Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Failure Of Al Gore

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More thoughts from Walter Russell Mead:

The global green strategy was a comprehensive, unified and coordinated one. Green activists around the world, in some countries empowered because proportional representation gives fringe groups disproportionate political influence, would unite around the push for a single global solution to climate change. The global solution involved a treaty to be negotiated under UN auspices that would be “legally binding” and subject the emission of greenhouse gasses to strict global controls. Developing countries would receive massive transfers of official aid ($100 billion or more a year) to compensate them for the costs they would incur in meeting carbon targets; developed countries like the United States would face stricter targets still. The target for the treaty was to cap global emissions at levels believed to keep the global temperature rise this century to two degrees centigrade.

To reach this Valhalla, a political strategy was put in place; it is the strategy that the former vice president is still gamely trying to push in his Rolling Stone article. It has failed.

Good. As with Obama, his failure is success for the rest of us.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, a success for the rest of us who don’t live in California. Here, he succeeded, because the voters are idiots, and the ruinous law that the Democrats and Scharzenegger pushed (thanks, Maria!) will be just one more factor that irretrievably sinks the state’s economic prospects.

[Late morning update]

Al Gore — idiot Malthusian.

As bad as Bush was, we really dodged a bullet in 2000.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The President Has His Self Confidence Back

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I am so relieved:

Finally, President Obama – author of two memoirs by the age of 45, speaker of the famous argument, “I won,” the man who famously assured his party that they wouldn’t endure a 1994-style shellacking because they had him, the man who gave an iPod of his speeches to the Queen of England, the man who claimed his election would trigger the falling of oceans and the healing of the sick, the man who believed the best candidate to be his chief of staff was himself – has overcome all of that crippling self-doubt.

Now, to gain the confidence of the rest of us, or at least enough to reelect him next year. That will be tough, I think, because it would require a thorough education on topics of which he seems utterly innocent (e.g. basic economics, free-market capitalism, Business 101, human nature), and a personality transplant.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Mexifornia

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Observations from VDH:

That schizophrenia is what confuses so many about illegal immigration — the simultaneous furor over even the suggestion of compliance with federal immigration law and the occasional symbolic expressions of dislike for the United States in public fora, whether booing at the Rose Bowl at mention of America, or walking out of a California high school en masse at the sight of an American-flag T-shirt on Cinco de Mayo.

When a foreign nation is treated as the home team, and when the home team is booed in the Rose Bowl, I think we can see why the entire open-borders, non-enforcement, ‘La Raza’ paradigm of tribal chauvinism based on ethnic solidarity has been proven an abject failure — summed up by one word, “hypocrisy.”

And it’s just one factor in the continuing California decline and ascendancy of Texas and the Gulf Coast.

Well, at least they’re wising up in Holland.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Static Scoring Of Health-Care Costs

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Yuval Levin notes that CBO is admitting that their projections are intrinsically wrong:

What we have here, in other words, is a frank admission by CBO that their methodology ignores the effects of policy changes on the behavior of both providers and consumers—effects which must, of course, be essential to the consequences of any health-care reform.

This methodological “gap” strongly favors the left in the health-care debate, because it assumes that the economics of health care are just a matter of manipulating levels of spending, and so that crude price controls will not affect access and quality and that market competition will not reduce costs. There is, of course, ample evidence of the former effect (especially in Medicaid, which in most states pays doctors at even lower rates than Medicare, at least for now), and there is some evidence of the latter too (though market forces haven’t had much of a chance to be tried, except in the Medicare prescription-drug benefit; other experiments (like Medicare advantage) all take place in the shadow of the existing fee-for-service Medicare system and so can’t really change the behavior of providers—they therefore have neither traditional Medicare’s ability to boss doctors around nor a market system’s ability to keep costs down, so they end costing no less than traditional Medicare, and sometimes even a little more.)

It’s the same kind of scam that they pull when they statically score the effect of a change in tax rates. It’s lunacy to assume that it will have no effect on behavior, and yet they do, and so delude themselves that they can predict with any confidence the resulting revenue.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

Rethinking Space Transportation Regulation

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Wayne Crews, one of my colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has some thoughts at Forbes about how best to regulate the new private spaceflight industry.

[Update a while later]

Speaking of my CEI colleagues, Iain Murray has a new book out, titled Stealing You Blind: How Government Fat Cats Are Getting Rich Off of You. Sounds like the basic theme of the last three years. If not eighty.