I am not the only person worried about the economically illiterate, anti-capitalist and anti-free trade statements of she who would be President - a topic on which I posted here. It seems that Hillary Clinton's sophmoric musings have also disturbed Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, who sees in her words a serious danger to the world economy. This today from the Telegraph:
Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, has warned Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, that she risks stirring up a hornets nest by inflaming protectionist sentiment in the United States.
"The things she's been saying reverberate around the world," he said. "This is the last year the Doha trade round can survive. There is little chance of a breakthrough after this president leaves office. People in the current administration tell me the US is turning into a protectionsist country. It is a serious concern."
Mr Mandelson, the ex-architect of New Labour, once had close ties to the Democratic Party. But his duties as defender of the EU trade system now put him starkly at odds with his former allies and soulmates.
"The Democratic Party is not where it was in the free trade heyday of Bill Clinton, but I don't think it is irretrievable," he said.
Hillary Clinton has vowed to "review" America's main trade treaties, including the North American NAFTA pact signed by her husband. She has called for measures to "shelter" US companies from foreign investors.
Her arguments appear to go beyond campaign rhetoric. She now argues that "free trade" doctrines have been overtaken by the rise of cheap labour rivals in Asia, forcing the US to adopt a radically different strategy. "We just can't keep doing what we did in the twentieth century. We have to drive a tougher bargain," she said. . .
Read the article here. If Hillary Clinton believes half of what she has said about economics in America, she is tuly an economic illiterate and poses a danger to our economy and the world's economy if elected.
Several months ago, columnist Charles Krauthammer opined that he could live with a Hillary Clinton presidency. As he said of Hillary, "She has no principles. Her liberalism is redeemed by her ambition; her ideology subordinate to her political needs." While I agree with his assessment generally, I do not agree with his conclusion.
Hillary's economic ideology is different in both substance and degree from her husband’s. She clearly does not share her husband’s affinity for business and trade. Hillary's economic views appear socialist if not marxist, and they, in many ways. seem superficial and sophmoric. That notwithstanding, Hillary gives every indication that she intends to push the government into the center of America’s economy if elected as President.
Ms. Clinton has clearly stated her economic philosophy over the years. For example, in a 1996 interview with C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, Hillary was asked about a quote she had included in her book, "It Takes a Village," that expressed severe criticism of free market economics. The exchange and response were:
LAMB: There's a quote here. I want to ask you if you agree with this. This is from Alan Arenhault, author of "The Lost City" -- you put it in your book. "The unfettered free market has been the most radically disruptive force in American life in the last generation."
CLINTON: I believe that. That's why I put it in the book. . . .
That is an incredibly strong statement. And to the best of my knowledge, it is not one she has ever retracted, either in deed or substance. Further, during the same interview, Hillary discussed her appreciation for the socialist policies of Europe – and I assume here that they are many of the same one’s Sarkozy is today trying to strip from France so that his country can compete economically. As she states:
CLINTON: Well, I am a fan of a lot of the social policies that you find in Europe, . . .
"Other developed countries, including some of our fiercest competitors, are more committed to social stability than we have been, and they tailor their economic policies to maintain it."
The NRO reports a 1995 conversation with Dennis Hastert on Social Security in which Hillary argued against personal accounts saying, "We can’t afford to have that money go to the private sector. The money has to go to the federal government because the federal government will spend that money better than the private sector will spend it."
In 2004, Clinton, speaking to an assembly in San Francisco, stated "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
All of the above constitute merely antecdotal evidence. But Hillary's specific economic proposals are fully in keeping with this antecdotal evidence. For example, it was not long ago that Hillary proposed to strip American oil companies of their profits so that she can fund R&D for new sources of energy.
She really needs to take a course in basic economics. The oil industry has been the subject of recent investigations – several of them actually – to look into price gouging, price fixing and profits. In no case was anything found to be wrong. And furthermore, the reality is that the majority of their profits were being reinvested into finding and exploiting new sources of energy. I hate to begin to contemplate what damage an unchained Hillary could do to the energy sector, energy supplies and energy prices in the U.S. were she to attempt something so utterly ludicrous as what she has suggested here. (And as an aside, if we wish to achieve energy independance, the first things that we need to do are remove the impediments to exploiting our domestic resources - and Hillary is a major part of that impediment.)
"I have a plan - a moratorium on foreclosures for 90 days [and] freezing interest rates for five years, which I think we should do immediately," Clinton announced at what was the last Democratic debate before the Nevada Caucus on Jan. 19.
A government enforced control such as this would severly distort the market. As the writers at Fortune magazine see it:
. . . such a freeze would be disastrous. Interest rates on new mortgages would skyrocket - perhaps past 8 percent, as the mutual funds, pension funds and other investors who typically provide capital to the mortgage market shift their money into other investments where the government isn't impairing returns. With higher mortgage rates eroding buying power, the downward pressure on home prices would only increase. Lower home prices would lead to even more defaults, as more folks who'd lost the equity in their homes choose to walk away from their mortgages.
"It certainly would not speed the recovery of the housing market," says Doug Duncan, chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association. "The problem now is that investors are already worried about what the risks are, and (a rate freeze) would only widen risk premiums more."
Do you see a pattern here? Hillary, for all her intelligence, has woeful economic ideas and an anti-business animus that could truly injure our nation’s economy. And, if elected, she fully intends to use the power of government to manipulate the economy.
As she said in the NYT just yesterday, she does not trust "market forces." Rather she believes that the government should "play an active role" to correct "the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration." Compared to her husband, "she has long been more skeptical about the benefits of freer trade and other aspects of a free-market economy." Read the entire article.
I think the only way to characterize Ms. Clinton is as a strongly committed socialist, bordering on being a marxist. Yes, it is possible that she is simply blowing populist smoke at the nation with her incredibly sophmoric suggestions for massive taxation of oil company profits and imposing a five year mortgage interest rate freeze. But I will never vote for someone on the hope that they are lying to me about their intentions. And even if Hillary is more economically sophisticated than her pronouncements suggest, I think that she is sincere when she says that she wants to use the power of government to manipulate the economy. And I beleive she is sincere in her expressions of dislike for free trade or free markets. And lastly, she has convinced me that her knee-jerk reaction will be to intervene with the heavy hand of government in response to any perceived inequities or downturns in the market.
To put this in perspective, we are now facing some rather dismal economic news for which the President and Congress must take responsibility. President Bush’s economic policies have been, I would say, poor. Although we have had good growth and a relatively strong economy under Bush, in the long term, it was not sustainable under his policies. His "weak dollar" policy threatens havoc to the world economy so long as it stays dollar based and he has done nothing to rein in out-of-control spending by Congress. Arguably, the fed held interest rates too low for too long which has had a significant hand in causing the current sub-prime crisis. But indications are that the market is already correcting for these discrepancies, and that we should be able to weather this downturn without too much pain so long as our government does not act irrationally. Some ineffectual intervention – such as the one now being considered by President Bush - is necessary politically because the nation demands the appearance of action. To the extent that intervention is minimized, so much the better.
The next President will inherit the world’s strongest economy – and one that has already weathered or is about to come out of a recession and market correction. We have the world’s largest economy by far because of free market capitalism and free trade - though arguably with far too much existing regulation. That notwithstanding, there has not been a socialist nation yet that can even begin to compete with the U.S. economically. What the next President needs to do to keep our economy strong is, first and foremost, do no harm. Beyond that, the economy would benefit were the next President to pursue more free trade agreements and act to improve the business environment in America by repealing Sarbanes Oxley and by reducing the corporate tax rates that are so high as to be approaching non-competitive. Further, the next President would do well indeed to strengthen the dollar and get spending under control.
Hillary Clinton would seem to be the last person to undertake any of these tasks. Indeed, taking her at her word, she would clearly lead the nation in the opposite direction. The few economic ideas she has posited would be laughable if not for being so utterly dangerous to the economy. And her desire to manage the economy and adopt a socialist economic structure portend only ill. Thus, I am nowhere near as sanguine about a Hillary Clinton presidency as Charles Krauthammer seems to be.
Update: I am not the only person concerned with Hillary's apparent economic illiteracy. She has the EU Trade Commissioner concerned also.
If global warming is the new religion of world socialism - and even the Pope seems to think so - than the IPCC's Bali Conference, now ended, was its High Mass. And from the way some of the particpants have reacted, one might think that . . . well, a noxious fume had been let loose amongst the otherwise pristine sea air circulating in the Global Warming Cathedral. Much to the chagrin of the true believers present in Bali, the US apparently could not be cajoled into putting a stake in capitalism by agreeing to a massive redistribution of its national wealth via a carbon tithe. That in fact was a major motivation of many of the faithful who were present for the services, as reported by one attendee:
A common theme [at the Bali Conference] was that the "solutions" to climate change that are being posed by many governments, such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and biofuels are false and are not rooted in justice. Another point was that as this current economic system got us here in the first place, a climate change response must . . . [provide for] a redistribution of wealth and resources.
See here. And the U.S. didn't even agree to come on board for an economy busting massive decrease in its carbon footprint, though it did agree to talk more about it.
All of this was apparently too much for the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, the man negotiating on behalf of the UN at Bali. Fashionably dressed in eco-friendly church attire - a floral shirt - Mr. de Boer had to be led away when he broke down in tears over the failure to reach an agreement for a hard target reduction in carbon emissions. The "Crying Dutchman's" emotional outburst was emblematic of the angst that many of the parishioners seemed to be feeling when they characterized the end result of Bali as "fatally flawed." It should go without saying that such characterization is all a matter of one's perspective. But not all in Bali were held back by ecognosticism. Britain's Labour government certainly was not.
The socialists in Britain's Labour government are true believers. Indeed, Labour is trying to indoctrinate Britain's young in this new religion, making the Goracle's "An Inconvenient Truth" part of the national school curriculum for children aged 11 to 13. And Prime Minister Gordon Fawkes Brown considers himself a standard bearer of the faith, vowing to "lead Europe on climate change." Shortly before the Bali service convened, he committed Britain to a massive 60% reduction of carbon emissions by 2050. Its not hard to forecast what that will do to Britain's economy if it ever comes to fruition.
Of course, the reality is that Britain's economy no longer belongs to Brown, he having unilaterally signed over the sovereignty of Britain to the EU the other day. But, that aside, is hardly the end of PM Gordon Fawkes Brown's madness. Christopher Booker comments in the Telegraph upon Gordon's latest folly in Bali, or, as Booker characterizes it, "the maddest single decision ever made by British ministers." Booker is referring to Gordon's decision, announced through his Secretary Timothy Hutton "amid the clouds of self-righteous humbug billowing out from Bali," to build "7,000 giant offshore wind turbines round Britain's coast by 2020, to meet our EU target on renewable energy." Booker examines this "megalomaniac project" that defies reality:
For a start, no one mentioned costs. Mr Hutton spoke of his turbines, equivalent to one every half mile of coastline, as having a capacity of 33 gigawatts (GW), a hefty chunk of the 75GW of power we need at peak demand. But with the cost of giant offshore turbines, as tall as 850 feet, estimated at £1.6 billion per GW of capacity, this represents a bill of more than £50 billion - equivalent to the colossal sum earmarked last week by central banks to shore up the world banking system.
But of course the point about offshore turbines is that, because wind blows intermittently, they only generate on average at a third or less of capacity. So Mr Hutton's 33GW figure comes down to 11GW. To generate this much power from "carbon-free" nuclear energy would require six or seven nuclear power stations and cost, at something under £20 billion, less than half as much as the turbines.
This, however, is only the start of the madness. Because those turbines would generate on average only a third of the time, back-up would be needed to provide power for the remaining two thirds - say, another 12 nuclear power stations costing an additional £30 billion, putting the real cost of Mr Hutton's fantasy at nearer £80 billion - more than doubling our electricity bills.
. . . The turbines' siting would mean that much of the national grid would have to be restructured, costing further billions. And because wind power is so unpredictable and needs other sources available at a moment's notice, it is generally accepted that any contribution above 10 per cent made by wind to a grid dangerously destabilises it.
Two years ago, much of western Europe blacked out after a rush of German windpower into the continental grid forced other power stations to close down. The head of Austria's grid warned that the system was becoming so unbalanced by the "excessive" building of wind turbines that Europe would soon be "confronted with massive connector problems". Yet Mr Hutton's turbines would require a system capable of withstanding power swings of up to 33GW, when the only outside backup on which our island grid can depend is a 2GW connector to France (which derives 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power). . .
Amen. If only Ted Kennedy had a summer home overlooking the North Sea, Booker and his small number of like minded heretical Brits might able to generate some staunch opposition to such a project.
The bottom line of all this is that socialists are largely ascendent throughout the world today, they are using global warming as a tool to advance their political philosophy, and we may well get dragged into this if we are not careful. While we desperately need to get off oil, and we do need to husband the environment, those things have precious little in common with goals and methods of the religion of global warming. Newt Gingrich's A Contract With The Earth is well worth a read in this regard.
Addendum: Reading the Treaty of Lisbon the other day was quite educational. The Treaty of Lisbon is the one just signed that marks the EU's debut as a true state and establishes a Constitution for the EU. The fine folks at the EU have taken the dubious scientific proposition of global warming, turned it into dogma, and made it a matter of Constitutional law.
By Article 4 of the new Lisbon Treaty/Constitution, the EU takes primacy to pass laws on the "environment." The Treaty/Constitution amends Article 179 to explicitly recognize the problem of "climate change" as an "environmental" problem and provides the EU with a constitutional mandate to take appropriate measures to "deal with" it. It is a constitutional excuse for centralizing power and redistributing wealth on a scale unheard of. And as Constitutional law, that means that judicially, "climate change" is a settled issue. No amount of scientific argument will even be heard as a means to challenge any law the EU chooses to pass in which they claim global warming as a justification. The ramifications of that are just jaw dropping. If global warming is a socialist's wet dream, than the people that staff the EU are going to bed warm and comfy each night in globally warmed pup tents.
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I am not the only person worried about the economically illiterate, anti-capitalist and anti-free trade statements of she who would be President - a topic on which I posted here. It seems that Hillary Clinton's sophmoric musings have also disturbed Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner, who sees in her words a serious danger to the world economy. This today from the Telegraph:
