Monthly Archives: June 2012

How “Green” Energy is Working out for Germany

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We’re getting an empirical lesson in the effectiveness of an economy whose energy is intended to come entirely from “green” sources.  The Obama administration would do well to observe closely the in-progress German demonstration.

Germany’s electricity prices have risen 10% in the last few years, since the beginning of the German push to rely exclusively on these sources and to walk away from coal, which Germany has in abundance.  That might not seem like much of an increase, but it hurts.

The Federation of German Consumer Organizations estimates that roughly 10% of German households are having trouble paying for their energy.  Some have been pushed over the threshold and can no longer pay—and their electricity is being turned off altogether: nearly 200,000 recipients of Hartz IV, a German benefits program for long-term unemployed, had their power cut off in 2011 because of unpaid bills.  There’s more: the Economy Ministry has estimated that prices will increase an additional 3-5 euro cents per kilowatt hour in the next year, just to finance renewable energy subsidies and grid expansion.  Those increases amount to an additional €105-€175 ($130-$220) for a family of three.

There are more cost increases to come.  The Federal Network Agency, a wide-ranging regulatory agency with its fingers in electricity, gas, telecommunications, post and railway markets, will announce this fall that rates will increase by 30%-50% above current levels.  Consumer “contributions” to renewable energy subsidies will rise by more than FGCO’s estimate of 3-5 cents; the FNA says the rise will be closer to 4.7-5.3 euro cents per kilowatt hour—plus VAT, they remind us.  Hartz recipients, and potentially programs like Hartz, will be hard-pressed to meet these increases.

We don’t need these headaches in the US.

A Short History Lesson

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Much ado has been made about the Great Depression and of the Panic of 2008, whose effects we’re still feeling.  Here is a brief history of another economic depression, one that could have had devastating impact, the depression that occurred in the US in 1920-1921.

In the 18 months between January 1920 and August 1921, our unemployment rate jumped to 14% or so from about 2%, as estimated from the times’ inexact records; wholesale prices fell more than 40%; and industrial production fell 23%.  From peak to trough, the total of checking accounts and currency fell by nearly 11%.  Some today might have considered the survival of the banking system as a whole to be in the wind.  The farm economy also was hard hit, and there were waves of business failures.  What interventions did the government effect to rescue the nation from this devastation?  The most effective intervention a government can execute with a free economy: it sat on its collective hands and let the economy right itself.

The Harding administration very deliberately ran a budgetary surplus. The Fed, with less than a decade’s worth of bad habits to influence it, raised interest rates, increasing the cost of money (and increasing the value of savings).   In response, the economy in 1922, the first full year of recovery, increased industrial production more than 27%, and by 1923, unemployment was back down to 3%.

What happened?  Market forces, unfettered by Know Betters in the government, happened.  The US and our goods and services were dirt cheap, and bargain-hunting investors from overseas jumped on the opportunity with both feet.  No central banker had to instruct investors in what to do with bargains.  Money flowed into the US, and this inflow delivered a powerful monetary stimulus.

Moreover, that 40% drop in prices meant that Americans’ dollars were able to buy more.  This increase in the value of our money—wonks call it the “real balances effect”—enabled Americans in our aggregate to begin again to buy goods and services.  Which stimulated demand for new production, which stimulated job creation.

And those banks that a Hank Paulson might have panicked over?  The biggest casualty was the little First National Bank of Cleburne, Texas, with its deposits of $2.8 million. That certainly hurt those Cleburne depositors, but the damage was that limited.  No bank was “too big to fail” in those days, and no big bank did.

That depression lasted all of 18 months, and over its course—one more little tidbit—the nation’s debt was reduced by nearly 6%, to a shade under $23 billion.  The Great Depression lasted 10-17 years (depending on who you read) and added billions to our debt—even before WWII, and the Panic of 2008 is still being felt four today, years later, and our national debt still is exploding by trillions of dollars per year.

Yet the Obama administration has cynically ignored the lessons the Harding administration could teach about not intervening in a free economy.  Rather, Obama and his “advisors” have chosen to listen to a fellow Progressive, Franklin Roosevelt, and so to ignore the manifest failures of government intervention into that more publicized depression.  Obama has chosen to double down on those failures with his own interventionist policies, which are exacerbating the Panic of 2008, and the ongoing recession still ensuing (never mind the “official” end of the recession in 2009—ask the millions of Americans who are out of work, and the millions more who have given up and abandoned the labor force altogether, how their recovery is going).

Worse (if that’s possible), the supposedly independent Federal Reserve System has been entirely complicit in these interventionist policies, what with its freely running dollar printing press, its QE2 (preceded by a QE1—why do these sound like failed luxury cruise liners?), its Twist, its artificially depressed interest rates (so much for the widows and orphans who need their savings for living), and so on.

Give Him a Speedy Trial and a Fast Impeachment

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Convicted serial bomber, drug trafficker, and perjuror, Brett Kimberlin, is continuing his assault on any and all who are rude enough to write about him in any way less than completely fawning of his wonderfulness.  In one such assault, done under the guise of his lawfare war, he had the rude blogger Aaron Walker arrested while in court responding to a prior Peace Order Kimberlin had managed to obtain.

But of interest here is not so much Kimberlin’s behavior, but the behavior of Maryland Judge C.J. Vaughey in that matter.  The Peace Order Kimberlin had obtained, and under which Walker was arrested in Vaughey’s court, centered on this:

Mr. Walker has tweeted on Twitter about me in alarming and annoying ways over hundreds of times in the past week and urged others to attack me.  He has generated hundreds of blog posts directly and indirectly based on false allegations that I framed him for an assault.

Mr. Walker has had many people threaten me directly with death, and told me to stop talking to the police, and not show up in court or I would die.

These are carefully, cynically, vague and unsubstantiated claims, yet Vaughey took them at face value, not even inquiring into evidence to support the claims.  Then we get this from Walker’s hearing before Vaughey [emphasis mine]:

VAUGHEY: –You’ve decided to battle, and he comes back.  And see, you’re—you—you’re the kind of guy, you don’t want to get into this to settle this, mano y mano.  You want to get all these friends who got nothing else to do with their time, in this judge’s opinion, because—my God, I’m a little bit older than you are, and I haven’t got enough time in the day to do all the things I want to do.  And I thought by retirement, I would have less to do.  I got more!  Because everybody knows I’m free!  So they all come to me.  But you, you are starting a—a conflagration, for lack of a better word, and you’re just letting the thing go recklessly no matter where it goes.  I mean, you get some—and I’m going to use word I (ph)—freak somewhere up Oklahoma, got nothing better to do with his time, so he does the nastiest things in the world he can do to this poor gentleman.  What right has that guy got to do it?

WALKER: He has no right to do that, Your Honor.

VAUGHEY: Well, he’s—you incited him.

WALKER: But, your honor, I did not incite him within the Brandenburg standard though.

VAUGHEY: Forget Bradenburg [sic].  Let’s go by Vaughey right now, and common sense out in the world.  But you know, where I grew up in Brooklyn, when that stuff was pulled, it was settled real quickly.

WALKER: I’m not sure what that means, your honor.

VAUGHEY: –Very quickly. And I’m not going to talk about those ways, but boy, it ended fast.  I even can tell you, when I grew up in my community, you wanted to date an Italian girl, you had to get the Italian boy’s permission.  But that was the old neighborhoods back in the city.  And it was really fair.  When someone did something up there to you, your sister, your girlfriend, you got some friends to take them for a ride in the back of the truck.

WALKER: Well, Your Honor, what–

VAUGHEY: –That ended it.  You guys have got this new mechanical stuff out here, the electronic stuff, that you can just ruin somebody without doing anything. But you started it.

As Popehat points out, the Brandenburg standard is from a Supreme Court ruling that held that speech may be banned on the theory that it is incitement only when it is intended to create, and is likely to create, a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action.

What do we have in this…judge’s…actions, then?

First we have his statement that the law is what he says it is, not what is actually written by our legislators, not what has been ruled by his superiors, the Supreme Court.

We also have this judge’s implicit recommendation that if someone offends Walker, then Walker should simply take that offender for a ride in a truck and “settle” the matter.  And by extension, he’s given that ex-con Kimberlin permission to do exactly that.

And he’s accused the victim of Kimberlin’s assault of having started the ex-con’s assault.

Vaughey is unfit to be a judge; he should be removed from the bench he’s sullying as soon as possible.

 

h/t to Grim’s Hall.

Duplicity in Government

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No, I’m not talking about leaking the nation’s secrets for personal political gain, or personally approving, individual by individual, the execution of…individuals…by remote control.  I’m talking about duplicity aimed at maintaining incumbents’ positions in government, and so their personal power.

Here is an example of incumbents increasing the dependency of Americans on government. Here’s an example of falsifying “green” jobs data (as part of a larger investigation into the Labor Department’s “trouble” producing reliable labor data generally.  Select Part 2 from the tabs below the video and either listen to the whole thing, or skip ahead to 49:45 to hear the money part of the duplicity.

Here are a couple of examples that the government allows its unions to perpertrate on people:

  • Sally Coomer: Denied the Right to Choose by SEIU Leaders
  • Claire Waites: Denied the Right to Choose by Teachers Union Leaders

Some Thoughts on Security Leaks

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President Obama finds it offensive that anyone would accuse him of leaking classified information for personal political gain.

The notion that my White House would purposely release national security information is offensive[.]

Of course it is.  And President Nixon had some remarks along these lines, too.

Yet here is a partial list of the White House’s leaks:

  • A terrorist kill list, identifying persons whom Obama personally approves for remote control execution (and so leaves no terrorist to be inconveniently captured and questioned
  • reports of US spies infiltrating Al Qaeda in Yemen
  • stories about Osama bin Laden’s DNA and how the US got it
  • US involvement in the Stuxnet (and Flame) computer virus development and employment against Iranian nuclear facilities, including identification of the government lab that designed it
  • revealed a British asset who penetrated al Qaeda and stopped another bombing of a US-bound airliner

These leaks, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) correctly says, put “American lives in jeopardy,” put “our nation’s security in jeopardy.”  And every one of those leaks push an Obama agenda, or purport to paint Obama in a favorable light.

Oh, and the White House’s leaks about a supposed Israeli plan to use Azerbaijani bases to launch an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities—which plan, if it existed, became impossible for an Obama-disliked Israel to execute.

Yet Obama refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leaks; although Attorney General Eric Holder has named two DoJ attorneys to investigate.  While it’s true that the leaking that’s coming out of the White House is a present and clear danger and a special prosecutor investigation would take time—possibly years—such an appointment at least would move toward defusing the personal gain question.

Moreover, his CIA and his Department of Justice have announced they will not cooperate with Congressional investigations into the leaks.

I have to ask: why is Obama so bent on hindering investigations into these leaks?

Obama’s offended?  He’s not as offended as are honest Americans over them.