Tag Archives: ethics

Another Fiscal Cliff

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From Fox News:

[A] potential strike by thousands of dock workers from Boston to Houston threatens to shock the economy as early as this weekend.  …it could cost billions, citing estimates that a 10-day port lockout in 2002 cost $1 billion a day—and caused a major backlog in shipments.

[The present] port strike would affect more than the East and Gulf coasts, where all these ports are located.  It could choke supply chains across the country.  Groups ranging from the automobile industry to the National Retail Federation to the US Chamber of Commerce to the Cheese Importers Association of America are warning of dire consequences.

The primary beef?  Management wants to cap the current container fee royalties, rather than letting them continue to rise according to International Longshoremen’s Association schedules.

It’s important to note that those royalty fees are little more than featherbedding on the docks.  As The United States Maritime Alliance, Ltd (USMX), notes,

[C]ontainer royalties were established in 1960 as a way to protect members of the International Longshoremen’s Association, AFL-CIO (ILA) in New York from job losses created by containerization and its introduction of automated cargo.

Because shippers are job welfare programs for the ILA, after all.  Keep those buggy whip workers employed, no matter the costs to Americans.  Never mind that there aren’t any buggy whip workers anymore, anyway.

[O]nly 136 of the 3,281 ILA workers at the Port of New York and New Jersey today were working at the port in 1968….

The Port of New York and New Jersey was the original and only port at which the ILA was active during the transition to container shipping.  The rest of the ports up and down the east and Gulf coasts through Florida began life with containerized cargo.

Moreover, containerization has been beneficial to labor.  ILA workers at ports like Savannah, Charleston, and the rest saw their job opportunities grow specifically because of containerization.

On top of this, the royalty payments don’t all make it into the pockets of the ones being featherbedded.  Ten per cent—which ran to $21 million in 2011—were raked off the top by the workers’ union management, as the union’s vig.

In the end, the union doesn’t care about the economic damage done by the strike they’re threatening, nor do they care that their strike has so little economic purpose.  This isn’t even about protecting a featherbedding perk—USMX is willing to keep paying the “royalty;” they just want an upper bound on a payment that has nothing to do with the work being done.

No, this is about union power and the unions’ decision to use extortionate-type actions to maintain/increase it.  It’s a legal version of the violence they threatened in Wisconsin and Michigan, and of the dishonesty shown by the Wisconsin Teachers’ Union a year ago.

Update: Michelle Malkin provides one:

A deal has been struck that for now averts a strike by 14,500 longshoremen at major ports on the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico, including PortMiami and Port Everglades.

A federal mediator announced Friday that an expired contract for workers in the International Association of Longshoremen would be extended for another 30 days while negotiations continue.

Anthropogenic Climate Change

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…and dishonesty.  More is beginning to leak out, this time from of all places the UN.  That august body’s IPCC has had leaked a draft of its latest “study” on the man-caused disaster in climate, and it isn’t a pretty example of the outcome of climate “scientist” incestuousness.

High points on the leak are from Matt Ridley, in The Wall Street Journal, and they concern a “pollutant” that our present administration is going after, and damn the economy—and damn the

poor people whose lives are being ruined by high food and energy prices caused by the diversion of corn to biofuel and the subsidizing of renewable energy driven by carboncrats[.]

The question at hand:

How much warming will a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide actually produce?

Ridley’s information comes from Nic Lewis.

A semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background, Mr Lewis has made significant contributions to the subject of climate change.

Per Lewis [emphasis added]:

[T]he latest observational estimates of the effect of aerosols (such as sulfurous particles from coal smoke) find that they have much less cooling effect than thought when the last IPCC report was written.  The rate at which the ocean is absorbing greenhouse-gas-induced warming is also now known to be fairly modest.  In other words, the two excuses used to explain away the slow, mild warming we have actually experienced—culminating in a standstill in which global temperatures are no higher than they were 16 years ago—no longer work.

Thus [again, emphasis added],

We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide.  We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models.  Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in “radiative forcing” (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.

The conclusion—taking the best observational estimates of the change in decadal-average global temperature between 1871-80 and 2002-11, and of the corresponding changes in forcing and ocean heat uptake—is this: A doubling of CO2 will lead to a warming of 1.6°-1.7°C (2.9°-3.1°F).

This is much lower than the IPCC’s current best estimate, 3°C (5.4°F).

In the end,

A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm.  It will actually do net good—that much the IPCC scientists have already agreed upon in the last IPCC report.  Rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland’s ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.

There’s more to this climate pseudo-science failure, and it flows from the CO2 interactions via alleged feedback loops [emphasis added]:

A little warming (from whatever cause [including atmospheric CO2]) heats up the sea, which makes the air more humid—and water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas.  The resulting model-simulated changes in clouds generally increase warming further, so the warming is doubled, trebled or more.

[The problem is,] water vapor may not be increasing.   A recent paper from Colorado State University concluded that “we can neither prove nor disprove a robust trend in the global water vapor data.”  [On top of that], as one Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a senior role in combating climate change admitted to me the other day: “We don’t even know the sign” of water vapor’s effect—in other words, whether it speeds up or slows down a warming of the atmosphere.

One reason for the uncertainty of the sign is that atmospheric water vapor means more clouds, and clouds reflect inbound sunlight while trapping outbound heat.  Which has the greater effect—reducing the inbound inputs or holding onto the outbound outputs?  Only a climate pseudo-scientist claims to know at this point in the data collection and analysis.  Especially given the…quality…of their data and of their models.

There’s a whole lot more at the Watts Up With That? site, both on the present topic and on anthropogenic climate change, generally.

Some Government Spending

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Progressives in Congress and the White House are loathe to reduce spending—especially actual reductions, not just the reduced rates of growth that they, along with too many Republicans, masquerade as spending reductions.  This reluctance is part of why they’ve been so indisposed toward passing a budget, which would make their spending excesses even more apparent.

Bret Baier, of Fox News, though, has dug out some numbers illustrating the present excesses.  Just last November, for instance, the Federal government collected $5 billion in total revenue, while spending $11 billion, each day of the month, for a spending excess of $6 billion per day.  The table includes Baier’s numbers and provides some of the biggest spending sources.  (The Totals sums won’t agree  between across and down due to rounding.)

Spender Daily Tab ($billion) Monthly Tab ($billion) Projected Annual Tab ($billion)
Department of Health and Human Services

3

90

1,080
Social Security

2.5

75

900
Department of Defense

1.8

54

648
interest on the national debt

0.85

25.6

307.4
Totals

8.2

244.6

2,935

Notice that the two biggest spenders are Obamacare—HHS—and Social Security: two of the entitlements which the Progressives have already said are not negotiable—no matter the damage to our economy.

Notice further that those $300+ billion in debt interest are utterly withdrawn from our economy; it’s just the vig on our debt.  Those dollars don’t circulate.  Moreover, that vig doesn’t pay down the debt a single fēn (分).  Then, too, when interest rates revert to our historical levels in the neighborhood of 5% from our current roughly 0.25%, those interest payments will explode to the region of $6,148 billion—over $6 trillion.  Per year.

No wonder the Progressives are so reluctant to discuss spending or actual deficit elimination and debt reduction.  That would be hard.

The Future of American Youth?

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In France, we’re seeing the impact on the nation’s youth of their government-managed economy, magnified by the union-driven difficulty (near impossibility, actually) of getting rid of extraneous labor (or even bad workers).  Spiegel Online International offers some insight.

Kafui Affram doesn’t feel at home in either environment, not in the suburb where the 22-year-old still lives in his childhood room in his parents’ little house [or in Paris, his suburb’s parent city].

Still living with his parents.  Just like America’s youth, especially in the Age of Obamacare.

Some 23 percent of the country’s 18- to 24-year-olds live in poverty, according to a study by the National Institute for Youth and Community Education (INJEP).

The poverty rate for America’s youth as recently as 2009 was 20%.  It’s not going to improve any time soon; the unemployment rate for America’s youth was 17.1% in July 2012, at the height of the summer season for employing our youth, and the unemployment rate for their parents has been hovering around 10% for the last four years after factoring in the effect of our shrinking labor participation rate.  Then,

Youth unemployment in France has been high for some time, but it has now climbed to 26%.  For decades, regardless of their political affiliation, lawmakers have been promising to create a better situation for young people.  But exactly the opposite has happened.  Labor laws protect those who already enjoy steady jobs, while the economic crisis and recession have limited the number of new jobs created.

On Socialist President François Hollande and his program for creating of “future jobs,” Affram says,

We’re used to politicians constantly coming up with new ideas.

Yeah, we’ve heard that, too, and from the same sort of source.  With the same degree of confidence that Affram has:

I know I should be optimistic and have goals, but it’s mostly all just bleak.

Now is Not the Time

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…to surrender.  Yet that’s what Peter Berkowitz advocates Conservatives do in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed [emphasis added].

Conservatives should…come to grips with two entrenched realities that pose genuine challenges to liberty, and whose prudent management is critical to the nation’s well-being.

The first entrenched reality is that big government is here to stay.  This is particularly important for libertarians to absorb.  Over the last two hundred years, society and the economy in advanced industrial nations have undergone dramatic transformations. And for three-quarters of a century, the New Deal settlement has been reshaping Americans’ expectations about the nation-state’s reach and role.

…

In these circumstances, conservatives must redouble their efforts to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities.  But to reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities reflects a distinctly unconservative refusal to ground political goals in political realities.

Conservatives can and should focus on restraining spending, reducing regulation, reforming the tax code, and generally reining in our sprawling federal government. But conservatives should retire misleading talk of small government. Instead, they should think and speak in terms of limited government.

Yet the only way to “reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities” is to shrink the government back to a manageable size—to regain the small, limited government we used to have and that is created in the documents of our social compact.  Limited government and small government are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin.  Yes, yes, monarchies can be small governments, too.  But they’re not limited.

Accepting the status quo and declining to seek to “reform sloppy and incompetent government and resist government’s inherent expansionist tendencies and progressivism’s reflexive leveling proclivities” by shrinking—limiting—that over-large and out of control government is most assuredly an unconservative thing to do; it is to accede to the modern Liberal’s goal.

Berkowitz seems not recognize the role reversal that has occurred.  The modern Conservative is the 18th Century Liberal—the champion of limited government that protects and enhances individual liberty, individual responsibility, and the resulting national prosperity.  The modern Liberal is the 18th Century Conservative, a man who favored government control over men’s lives on the theory that both the common man was too stupid to see to his own ends and that Government—the King—Knows Better.  The only difference between the modern Liberal and that 18th Century monarchist is the accepted superficial structure of the Big Government that Knows Better.

Berkowitz’ second entrenched reality,

…this one testing social conservatives, is the sexual revolution, perhaps the greatest social revolution in human history[]

is wholly irrelevant without the individual freedom and responsibility available only with small, limited government.  With government determining what our lives should be like and how we should live them, things like the sexual revolution and our responses to them also are for governments to determine.

Even under the shadow of big government and in the wake of the sexual revolution, both libertarians and social conservatives, consistent with their most deeply held beliefs, can and should affirm the dignity of the person and the inseparability of human dignity from individual freedom and self-government. They can and should affirm the dependence of individual freedom and self-government on a thriving civil society, and the paramount importance the Constitution places on maintaining a political framework that secures liberty by limiting government.

Indeed, but a modern Conservative is not a libertarian—and he never was.  Moreover, the “social conservative” is a modern invention, defined less by social mores than by opposition to the mores of the modern Liberal.  And the affirmation of the need of civil society as one means of guaranteeing “individual freedom and self-government” and that “political framework that secures liberty by limiting government” separately and together demand an actual limiting of government—its size and the reach of its powers.