Category Archives: Business

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

Obama’s Five-Year Plan

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…for the climate:

Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, President Barack Obama outlined his “new national climate action plan,” which amounts to a federal top-down five-year plan—although he has only four years to implement it. Obama’s plan ambitiously seeks to control nearly every aspect of how Americans produce and consume energy. The goal is to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases and thus stop boosting the temperature of the earth. The actual result will be to infect the economy with the same sort of sclerosis seen in other centrally planned nations.

This is doubly hubristic: that he thinks he knows what’s happening with the climate, and that he thinks he know what best to do about and that it will work.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

A Sweet Deal

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Not for the taxpayers or sugar consumers, though:

That’s right: The federal government protects the sugar industry, lends it money after promising that the loans wouldn’t cost anything to taxpayers, and after all that still ends up having to buy part of its sugar production because borrowers can’t repay the loans. Customers pay higher prices for sugar, and then they pay again when their tax dollars are used to buy over-priced sugar and bad loans. And yet, lawmakers on the Hill continue to support farm interests in spite of the unfairness and inefficiency of the whole system.

This is the opposite of good government.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Food Stamps And Farms

This is long overdue:

The plan being contemplated by Cantor closely tracks an earlier proposal by Indiana Republican Marlin Stutzman. In a press release issued last week, Stutzman pointed out that “Eighty percent of the spending goes toward food stamps” in the original farm bill. He called on the House to “do our work in the full light of day by splitting this bill and having serious debates on both farm and welfare policy.”

It’s a shame that Congress doesn’t seem capable of having a serious debate about anything.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Limits To Growth

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The authors of the report were wrong about everything:

The Limits of Growth got it so wrong because its authors overlooked the greatest resource of all: our own resourcefulness. Population growth has been slowing since the late 1960s. Food supply has not collapsed (1.5 billion hectares of arable land are being used, but another 2.7 billion hectares are in reserve). Malnourishment has dropped by more than half, from 35 percent of the world’s population to under 16 percent.

Nor are we choking on pollution. Whereas the Club of Rome imagined an idyllic past with no particulate air pollution and happy farmers, and a future strangled by belching smokestacks, reality is entirely the reverse.

In 1900, when the global human population was 1.5 billion, almost 3 million people – roughly one in 500 — died each year from air pollution, mostly from wretched indoor air. Today, the risk has receded to one death per 2,000 people. While pollution still kills more people than malaria does, the mortality rate is falling, not rising.

Nonetheless, the mindset nurtured by The Limits to Growth continues to shape popular and elite thinking.

Because it gives them an excuse to run our lives for us.

[Update a couple minutes later]

I agree with Glenn: “Personally, I’ll be more impressed if we’re ever warned of a pending doom whose aversion won’t require giving a lot of power to bureaucrats, technocrats, and other hangers-on while being left poorer and more constrained ourselves. Because no matter what the crisis being propounded, the remedy always seems to be the same…”