Tag Archives: government

What Do Progressives Have Against the Federalist?

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Why study it?  Peter Berkowitz, writing in The Wall Street Journal, has some thoughts on the matter.

…despite the lip service they pay to liberal education, our leading universities can’t be bothered to require students to study The Federalist—or, worse, they oppose such requirements on moral, political or pedagogical grounds.

And

The Federalist deals with the reasons for preserving the union, the inefficacy of the existing federal government under the Articles of Confederation, and the conformity of the new constitution to the principles of liberty and consent.  It covers war and peace, foreign affairs, commerce, taxation, federalism and the separation of powers.  It provides a detailed examination of the chief features of the legislative, executive and judicial branches.

Shockingly,

It advances its case by restatement and refutation of the leading criticisms of the new constitution.

Actual logic.  What’s up with that?

Amazingly, our pseudo-elite schools blow off this collection of essays almost entirely.  At Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Berkeley, for instance, political science majors can get their BS/BAs without so much as a reference to The Federalist, and their law school graduates (except for Princeton, which has no law school) can get their law degrees with the same level of ignorance of how our legal system, and the laws within (and without) it, are intended to operate.

Never mind that the collection of essays comprises a most sound analysis of the problems our Constitution was intended to solve (have these institutions, or their graduates, even heard of the Articles of Confederation?) and the manner in which the government of which our Constitution is the blueprint was intended to operate.

Again, I ask: why do Progressives avoid The Federalist as assiduously as they do?  I can think of two reasons.  One is Berkowitz’: the essays are about a Constitution that they think no one can understand because it’s old, and it’s not binding on anything, anyway.  It’s wholly irrelevant.

But there’s another reason, too.  If they knew and understood these arguments, they’d have a harder time trying to criminalize those who disagree with them.

Update: corrected the last link, which had been broken.

Expensive Energy

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Do “green” energy subsidies work?  Pretty much by definition, they do not.  Without the subsidies, “green” energy is unsustainably expensive.  Even—especially—when the subsidy is a government mandate to use/buy the “green” energy, the only thing green about it is the money necessary to buy it.  The cost of the ethanol subsidy/mandate in our gasoline has been well documented as appearing not only in the cost of our gasoline, but in the cost our food, as well.

Wind energy provides another example of an expensive, and failed, “green” energy subsidy.  The Wall Street Journal writes

Twenty-nine states have these rules requiring local utilities to purchase between 20% and 33% of their electric power from renewable sources.

Minnesota, in particular, the WSJ reports, required as recently as 2007 that utilities in the state push their use of renewable energy  to 25% by 2025, to 12% by this year.  That means wind energy because in that Midwestern and northern state, the sun doesn’t shine as much as it does in New Mexico or Arizona.

The Minnesota Rural Electric Association says its members lost $70 million last year because these utilities are forced to buy wind power they “can’t use and can’t sell.”  Even so, residential utility bills for MREA’s customers run $50 to $100 per year higher than they would absent the mandate.  That’s not chump change for Mr Everyman.

What are Minnesotans getting for their extra $100 of energy expenditures?  Nada.  Not more energy.  The wind does not blow all the time, so the wind mills stand idle while still costing money.  When the wind blows too hard, the wind mills must be shut down, so they stand idle while still costing money.

Not more jobs.  Minnesota’s wind-generated electricity doesn’t come from wind mills built in Minnesota.  They import it from North Dakota.  When the wind is blowing just right.

The WSJ also described a study published this year by the Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based market-oriented think tank, that compared states with renewable energy mandates with those that allow utilities to purchase the cheapest electricity available.

The states with mandates paid 31.9% more for electricity than states without them.  Residents of North Dakota, a state without a mandate, pay $7.63 per kilowatt hour for electricity.  Neighboring Minnesota pays $10.76.

Hmm….

France and the US

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Guy Milliere has an interesting article on the French elections last Sunday and on the decline of a once proud nation (the article was written before the elections, but what he wrote remains valid today–RTWT).

Milliere decries the failure of France and sees its present strait as no better than the precipice, beginning with:

…among the 10 candidates in the first round [of the French presidential elections last month], three were Trotskyites advocating a Leninist revolution; a disciple of Lyndon La Rouche; a former Norwegian judge who appears to think she is an environmental Robespierre (Eva Joly); a populist from the extreme right (Marine Le Pen); a moderate who would find his place in the left wing of the American Democratic Party (François Bayrou); a Gaullist speaking as if it were still 1965 (Nicolas Dupont Aignan); a very « socialist » Socialist (François Hollande); and the outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy, a Bonapartist who, in the UK, would be to the left of the Labour Party.

At least with a two-party system (and occasional third-party spoiler) like ours (or even a three-party system with occasional spoiler flashes in the pan, as in Great Britain), the fringe groups don’t have much post-election effect, beyond the spoiling aspect of turning an election from one main party to the other.

But Milliere continued:

…no candidate defended free-market principles;…all of the candidates harshly attacked the financial world, multinational corporations, and globalization;…of the two finalists, one[‘s]… program appears to have been written before the development of the Internet.

Now we get to the parallels.  President Obama’s hostility toward free market principles, and toward business generally and banks explicitly, are both manifest (his claims to the contrary even as he follows them with screeds against the fat cats notwithstanding) and rooted in (and unchanged from) the late ’60s and early ’70s radical “community organizing” of his mentors.

Milliere went on:

France’s problems date from long before the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy.  [It is a] country where no budget has been balanced since 1974, and where public expenditures have risen continuously in recent decades to represent a crippling 56% of its gross domestic product….  It is a country whose public debt is growing far faster than the public debt of its main economic partners in Europe, and will hit 87% of GDP this year (actually 146%, if what France owes to the European Union is included).  It is a country where reports on the inevitable failure of pension systems were presented to successive governments for over 25 years without a decision being proposed or taken.  It is a country where the…number of people living in poverty is between eight and ten million out of a population of 65 million.  It is also a country where…two-thirds of all higher education diplomas are worthless on the labor market.  Graduates with Master’s degree become fast-food servers or cashiers in a supermarket—if a position is available.

So it is in the US.  Our current economic disaster has been years, and administrations, in the making: very few actually balanced (as opposed to accounting gimmick balancing) budgets and national debt exploding over the last three years.  We’ve been ignoring the impending failure of our entitlement programs for decades, even though the originally forecast date range of their bankruptcy has moved very little in all that time.  Nearly 45 million Americans are currently receiving food stamps, which is roughly the same 14% of our population as is Milliere’s Frenchmen living in poverty; although, according to the CBO report at the link, that number is 70% higher than it was in 2007, immediately before the housing bubble burst.  And we insist on loaning taxpayer monies to students who wish to degree in gender studies, women’s contemporary literary issues, or basket weaving instead of in the productive STEM skills that a burgeoning and technologically evolving economy needs for national survival.

It’s necessary to change course.  And that course change must be in the direction of smaller, limited government that leaves more of our money, and our responsibility, in our hands.

Or we’ll end up like France.

Defense and the Russians

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The Russian government has shown their fundamental view of the United States and of their relationship with us.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said last year that Russia will retaliate militarily if it does not reach an agreement with the United States and NATO on our missile defense shield.

At a daylong Missile Defense Conference that took place in Moscow last week, the Russians made explicit their threat against us.  General Nikolai Makarov, the Russian armed forces chief of staff said, referring to missile defense installations currently contemplated by us in eastern Europe,

A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens[.]

Makarov extended the scope of Russia’s intended actions.  He displayed on a large-screen video system for the benefit of conference delegates from 50 countries, including the US and NATO, computer-generated imagery depicting the reach of the American radar and missile systems that are components of our missile defense shield.  Russian missiles were shown streaking toward the US before being intercepted.

But this overt aggressiveness is not a new position for the Russians.  They threatened nuclear attacks against Poland four years ago if we deployed components of a then current missile defense shield there and in the Czech Republic.  We quietly canceled those plans.  The Russians invaded Georgia over a manufactured pique and perpetrated a Sudetenland-like partition of that country while we stood meekly by.

A couple of questions arise.

Why would Russia be thinking about a nuclear attack against the US?

Why would Russia casually threaten us in front of the world?

Perhaps they sense timidity on the part of the US administration.  Certainly, in the face of these public threats against both our allies and our homeland, our own State Department Special Envoy for Strategic Stability and Missile Defense, Ellen Tauscher could only say that it was

pretty clear that this is a year in which we’re probably not going to achieve any sort of a breakthrough.

But this was the point President Obama was making a couple of weeks ago to Medvedev when Obama pleaded for more time on the defense question—he’d have more flexibility to give the Russians what they want after he’s no longer accountable to the American people.

So much for Reset.  In the face of such naked threats of war—of preemptive war—how can the US do anything at all other than to press ahead with the deployment of a missile defense shield, now including defense against the long-range ICBMs that Russia has shown with their little demonstration that they fully intend to use against us?  On what basis can the Obama administration seriously be talking about disarming us in the face of these overt threats?

Some Thoughts on Free Markets and Limits

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I was driving to the airport to pick someone up after a too-long absence the other day when the traffic load struck me (figuratively).  I was driving on a modern freeway with no impediments to traffic flow.  Adjacent to this was a frontage road with traffic lights.  Even though the traffic loads were the same on both roads, the traffic on the frontage road stayed bunched up and slow moving—neither the drivers who wanted to go faster nor the slower drivers were able to go as fast as they wished due to the limits imposed on everyone traffic by those lights.

On the freeway, however, the traffic quickly got strung out and widely spaced, as the faster drivers moved apace, and the slower drivers—moving faster than their brethren on the frontage road—moved at their preferred slower pace.

What has this to do with free markets, one might ask.  It’s those limits.  The traffic lights—the limits a government applies to a centrally managed economy that requires (limited) licenses to manufacture so as to not over produce, licenses to sell so as to avoid unsanctioned pricing, licenses to handle the manufacturing scraps, donations to the correct political cause, and “protection” for everyone—keep everyone bunched up and slow-moving.  Certainly, the speed range between the fast-movers and the slow-movers was much narrower than the speed range on the freeway, but everyone was moving much more slowly than we were on our freeway.

Of course, on closer inspection, the analogy breaks down, but that closer inspection, now that we have the overall picture from the analogy, demonstrates the power of the free market economy compared to one that’s controlled by government, one that has those “traffic lights.”  Within the context of this post, the individual actors on each of the two highways are largely unrelated to each other, with the cars on the traffic light-limited highway, for instance, connected only by the physical presence of a car in front that’s held up by a red light or that is a slower-moving car in the forced bunch and so is holding up all the cars behind it.

In a free market economy, though, all the players are inextricably intertwined.  Indeed, the fast-movers don’t merely facilitate the slow-movers’ ability to get along down the market road, these fast-movers actually help pull the slow-movers along—even though the speed range between economic fast-movers and slow-movers in the free market is wider than it is in the managed economy.

Take luxuries, for example.  Two come to mind: air conditioners and televisions.

Oh, wait; these aren’t luxuries anymore, and they haven’t been for decades.

When these things first came out, only the rich, the economic fast-mover, could afford an air conditioner in the window of his house or a TV in his house’s living room.  But in a free market, these fast-movers helped create the market for the air conditioner and the television.  Call it a status symbol—I’ve arrived—or a desire to be first on the block to have one, or any other reason, only the rich both could afford such things and were interested in acting on the desire.

Air conditioner and television producers, wanting to sell more into that nascent market, produced more, and so more were bought.  In the free market economy, others wanted a piece of that action, and they produced air conditioners and televisions.  Competition between the producers—which doesn’t exist in a managed economy—began driving prices down, which made these luxuries more affordable—which drew in more producers wanting a taste of the money, which drove prices down even more, and ultimately, nearly everyone could—and did—buy.  Today, most houses have central air, and of those that don’t, most have window air conditioners that cost as little as $100—an unheard of level of cheapness 50 years ago—and air conditioning comes standard in our cars.

Today, most houses have multiple televisions, and increasing numbers have 50″ and 60″ plasma or LCD televisions, technologies not even imagined in the ’50s when television sets first started to become widely affordable.  And our higher end (no longer strictly high end, even) cars now have DVD players, or streaming video, or both—again, technologies unheard of just a bit ago.

Moreover, it’s those fast-movers that do the hiring of those slow-movers, either directly into their own production facilities, or indirectly, by the market’s push to get more manufacturing online, into other production facilities that are newly built or expanding existing operations to support the burgeoning market for all those (ex-) luxury goods. The ripples spread, too.  Supporting functions grow: the transistor and chip manufacturers to support the circuits in all those televisions, for example.

All this because the economic fast-movers wanted a luxury good, and a free market, unlimited by government “guidance,” enabled those luxuries to become commodities.

Finally, one too-often overlooked result is that those relatively farther behind free market slow-movers are vastly better off than are their slow-moving counterparts in the managed economy.  And with the jobs created by that free market, they have excellent opportunities to move up their economic ladder.