Rumsfeld called “an idea of enormous consequence” the fact that “anyone who finds a way to make use of such riches by applying their labor or their technology or their risk-taking are required to pay writ royalties of unknown amounts, potentially billions, possibly even tens of billions over an extended period, an ill-defined period of time, to the new International Seabed Authority for distribution to less developed countries.”
Saying that this principle has “no clear limits,” he mused that it could set a precedent for space exploration, too.
He shouldn’t just “muse.” It could be a disastrous precedent, completely undercutting the arguments we make against the Moon Treaty.
Once again government has created the conditions for wholesale failure, and failure is upon us.
From 1976 to 2010, the prices of all commodities rose 280 percent. The price of homes rose 400 percent. Private education? A whopping 1,000 percent.
In the end, this bubble will be worse than the last. Even when homeowners got hopelessly behind on their mortgages, two options helped. First, they could declare bankruptcy and free themselves of their crippling debt; second, they could sell their houses to pay down most of their loans.
Students don’t have either of these options. It’s illegal to absolve student loan debt through bankruptcy, and you can’t sell back an education.
I hope that it has a disproportionate effect on the academic left. In a sane world, the first thing to go would be diversity programs, with “studies” departments hard on their heels.
We are less than two grand from the goal for the space-safety Kickstarter project. I have an offer from a potential donor to match the next thousand that comes in, which means that the rest of you only have to contribute a thousand on your own over the next two and a half days to get it home. Please, have at it.
Even the best tax regimes are cannibalistic: Every tax is an incentive for the taxpayer to relocate to a more friendly jurisdiction. But tax rates are not the only incentive: Google is not going to set up shop in Somalia. Healthy governments create conditions that make it worth paying the taxes — which is to say, governments are a lot like participants in any other competitive market (with some obvious and important exceptions). The benefits of being in Detroit used to be worth the costs, but in recent decades millions of people and thousands of enterprises large and small have decided that is no longer the case. It is not as though one cannot profitably manufacture automobiles in the United States — Toyota does — you just can’t do it very well in Detroit. No one with eyes in his head could honestly think that the services provided by the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan are worth the costs.
The third lesson is moral. Detroit’s institutions have long been marked by corruption, venality, and self-serving. Healthy societies have high levels of trust. Who trusts Detroit? This is not angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin stuff. People do not invest in firms, industries, cities, or countries they do not trust. Corruption makes people poor.
And here are some recent graphic images of the results, from (Michigan ex-pat) Amy Alkon. As went Detroit, so will go the country, if the Democrats get their way on a national level, as they did in Detroit.
By saying that its investigation, carried out by unknown parties, confirmed Dr. Gleick’s account, the institute was implicitly backing the scientist’s claim that he was not responsible for cobbling together a document labeled a fake by Heartland, which he disseminated along with other genuine ones.
The bogus document spoke of effective ways for “dissuading science teachers from teaching science” and of “cultivating” respected writers on climate issues. Dr. Gleick said he had received it “in the mail.”
The Heartland Institute, which has a Web site related to the document release that Web site it calls “Fakegate,” responded scornfully to Dr. Gleick’s reinstatement. “As near as we can tell, this was not an investigation. It was a whitewash,” the institute’s president, Joseph Bast, said in a statement.
Reactions to the Gleick affair have varied widely. Some environmentalists have praised his actions, saying that the risks posed by climate change are so great that using misrepresentation to uncover details about a group like Heartland is justified. But many others in the environmental camp, including his own board, said that such conduct was unworthy of a scientist, particularly one of Dr. Gleick’s stature.
Not enough of them. Remember this the next time the Pacific Institute says anything about…anything.