How the Government Mandates Inflation

or, “How the Government legislates Environmentally stupid laws and makes you poorer at the same time”:

The EnergyStar fridge costs $1329 and uses $41 of electricity per year while the conventional one costs $1029 and uses $48 per year. It would take about 43 years of energy savings to make up for the difference in cost between these two refrigerators. Many consumers might not think that’s such a good deal.”

This green lobby is out of control.  Why micro-manage production?  If, in Congress’ omnipotent view, all Americans should pay more for power, why don’t they just increase the price of energy?  The market will find the right payback for that, and Congress will have more money to fritter away, I mean, to explore more energy alternatives.

These laws are senseless, regressive and administratively horrendous for life and living.

Remember What They Did to Galileo?

Newsweek equates global warming skeptics with Holocaust deniers and accuses reputable scientists of being paid to create confusion in the face of consensus.  Read the review by Investors’ Business Daily.  It’s worth reading, unlike the Newsweek article.

UPDATE:

Aug. 20-27, 2007 issue – We in the news business often enlist in moral crusades. Global warming is among the latest. Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism. Last week’s NEWSWEEK cover story on global warming is a sobering reminder. It’s an object lesson of how viewing the world as “good guys vs. bad guys” can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story.

[Samuelson: A Different View of Global Warming - Newsweek Robert Samuelson - MSNBC.com]

Clearly an attempt to apologize:

Against these real-world pressures, NEWSWEEK’s “denial machine” is a peripheral and highly contrived story. NEWSWEEK implied, for example, that ExxonMobil used a think tank to pay academics to criticize global-warming science. Actually, this accusation was long ago discredited, and NEWSWEEK shouldn’t have lent it respectability. (The company says it knew nothing of the global-warming grant, which involved issues of climate modeling. And its 2006 contribution to the think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, was small: $240,000 out of a $28 million budget.) [Samuelson: A Different View of Global Warming - Newsweek Robert Samuelson - MSNBC.com]

As honest a review from the Left Wing journalism as I’ve seen.  But still in ultimate denial.

 

Technorati tags: Global Warming

The Battle in Iraq

It’s not a war; it’s a battle.

Similarly, we are fighting in Iraq a battle, one of many we have or will fight in the War on Terror. Play in your mind with the difference that concept battle makes in evaluating the struggle there over treating it as a war. To claim it is a war localizes it, raises questions of why we are there, and suggests we should get out and leave it to the Iraqi’s to settle. But, if we consider it a battle, then….

Is Democratic Competence Possible?

Jeffrey Friedman is a senior fellow of the Institute for the Advancement of the Social Sciences, Boston University.

If you’re interested in debating forms of government, he wrote an interesting article on the connundrum of elected structures:

ABSTRACT : “The Nature of Belief Systems” sets forth a Hobson’s choice between rule by the politically ignorant masses and rule by the ideologically constrained—which is to say, the doctrinaire—elites. On the one hand, lacking comprehensive cognitive structures, such as ideological “belief systems,” with which to understand politics, most people learn distressingly little about it. On the other hand, a spiral of conviction seems to make it difficult for the highly informed few to see any aspects of politics but those that confirm the cognitive structures that organize their political perceptions.This is a troubling situation for any consequentialist democratic political theory, according to which what is crucial is the electorate’s (and subsidiary decision makers’) ability to make informed policy judgments, not their possession of willful but uninformed political “attitudes.” Any political theorist who does not take democracy to be an end in itself (regardless of its consequences) should be concerned about Converse’s findings.

In a review titled, “Is Voter Ignorance killing Democracy?” Salon makes further comments on the ideas Friedman has illustrated.  They’re off the mark, as usual.

Nevertheless, it’s an age old issue; by necessity, we need to have governments, or in the case of companies, we need managers, but we wish the ‘managers’ wouldn’t be so dumb.  But especially in issues of government, it is the nature of the discussions both by the politicians and the media, that are inappropriate, not the inteligence of the voters.  The public has never been wiser.

To illustrate, I do not need to understand computer systems to sit on the Board of Directors of a company.  Neither do I need to have a vast understanding of law, or financial instruments, or the latest in human resource theory.  But I do want to be afforded a good honest, and open debate of goals and direction, and be reasonably assured of where it is you and your party are meaning to go if we grant you public office.  For my purpose, and leaning towards a decidely libertarian, free market approach, I would humbly suggest you compare yourselves to the Constitution, and take a more active interest as politicians to amend it (rather than reading weird interpretations into it that are clearly not there) so that we can all have clearer understandings of where we’re going and better live the product of goal and strategy papers in our lives.

So I don’t think we need smarter voters.  I think we need smarter politicians with vision.  And smarter journalists.  Both have continued to sink to new lows over the last 200 years, and have immeasurably fouled the discussion in the process.  As a result we voters are frustrated beyond measure, and dearly wish to throw the whole lot of them out.

The CIA Follies

The CIA is fundamentally broken by almost any measure:

Picture a large and very important federal agency. It happens to conduct highly specialized work that requires close and attentive management. One of its basic assignments, for example, is to collect intelligence. Toward that end, it relies on twelve major stations from which it gathers data. The information thus assembled has to be reliable, meaning that those who collect it, and those who organize the collection process, must be both trustworthy and highly trained. And once the intelligence is gathered, it has to be analyzed. This process, too, requires a high degree of organization, and the men and women who engage in it must be top experts in their field. Their final product, hugely influential, and released to the outside world only at specified intervals, is by necessity wrapped in secrecy. Indeed, unauthorized disclosure is punishable by law.

The organization he’s talking about?  The Federal Reserve.  Read the whole thing.  Imagine an almost limitless technological budget, but in many ways less informative than the Internet.  Imagine a bureaucracy so byzantine no one knows what’s happening.  Imagine a culture where state top secret information is now commonly leaked to the press.  Imagine a spy agency with less than 30% of their agents in the field.  Imagine that the CIA says it will take at least 10 years to put it house in order to counter the ‘terrorist’ threat.

Related reading: When Mohammed Atta landed in the US, CIA’s Tenet was celebrating gay pride

Congress long ago sowed the seeds of the CIA’s destruction as an institution; not having clear goals is its foundational issue.  But this is a common mistake made by governments and its journalistic reporters; talking and legislating how things are done rather than debating and reviewing the Objectives (What you want) in the first place.  Businesses that take this approach live a short life, and people that live their personal lives in this way remain vaguely unhappy and unfulfilled.  Congress’s role should be to give them goals and the tools to let them win, along with only general lines they are not able to cross.  Micro-managing beyond these boundaries is inappropriate and inefficient.  Perhaps most importantly, they are almost singularly unqualified and ill suited as politicians (public servants with an established elective agenda, and huge incentives to sensationalize and publicize) to do so.

Once last thought: since bureaucracy in any institution, whether government or large business, or charity, inevitably slows its endeavors down, thwarts innovation, and rewards the status quo in its Associates, why would further bureaucracy as suggested by the 9/11 commission and implemented by Bush and Congress, have any chance of ‘fixing’ anything?