Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Incoherent

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Julian Sanchez is as confused about the rationale for the current health-care deform as I am:

So we’re eliminating the rationale for the role private insurance companies play in our system, but insisting that it continue to revolve around them and, even better, handing them an enormous subsidy. What we’ve eliminated is the counterweight designed to check costs, because that part, according to a logic I completely fail to fathom, is especially socialist.

What’s remarkable about this is how naked and brazen it is. That is, I can’t come up with any remotely coherent pretext for thinking this particular policy combination makes sense on any set of background assumptions or values. (Which isn’t to say the same system with the public option was much more coherent.) Contemplate how extraordinary that is: There’s almost always at least some fig leaf of an ideological principle or an economic argument strung up in front of even the most naked interest group grab. But nobody seems to be even pretending this compromise amounts to anything but an open bribe to the very insurers whose existence it renders unjustifiable.

Also, if I hear one more economically ignorant moron tell me that we “need a public option to provide competition for insurance companies,” superheated steam will come out my ears. This is a phrase so absurd that I don’t know why its utterers don’t melt down in the sheer incandescent idiocy of it. If there isn’t competition in the insurance business, it is because (as is always the case in which there is no competition) there is some government policy that prevents it. Fix that. Don’t set up a health-care DMV to “compete” at taxpayer expense.

[Mid-afternoon update]

One of the deranged but prevailing myths among Democrats is that they lost the Congress in 1994 because they didn’t pass HillaryCare, when in reality, their loss was due to a combination of their attempt to do so, plus the “assault” weapons ban, and other misbegotten legislation. But because they continue to indulge themselves in this bizarre fantasy, they continue to equally imagine that their key to political success is ramming this monstrosity through. Sean Trende makes a devastating case against that lunacy as well, and explains why it would actually be political suicide for them. Which almost, but not quite, makes me want to see it pass.

[Bumped]

Political Commentary, Weird

Running Out Of Popcorn

6 Comments

I didn’t pop enough for Hopenchangen:

Chávez said that “the Kyoto Protocol cannot be declared dead or extinguished, which is what the US pretends to do. Which is why (President) Evo (Morales of Bolivia) tells a great truth: If Obama, Nobel War Prize, said here, by the way, it smells of sulfur here. It smells of sulfur. It keeps smelling of sulfur in this world. The Nobel War Prize has just said here that he came to act. Well, then show it, sir, don’t leave by the back door, eh? Do everything you need to do for the US to adhere to the Kyoto Protocol, and let’s respect Kyoto, and empower Kyoto, and respond to the world in a transparent fashion.”

Well, now I’m confused, because when he was in New York, Hugo said that it was Bush who smelled like sulfur. So who is the Devil? Bush, or The One? I know where I’d put my money, but I think that maybe Hugo should see an otolaryngologist about that sulfur deposit in his nostrils.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

Negative Cloud Feedback

3 Comments

Roy Spencer was allowed to give an interesting presentation at the AGU meeting in San Franscisco. I liked this comment:

I can’t help feeling that you might as well have stood before a flock of Archbishops, who were discussing the 7 days of creation, stating that there is evidence that the earth is actually several billion years old – and giving evidence to support your idea. The religious elite smile and nod, and say encouraging words.. “interesting way of seeing things, young man…” before moving on to discuss whether The Almighty drank coffee or iced tea during work breaks.

But this is an interesting point as well:

There seems to be great reluctance to consider the possibility that these computerized prophets of doom, which have required so many scientists and so much money and so many years to develop, could be wrong. I come along with an extremely simple climate model that explains the behavior of the satellite data in details that are beyond even what has been done with the complex climate models…and then the more complex models are STILL believed because…well…they’re more complex.

Besides, since my simple model would predict very little manmade global warming, it must be wrong. After all, we know that manmade global warming is a huge problem. All of the experts agree on that. Just ask Al Gore and the mainstream news media.

Let us stipulate that a valid model of climate prediction is going to be complex, or at least, the more complexity, the more likely it is that it is taking the necessary factors into account. That does not, in itself, render complexity a virtue, and it’s quite possible that a simple model will do a better job than a more complex, but flawed one. This sort of reminds me of Shuttle huggers who will say, with pride, that it is the most complex machine ever built, as though that were a feature and not a bug.

Political Commentary, Space

Is Ares I Dead?

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If this report is correct, it is.

I’ve thought for a long time that it was a dead rocket walking. It simply cost too much, and made too little sense (though, of course, that’s never stopped NASA before). But we won’t know for sure until next year, and in the meantime, NASA will continue to waste money on things like this, because to stop work would be a tip off of the new policy. And of course, the article isn’t very specific about what the new heavy lifter will look like. It’s a shame that Augustine didn’t put a stake through the heart of heavy lift, but at least we got rid of the Corn Dog.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Green Jobs Illusion

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Thoughts from Ron Bailey, from Kyopenhagen.

This is a good example of the difference between creating jobs, and creating wealth:

As we rode the metro to the conference, Ratledge and I had a pleasant conversation about the great successes of Aspen, Colorado, in producing green jobs. With the financial crisis, construction jobs in Aspen disappeared. But thanks to stimulus money and tax breaks earmarked for weatherization, unemployed construction workers are now insulating houses. Tax breaks have similarly encouraged a solar power installation boom. When I asked him if solar was price competitive with conventional power without government guaranteed low interest loans and tax breaks, Ratledge admitted that it wasn’t. But he predicted that the price of Chinese solar panels was falling so fast that it would soon outcompete conventional power. I chided him that it sounded like the federal stimulus was actually creating green jobs in China. Ratledge did note one rapidly growing green sector in the U.S.: energy auditing. Of course, people and businesses wouldn’t need to hire energy auditors if the price of energy remained low or if they didn’t have to comply with new energy efficiency regulations.

The tax code creates a vast industry of auditors and accountants. But they make the nation poorer, not wealthier.

“Green Jobs” are the last refuge of the economic ignoramus.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Long March — from California to Copenhagen.

If one is a teacher, a public nurse, or a state bureaucrat, and stays close to home, life is not too bad. Two tenured teachers at midlife can easily make together $160,000 with summers off — far more than the owner of a brake shop or a farmer of 40 acres of trees — and without worry over burdensome regulations or the daily need to drive down the 99 for a living, or to fly out of LAX for business, or to depend on the local CSU to provide literate, skilled employees. Life is therefore pretty good, at least so far.

But if you are a private company, dealing with high taxes, all sorts of regulations, a crumbling infrastructure (take a 300-mile drive from Gilroy south on 101; spend a day at LAX, or try finding a convenient east-west route out of California in the winter), and poorly educated employees, the experiment in egalitarianism has failed.

Answer? The best job in California is a state one; the worst a private-sector one. Result? 3,500 flee per week with capital, education, and know-how; 2,500 arrive with far less capital and training.

…This California model is important because Obama is adopting it as a blueprint on a national scale. If he wins (and don’t count him out), life really would be more patterned on an equality of result. New payroll, income, state, local, and health care surcharge taxes would hit those over $200K with about a 70% take of one’s income. The public sector employees double in number, unionize, and demand ever more from “them.” Cap-and-trade charges raise monthly utility bills 20%. Things like SUVs, Winnebagos, and private jet travel are taxed out of reach — except for a guardian class that uses public moneys for a rarefied lifestyle of governance and enforcement (sort of like the jets parked on the tarmac at Copenhagen or Barack’s night out on the Big Apple).

We would all want a job at the DMV but would never want to go there for any service — a model for health care to come. In short, the poor get a little better off, the better-off a lot worse, and America becomes a sort of collective lower middle class at about a 1950s lifestyle, praised and congratulated for ending “poverty.”

And ending wealth as well.

Political Commentary

Smart Diplomacy

9 Comments

Isn’t it great that we no longer have an arrogant cowboy in the White House?

UK diplomatic sources confirmed there had been a major setback after China took huge offence at remarks by President Obama over the need to independently monitor every country carbon emissions.

In his speech President Obama said: “Without any accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page” – remarks the Chinese interpreted as an attempt to humiliate them, prompting Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to return to his hotel.

President Obama will now hold a second round of talks with Mr Wen in an attempt to patch up the disagreement.

Maybe he can give him some DVDs.

[Via Iain Murray]

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Showing Their True Colors

The watermelons of Kyopenhagen:

The big name in the anti-capitalism club was, of course, Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan national-socialist strongman. In a typical stem-winder, he belched: “Capitalism is a destructive model that is eradicating life, that threatens to put a definitive end to the human species.”

I don’t know how to say “chutzpah” in Spanish, but you’ve got to hand it to the leader of the world’s No. 5 supplier of oil for bemoaning the system that keeps his regime afloat by buying his product.

Now, I know that nice, moderate progressive types are rolling their eyes at my cynical effort to associate their noble activism with support for socialism and thugs. Fair enough. Let us concede that many, perhaps even most, proponents of draconian restrictions on carbon emissions have no sympathy for socialist dictators and do not want to chuck capitalism in the dustbin of history. But surely it should trouble these responsible greens that they’re in bed with a Star Wars cantina of villains and monsters.

Also, if environmentalists want to avoid the “watermelon” charge (“green on the outside, red on the inside”), maybe the delegates and activists in the audience shouldn’t have given Chávez such a loud and boisterous round of applause? Perhaps the folks who gave him a standing ovation didn’t help either?

They couldn’t help themselves. It’s what they are.

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

The Socialists’ Victory

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…in Kyopenhagen:

Let’s ignore McKibben’s barmy notion that man has it in his power to control global climate by tinkering with CO2 output, and concentrate on that part of his tearful outburst that does make sense. Copenhagen never really had anything to do with “Climate Change”. Rather it was a trough-fest at which all the world’s greediest pigs gathered to gobble up as much of your money and my money as they possibly could, under the righteous-sounding pretence that they were saving the planet.

This nauseating piggery took two forms. First were the Third World kleptocracies – led by the likes of Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe – using “Global Warming” as an excuse to extort guilt-money from the Western nations.

Second, and much more dangerous, were the First World Corporatists who stand to make trillions of dollars using the Enron economics of carbon trading. Never mind all the talk of President Obama’s trifling $100 billion pledge. This is very small beer compared with the truly eye-watering sums that will be ransacked from our economies and our wallets over the next decades in the name of “carbon emissions reduction.”

Richard North has spotted this, even if virtually nobody else has. The key point, he notes, is the Copenhagen negotiators’ little-publicised decision to save the Kyoto Protocol. This matters because it was at Kyoto that the mechanisms for establishing a global carbon market were established. Carbon trading could not possibly exist without some form of agreement between all the world’s governments on emissions: the market would simply collapse. By keeping Kyoto alive, the sinister troughers of global corporatism have also kept their cash cow alive.

Fortunately, cap’n’tax remains DOA in the Senate.