No, despite the illogic of the Democrats, it’s not the Republicans’ fault. There is no responsibility on their part to attempt to implement an atrocious law that they rightly opposed, or to stop trying to repeal it when it’s clearly going to be so damaging to the nation’s economy and our personal health and freedom.
Category Archives: Economics
Skymall
Has the company fallen in with the wrong crowd?
I’ve always thought that Skymall’s target customers had to be people with too much money. It’s worth noting, though, that SpaceDev went public on an RTO.
[Update a while later]
Sorry, forgot the link. It’s fixed now.
America’s Transportation Infrastructure
No, Mr. President. It was best built by America’s entrepreneurs.
This is one of many reasons why high-speed rail will be a fiscal disaster.
Remembering Ploesti
Thoughts on energy and war from Bob Zubrin:
In World War II, we controlled the oil. In this war, the enemy does. This is an unacceptable situation, because it places our fate in the hands of people who want to kill us. In World War II, we had no compunction about destroying the Nazi fuel-making facilities at Ploesti and Leuna, or about systematically sinking the Japanese tanker fleet, because we didn’t need their oil. As we have seen, those attacks were incredibly effective in breaking the enemy’s power. On May 12, 1944, the day of the Leuna raid, the Third Reich ruled an empire comprising nearly all of continental Europe, with a collective population and industrial potential exceeding that of the United States. A year later, it did not exist. Once Japan’s tanker fleet was sunk, the collapse of its empire was almost as fast. Today we are confronted by an enemy without a shadow of the armaments of the Axis; all the Islamist countries have is oil. Were we to destroy that power, they would be left with nothing at all. But we can’t hit them where it would truly hurt, because our economy needs their oil to survive.
And we have people in power who think that climate change is a bigger risk than totalitarianism. Because, you know, in many ways, they don’t mind totalitarianism that much, as long as it’s their own.
Republicans And Climate Change
I was singularly unimpressed with this advice to Republicans, from RINOs, in the New York Times. So was Jonathan Adler.
Obama To America
“Hey, I managed to get re-elected, so I’m going to ram through my agenda, and eff you.”
Climate Change
It’s about the policies, not the science:
What isn’t solid, however, are all of the “fiddly bits.” How fast is warming happening? Will it speed up, and by how much? What the economic and environmental impacts be? What other factors besides anthropogenic ones might be contributing to the warming?What complex little mechanisms might slow the process down, or speed it up? And so on. It’s inherent in the nature of a system as complex as climate that these questions will be hard to pin down.
Because the uncertainty is about these “fiddly bits,” and not about the fundamentals, the worry is not about what the science says but about what the policy should be. The process by which greens dream up and then implement policies to address the problem of global warming makes the sometimes messy IPCC process look like a finely tuned, well-oiled machine by comparison.
Global greens develop stupid, horrible, expensive, counterproductive climate policy agendas, and then try to use the imprimatur of “science” as a way to panic the world into adopting them. All too often, in other words, they fall prey to the temptation to make what the science says “clearer than truth” in Acheson’s phrase, in order to silence debate on their cockamamie policy fixes. A favorite tactic is to brand any dissent from the agenda as “anti-science.” It is not only a dishonest tactic; it’s a counterproductive one, generating new waves of skepticism with every exaggeration of fact.
Yup. Every time someone calls me “anti-science” because I’m appropriately skeptical of lousy science and worse prescriptions, it simply increases my resistance to their idiotic policy nostrums.
[Update a few minutes later]
Climate scientists must not advocate policies:
I believe advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science. We risk our credibility, our reputation for objectivity, if we are not absolutely neutral. At the very least, it leaves us open to criticism. I find much climate scepticism is driven by a belief that environmental activism has influenced how scientists gather and interpret evidence. So I’ve found my hardline approach successful in taking the politics and therefore – pun intended – the heat out of climate science discussions.
They call me an “honest broker”, asking for “more Dr Edwards and fewer zealous advocates”. Crucially, they say this even though my scientific views are absolutely mainstream.
But it’s not just about improving trust. In this highly politicised arena, climate scientists have a moral obligation to strive for impartiality. We have a platform we must not abuse. For a start, we rarely have the necessary expertise. I absolutely disagree with Gavin that we likely know far more about the issues involved in making policy choices than [our] audience.
As well you should, because you’re right — you don’t.
We Don’t Need Monet
I’d say that when you’ve engaged in conjugal relations with the pooch to the depth that Detroit has, you can’t afford either impressionists or public-employee unions.
Press-Release Science
Some extensive thoughts, from Charlie Martin.
Sorry, but disagreeing with the media is not a “war on science.”
Detroit
Here, where cattle could graze in vast swaths of this depopulated city, democracy ratified a double delusion: Magic would rescue the city (consult the Bible, the bit about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes), or Washington would deem Detroit, as it recently did some banks and two of the three Detroit-based automobile companies, “too big to fail.” But Detroit failed long ago. And not even Washington, whose recklessness is almost limitless, is oblivious to the minefield of moral hazard it would stride into if it rescued this city and, then inevitably, others that are buckling beneath the weight of their cumulative follies. It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. This bedraggled city’s decay poses no theological conundrum of the sort that troubled Darwin, but it does pose worrisome questions about the viability of democracy in jurisdictions where big government and its unionized employees collaborate in pillaging taxpayers. Self-government has failed in what once was America’s fourth-largest city and now is smaller than Charlotte, N.C.
This is why the Founders gave us a republic, not a democracy.