A big government progressive finds himself in big government purgatory. He says, “it was an object lesson in something.” But what?
Posted by Harry Messenheimer
Archive for April, 2008
Oh Oh!
Apr 30
Mark Steyn has a dynamite article criticizing the latest cover featured article of Time and its failure to direct any attention to the actual consequences of so-called “eco-friendly” subsidies. Excerpts:
The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The U.S. added to its 51 cents-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a five-fold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.
The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.
Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that to date the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.
The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death.
ATSRTWT
Hat tip: Newmark’s Door
Posted by Harry Messenheimer
The Case for Colombia
Apr 14
Duncan Currie at The Weekly Standard writes about the postponed free-trade pact between the U.S. and Columbia:
The House of Representatives voted to postpone consideration of the U.S.-Colombia free trade pact, which President Bush sent to Congress earlier this week. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama oppose the Colombia deal on the grounds that Bogotá has not done enough to curb violence against trade unionists. This is the same argument we hear from other top Democrats and from senior American labor leaders. Yet it reveals either a total lack of perspective or an indifference to the facts, or both.
Read more about Columbia’s progress here.
An article by Dan Rabkin at FrontPage shows further evidence that China’s economic liberalization doesn’t necessarily translate into political liberalization:
On July 13, 2001 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that Beijing had beaten out Toronto and Paris for the rights to host the 2008 Summer Games. Joy immediately spread across the Mainland, first and foremost amongst the members of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC). Plans were being set in motion to “dump sand” at Tiananmen Square for a beach volleyball arena, the site where 12 years prior Chinese tanks rolled in and brutally extinguished a blossoming democracy movement. Seven years after the IOC’s announcement, the decision to host the Olympics is turning into a colossal strategic blunder that is “dumping sand” on China’s hopes of shedding its police state label.To be honest, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) deserves a lot of credit. In the late 1970s the communist grip over the economy started to ease and the shift to an open-door and reform policy has led to a period of real and substantial economic growth. With the highest growth rate in the world, averaging about 10% a year over the last few decades, the PRC is rapidly climbing up in the world’s economic power rankings.
In light of China’s achievements, it is not surprising that they want to show their progress off to the rest of the world. However, does China really need the world’s spotlight shining into its closet — a closet that has the skeletons of Tibet, “re-education camps,” Darfur, and Burma lurking inside?
Read the rest here.
Tax Insanity
Apr 14
And I thought my taxes were bad. Did you know that in 1936, the highest-earning Americans had a 79% tax rate?!!
Just in time for Tax Day (a day when flags should be be flown at half staff to mourn the income we lose to government bureaucracy), the Hoover Institution has released a fascinating history of taxes in America.
Think filing taxes is a pain? No kidding.
According to one source, the current tax code and its associated regulations “contain almost 5.6 million words–seven times as many words as the Bible.” One website that provides access to the tax code and its related documents notes that the complete tax code is 24 megabytes in size and, if printed 60 lines to the page, would fill more than 7,500 letter-size pages.
Contempt for the current tax system is rampant. In The Flat Tax, Hall and Rabushka note that President Jimmy Carter stated that the income tax was “a disgrace to the human race.” President George W. Bush commented that “the tax code is a complicated mess. You realize, it’s a million pages long.” Even Albert Einstein once quipped, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
The “green” CEO
Apr 14
Free-market types have good reason to worry when they hear about pro-environment CEOs. After all, the trend right now is for CEOs to compromise their own companies’ bottom lines by engaging in corporate philanthropy, especially questionable efforts to combat global warming.
That’s why this interview with T.J. Rodgers is so refreshing. Rodgers is the CEO of the company which owns solar-power manufacturer SunPower, and he is proud to be considered “green.” However, he despises corporate philanthropy, and agrees with Milton Friedman that charity should be an individual endeavor and not a corporate one. He makes a great case that a company can be pro-environment without hurting its profits. He also separates fact from fiction in the global warming debate; analyzes the greenhouse gas plans of McCain, Gore, and Obama; and compares different alternative energy sources (to quote Rodgers, “Ethanol? Total waste.”).
A news story by Lucia Kubosova from EUobserver.com:
France is planning to push forward plans for a common EU company tax base during its six-month term at the bloc’s chair, starting in July.
“It has been going on for a long time but this is one issue that we are determined to push,” French economy minister Christine Lagarde told reporters on Monday (7 April), following a tax forum organised by the European Commission.
The corporate tax base idea has been advocated by EU tax commissioner Laszlo Kovacs as a way to simplify cross-border business and cut red tape for European companies by setting up a single system for calculating taxes across the 27 member states.
But it has been so far strongly opposed by a bunch of countries, mainly the UK, Ireland, Estonia, Lithuania and Slovakia. They fear such a common tax base would be the first step towards harmonisation of tax rates, an area defended by EU states on national sovereignty grounds. Read the rest of this entry »
This just in from one of my favorite blogs:
The other problem sitting on my desk is a snack bar I inherited on a lease in California at Lake Piru. The snack bar is a dump. It is designed wrong, it is set up to cook the wrong kinds of foods, and uses space in the building very inefficiently. I want to lay the whole thing out differently, as a win-win for everyone. We could sell more with fewer workers. The customers would get more selection, including much healthier choices. The operation would be safer, because we would eliminate most of the heavy cooking (e.g. deep fat fryers). And it would be cleaner, with less wastewater and cleaner wastewater because there would be less grease and oil.
Unfortunately, it is very clear that Ventura County, California is not going to allow me to make these changes, at least at any cost I can afford. First, apparently I need to build a new wastewater treatment plant for the snack bar! But I am reducing the waste water load, I argue. Does not matter. New code requires a plant. So because of this environmental code, I am pushed to continue the current operation which is environmentally worse than my proposed alternative. We have the exact same problem on fire suppression. But I am removing the ovens and most of the cooking equipment! It’s safer! Doesn’t matter, if I make any change at all, I have to install a new fire suppression system. And on and on. this is the true face of government regulation. We face this kind of thing ten times a day.
Check it out. The post covers a lot of other ground on the realities of politicians and the economy.
BTW, for a stunning challenge to the global warming crowd check out his other blog, particularly this.
Posted by: Harry Messenheimer
A ‘Grassroot Perspective’ by Roy Innis
Every week brings new claims that clean, free, inexhaustible renewable energy will soon replace the “dirty” fuels that sustain our economy today. A healthy dose of reality is needed.
Over half of our electricity comes from coal. Gas and nuclear generate 36 percent of our electricity. Barely 1 percent comes from wind and solar. Coal-generated power typically costs less per kilowatt hour than alternatives – leaving families with more money for food, housing, transportation and healthcare.
By 2020, the United States will need 100,000 megawatts of new electricity, say EIA, industry and utility company analysts. Unreliable wind power simply cannot meet these demands. Read the rest of this entry »