As the economy has deteriorated, the government has resorted to dubious stopgaps such as price controls. The price controls have produced more shortages, leading to more stopgaps … and more political repression to control complaints about the shortages and stopgaps. People made much of the fact that Chavez won elections — but less of the fact that he won them in the context of government policies that required television stations to broadcast hours of his speeches every week. And that he silenced stations that opposed him.
This has only continued to get worse under President Nicolas Maduro. Having shrunk the space for legitimate opposition so far, its only outlet seems to be the streets.
They’re streets that the murderous Maduro should be dragged through. But the White House, and much of the media, remains silent.
I think it’s going to cost a lot more, in money and lives. I hope, though, that the electoral consequences are even more devastating for the Democrats than they were for Bush and the Republicans. They certainly should be.
Thoughts on the policy stupidity of it. As noted, truckers already have plenty of incentives to get their trucks as fuel-efficient as possible. This also applies to CAFE (which in turn is equally stupid to the new light-bulb rules).
[Update a while later]
The single-entry bookkeeping of the Left. This is particularly the case with carbon mitigation, which the warm mongers always ignore, or fantasize that it will be less than the cost of changes in the climate.
…are on the order of a hundred billion per year, a lot of it from Medicare/Medicaid.
One of the stupider arguments (among many) made by proponents of those programs it that they “have low overhead costs,” relative to private insurers. Well, it’s easy to have low overhead costs if you pay no attention to whether or not a claim is valid. I consider a hundred billion in overpayments in fact a very high overhead cost.
Even before President Obama was elected in 2008 I wrote that he was showing Chavez-like tendencies. I have never seen any reason to revise that notion; it has only strengthened. Reading the Globe and Mail article I quoted above, I am struck in particular by this seemingly unimportant quote, “the government releases almost no reliable data.” That’s been especially true of Obamacare and the present administration, as I pointed out last Thursday. Far more than ever before in my memory, domestic statistics released by the government have become almost pure propaganda, and few on right or left trust them.
But bluffing can only get you so far. Sooner or later economic reality comes to call.
As noted, collapses can come suddenly. And of course, the silence of the administration on what’s happening in Chavistaland is deafening.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is an important point:
It is easier to destroy than to build. Much easier. That’s true whether destruction is your goal or not. And if you’re blinded by the need to stick to your ideology and declare it a success no matter what the truth is, you may not even know what’s going on until Humpty Dumpty finally takes that tumble.
That’s what entropy is all about. There are millions of forms of crap, but just a comparative few of worthwhile things. Collectivism is a highly entropic system.
Colleges and universities are nonprofits. When extra money comes in — as, until recently, has been the pattern — they can’t pay out excess profits to shareholders. Instead, the money goes to their effective owners, the administrators who hold the reins. As the Goldwater study notes, they get their “dividends” in the form of higher pay and benefits, and “more fellow administrators who can reduce their own workload or expand their empires.”
But with higher education now facing leaner years, and with students and parents unable to keep up with increasing tuition, what should be done? In short, colleges will have to rein in costs.
When asked what single step would do the most good, I’ve often responded semi-jokingly that U.S. News and World Report should adjust its college-ranking formula to reward schools with low costs and lean administrator-to-student ratios. But that’s not really a joke. Given schools’ exquisite sensitivity to the U.S. News rankings, that step would probably have more impact than most imaginable government regulations.
on the Congressional-induced mess at the space agency.