1/1988, https://fee.org/articles/beyond-hayek-a-critique-of-central-planning/
“Hayek: The Knowledge Problem”, Jeffrey A. Tucker, Foundation for Economic Education, 10/28/2014, https://fee.org/articles/hayek-the-knowledge-problem/
Sorry, I can’t leave the gun debate alone. The reason: the people most stridently supporting gun-control are simultaneously most ignorant about them. They say stupid things like, “These guns [AR-15’s] are killing machines” (Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC, last week in a radio interview).
Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC
Here’s a question: Comparing the 2 gun pictures below – #2 and #3 – which one is more likely to kill you? Answer: It depends on which one is pointing at you. Dahhhh! A bullet out of a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words) acts the same way as one heading toward a deer.
Hunter with a bolt-action rifle.
Sighting-in an AK-47.
Okay, one is a semi-auto AK-47 (pic #3) and the other is a bolt-action hunting rifle (pic #2). But many sport rifles are semi-auto. Depending on the direction of the barrel, either one could be a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words). See below, pic #4, of a Browning semi-auto and an AR-15.
