Monthly Archives: January 2020

Carbon-Free Energy

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To the (very limited) extent such a thing would be useful.  Robert Dyson, in his Letter to the Editor of The Wall Street Journal is on the right track:

It’s worth pointing out that the 7,100 acre (11 square mile) Gemini Solar Project is rated at 690 megawatts (when the sun shines, of course) whereas only a few miles away sits the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, occupying only 12 acres and producing 3.3 times as much electricity, but on a 24/7 basis. That nuclear plant currently produces almost a quarter of all the carbon-free power generated in California, yet it will be closed in five years, largely due to the expense of fighting the same “greens” who oppose Gemini. The main argument against Diablo Canyon seems to be earthquake risk. However, the Fukushima Daichi nuclear disaster in 2011 included a magnitude 9-plus earthquake that didn’t cause any radiation leaks. The leaks resulted from a 40-foot-high tsunami, for which there was no planned defense. Despite the resulting meltdown, only one death was attributed to radiation and now, only nine years later, the surrounding land is fast approaching full utilization again.
If carbon-free power generation is important, logic would point to the necessity of nuclear power, not 11-square-mile solar installations.

There’s also our own Three Mile Island incident, in a different extremity, as an indication of the safety of nuclear power generators.

Plus, we have that Harry M Reid Memorial Nuclear Waste Repository nearly ready to go.

Universal Basic Income

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It’s creeping ever more deeply into the Progressive-Democratic Party’s psyche and ideology. It’s an idea that was first dreamed up in the ’70s, and it remains an idea that can only fail were it to be implemented.

Giving everyone a basic income won’t improve anyone’s income; it’ll only incentivize employers to pay a wage diminished by the amount of the guaranteed government payment.  But the failure runs much deeper than that.

Such a scheme is inflationary: the outcome can only be a spike in inflation followed by price stabilization at a higher price level.

Consider an economy in which a producer has two widgets to sell, and two consumers each have a dollar. The producer can sell his widgets for a dollar each.

Now give the two consumers their basic income of $1,000 (let’s say).  The producer still has two widgets, now the consumers each have $1,001 dollars, and the producer can sell his widgets for $1,001 each.  That’s price inflation to a new level—but the consumers’ buying power remains unchanged*: they each still have only enough money to buy one widget, and no more.

Nor is there any incentive—or buying power capacity—for the producer to make more widgets to sell. The producer is getting those same dollars, devalued by the same inflation, that his consumers are getting (from his sales) and so he’s getting no added value to induce him to produce more.  Furthermore, he still can buy the same amount of widget production inputs, and no more; he cannot produce more without incurring greater cost.

 

*Actually, buying power decreases on net for producer and consumer alike, not from the weaker dollar, but from fewer of them in hands of both.  The money for that guaranteed income can only come from one or more of three (sort of) sources. The money must come from the government’s printing press—but that’s the same as the guaranteed income; the dollars just follow a more convoluted path into economy than direct disbursement.  Or the money must come from taxes, which takes money away from consumers and producers directly and leaves them with fewer dollars with which to buy goods and services or to buy inputs to production. Or the money must come from borrowing—which is future taxes or future money printing.

It’s hard to believe that all of those politicians slept through their high school economics, whether they’re today’s crop, like Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate and minor town mayor Pete Buttigieg, newly graduated from high school, or Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidates and Senators Bernie Sanders (I, VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D, MA), who were in high school the first time this idea was floated those years ago.

Contradictions?

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Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D, MN) condemns our sanctions against Iran—sanctions against that nation’s government, various members of that government, and against that government’s oil sales and other business’ international activities.

calling them “crippling” and asserting they would “starve the Iranian people.”

Of course, the crippling nature of the sanctions is the point of them: to convince the men of the Iranian government to change their ways, to in President Donald Trump’s words, stop trying to kill Americans, stop trying to kill our friends and allies, and to stop trying to get nuclear weapons. If sanctions were not crippling, they’d have no effect. Omar knows this.

And, no, the sanctions won’t starve the Iranian people. Iran produces most of its own food, and food trade is not sanctioned. Omar knows this.

And this:

First he canceled our best shot at avoiding armed conflict—the Iran nuclear deal.

The Iran nuclear deal, on the contrary, transferred $150 billion in lifted sanctions and unfrozen assets to the Iranian government, and it transferred billions of dollars—$400 million of it in cold cash in the dead of night—to the Iranian government—money which went directly to funding Iran’s terrorism-by-proxy efforts throughout the Middle East.  The Iran nuclear deal, further to the point, had no hope of avoiding armed conflict—it actually guaranteed it. This “deal” codified Iran’s “right” to have nuclear weapons after a very few years’ delay, and Iran, true to its word, would have used them to destroy Israel. Omar knows this.

Omar also actively supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which designed to destroy the Israeli economy and to starve that nation into submission. Which submission would bring about Israel’s extinction at the hands of enemies sworn to effect that destruction: Hamas and Hesbollah, Iranian terrorist satraps, and Iran itself, which wants to wipe Israel from the map—a major aspect of Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons.  Omar knows this.

Omar also claimed

Since he [Trump] got into office, the president of the United States has been goading Iran into war….

Because objecting to Iran’s terrorist activities throughout the Middle East and in western Europe is goading Iran.

Because objecting to Iran’s attacks on oil tankers in the Arabian Gulf is goading Iran. Because objecting to Iran’s shoot-down of a drone in international airspace is goading.

Because objecting to Iran’s seizure of a US Navy small craft that, with engine failure had drifted a small way into Iranian water, and humiliating the sailors on board is goading Iran.

Because objecting to Iran having its Popular Mobilization Forces militia in Iraq assault and vandalize our embassy in Baghdad is goading.

Omar knows better.

And this:

Sanctions are economic warfare[.]

Of course they are. Would she prefer a shooting war?

No, not contradictive at all.  This is the face of the Progressive-Democratic Party.

Private Charity

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Readers of this blog know that I’ve long championed private charity as better suited to working our social ills than Government welfare—better economically, better for individual liberty, better for personal responsibility/morality.

Karl Zinsmeister, Editor in Chief of Philanthropy Magazine, offered some ways in which this is shown empirically to be true in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, which was adapted from his piece in the magazine’s winter 2020 issue.  One statistic that jumped out at me is this one:

77 million citizens volunteer time and labor [annually]

At Progressive-Democrats’ minimum wage, that works out to just under $1.2 billion per year that’s donated freely and on individual initiative. At current minimum wages, that still comes to nearly $560 million donated freely—at greater personal cost, too, to hear those pushing the higher minimum wage insist no one can live on such a puny wage.

Those numbers understate the donated time and labor contributed.  Many of those tasks done voluntarily are skilled tasks, and so are worth more in the doing.  Many of those volunteering time and labor are skilled individuals drawing high pay, and so their donated labor is worth far more.

But this is what progressive editorialists and political candidates openly call[ing] for deep cuts in the charitable deduction, an end to tax protections for churches and other charities, the taxing down of personal fortunes, and new regimes in which government becomes the sole ministrant of societal needs want to do away with.

Because these Know Betters are the font of what should be the target of largesse, who should pay for that largesse and how much, and how that largesse should be delivered—not the folks whose money, time, and labor would be confiscated.

A Shootdown

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Iran shot down a Ukrainian civilian airliner as it departed a Tehran airport, with the loss of all aboard.  The shootdown occurred shortly (a few hours) after Iran had launched some missiles at Iraqi facilities on which were based a number of American soldiers.

Stipulate the shootdown was accidental.

It also was an example of monumental incompetence: ill- to nonexistent discipline on the part of the antiaircraft missile crew and breathtaking lack of situation awareness by every single individual in the crew’s chain of command from the operational commander all the way to the top in the Iranian military establishment.

Consider.

Iran, expecting a kinetic response (to coin a phrase) to the missile launches it’s about to execute, put its air defense units on alert. That would include the units defending that Tehran airport: Iran would cavalierly attack civilian airports, so of course everyone else would.

One of those alerted units detected an aircraft climbing and flying away from the airport-as-target, assumed it was hostile, and fired on it.  Never mind that no ordnance had been expended against that target, no damage had been inflicted on that target.  That’s the ill-discipline.

Meanwhile, not one unit, not one sensor, in the entire Iranian military establishment had detected any inbound hostile aircraft in any direction.  Our, and our allied nations’, aircraft are capable of remarkable stealth, but they’re not invisible, not proof against detection.  From that total lack of detection of a single inbound hostile aircraft, there was no reason to believe that the Ukrainian airliner might, by any stretch of imagination, be hostile.  Yet no one in the firing unit’s chain of command, not a single officer at any level of the command hierarchy from the junior officer in charge of the firing unit on up, thought about that.  The loss of control over the unit was the command hierarchy’s own lack of discipline.  The lack of understanding of the situation and of the likelihood of the aircraft’s hostility is that utter absence of situation awareness.

That’s incompetence.

Further to this:

He [Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s Aerospace Force] said missile-system operators were told to fire at U.S. or other enemy warplanes without seeking permission from senior commanders.

The missile system operator in this case was a junior officer at the missile site that fired on the airliner. This degree of decentralization (which by itself is normal in wartime, such as the war Iran is prosecuting against the US) puts a premium on the juniors being able to think for themselves and on their having SA. The decentralization is not indicative of loss of control or ill-discipline. The lack of information being pushed down to junior levels to facilitate their SA and the lack of training in the use of coordination facilities is illustrative of ill-discipline.

Further to that SA–both the junior officer’s and that of the officers in his chain of command–are things like the airliner’s IFF/SIF signals, electronic signals that identify the aircraft to air tracking systems including anti-aircraft missile sites, and coordination with civil air traffic control, another of those air tracking systems–neither of which seems to have been used by the Iranians or to have been effected by the Iranians.

That obvious lack illustrates the incompetence.

The US Army’s anti-aircraft missile site operators have some aphorisms, things like “if it flies, it dies,” and “shoot ’em all down, and let God sort ’em out.” For us it’s black humor; for Iran, it’s just black.