Obama Doesn't Realize That His Ideas Predate Black-&-White T.V.

Here is Obama yesterday lampooning the Republican Convention, coming up with the laugh line that not only are Republicans offering no new ideas, you could be watching their platform "on black and white t.v."



Funny - at least to a crowd of the historically ignorant. Virtually Obama's entire "progressive agenda" predates the commercial introduction of the television, circa 1930. It is an agenda that has already been tried and failed.

- The welfare programs Obama is protecting against any reform - despite the fact that they threaten to destroy our economy within one to two decades - date back to Bismark in the 1880's. Trying to maintain this over century old system in its same form is, as Janet Daley opines in the Telegraph, fiscally unsustainable, and as Nicholas Eberstadt opines in the WSJ today, rotting the soul of our nation.

- Obama's often lawless favoritism towards the unions, be it with GM, Boeing, or the massive funding for the teachers unions, is central to his Presidency. Unions are an anachronism of the dawning of the industrial age, circa 1750, and, as Marx opined in 1848, they are the building blocks of communism.

- Obama's crony capitalism has its roots in the ancient era of monarchies when the king dealt out the spoils to his supporters and divested his opponents of their property. Where once there was William the Bastard the Norman knights and the Saxons, there is now Obama and GE, Solyandra, and Phizer, while GM bond holders and Delphi non-union employees were divested.

- Obama's war on disfavored industries (insurance, oil), disfavored groups (GM bond holders) and on the rich ("fairness") resembles nothing so much as Lenin's 1920 war on the Kulaks, whom Lenin regularly demonized as "class enemies" and "plunderers of the people."

- Obama's complete embrace of identity politics is the very essence of Marx's 1848 theory, that all of history is to be viewed through the distorting and simplistic rubric of the oppressed and the oppressors, with the latter being our modern permanent victim classes entitled to special treatment in perpetuity. (Interestingly, in Time Magazine this week, leftie Joe Klein argues that the left should give up identity politics on wholly pragmatic grounds, that blue collar whites - traditional supporters of Democrats - are starting to feel far less guilt and more anger at their unequal treatment as permanent sinners.)

- Obama's war on Christianity and the pushing of contraception for all have their radical roots, respectively, in the 1798 French Revolution and the work of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, circa 1915.

- The Keynsian economic theory Obama has fully embraced (and quite arguably bastardized) actually does post-date the commercial introduction of black and white t.v. - by about three years.

-  Massive deficit spending coupled with a major contraction of defense spending dates back over a millennium to the fall of the Roman Empire.  As Prof. Niall Ferguson pointed out, it is "quite a short ride from here . . ."

". . . to here."

No one is more backward looking than Obama and the rest of the progressives.  Indeed, they haven't had a new idea since 1933.  If you want to compare it to the Republican plank:

- True, the theory of capitalism and the view of wealth creation as positive forces predates the t.v. by several hundred years. Not surprisingly, where it has been close to fully implemented, it has been the success story of history. As an aside, Friedrich Hayek, the most famous modern intellectual opponent of Keynsian economics, wrote his seminal work, The Road To Serfdom, in 1944.

- The idea that tax cuts might stimulate our economy most famously dates back to JFK, circa 1961.

- The idea that unions are a threat to our economy and need to be divested of power dates to Margaret Thatcher, circa 1984, who led her country to an economic boom and away from socialism.  Unlike the U.S., there are no more "closed shops" in Britain.

- Fighting against an ever expanding regulatory regime that strangles our economy is most closely associated with Ronald Reagan, who likewise led us out of a severe economic downturn into a rapidly expanding economy for over a decade.

So, when it comes to ideas, Obama is not presenting new ones, he is fully embracing old ones that have virtually all failed. You couldn't watch Obama's plank on black and white t.v. - you would have to hear about over the telegram or get it by special delivery from the pony express. Moreover, not only does Obama have no new ideas, even his schtik is old:



(H/T Jammie Wearing Fool and Instapundit)

(Welcome Larwyn's Linx readers)

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The Future Of The Internet

The internet is a staple of modern life. Yet its future direction is very much at issue. Michael J. Gross has written a detailed and enlightening article, World War 3.0, on the issue at Vanity Fair.

When the Internet was created, decades ago, one thing was inevitable: the war today over how (or whether) to control it, and who should have that power. Battle lines have been drawn between repressive regimes and Western democracies, corporations and customers, hackers and law enforcement. Looking toward a year-end negotiation in Dubai, where 193 nations will gather to revise a U.N. treaty concerning the Internet, Michael Joseph Gross lays out the stakes in a conflict that could split the virtual world as we know it.

Do read the entire article. This is one of those situations where everybody should be paying attention, though I suspect that for most people, it is slipping completely under the radar.

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Expanding Powers

Modern proponents of big government hold some very noxious views. One, they view all money made in this country as property of the government, subject only to what they opt not to tax. Two, these same individuals claim the right to expansive powers by asserting that our Constitution, laws and regulations mean whatever they want it to mean. The latter is a point Ann Althouse eloquently makes in her post on the assertion by Ray LaHood and other's that "e-cigarettes," which produce no smoke, none-the-less are regulated by anti-smoking regulations:

In a world where it depends on what the meaning of is is, all the government needs to do is interpret. Regulating interstate commerce includes forcing people to buy things they don't want to buy, and smoking includes not smoking. You can make anything you want be true, if you only believe. And "you" means "the government," and "believe" means "dictate."

Do read her entire post. It is well worth the read.

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A Conservative Economic Narrative

At City Journal, The Free Marketeers Strike Back. It is a long and probing look from the perspective of conservative economists at free markets, regulation, and the origins of our current fiscal crisis. I highly recommend the entire article. To summarize the conclusions:

- Keynes was demonstrably wrong.

- Rising costs of energy were implicated in our economic meltdown and are the looming challenge for our future economy. Our government is not moving to meet this challenge, it is moving in the opposite direction.

- Don't underestimate the importance of monetary policy. Keep interests rates high enough so that prices remain stable but sufficient currency and credit are available to finance steady growth. Interest rates set too low for too long are a major factor in causing spectacular bubbles. That is what happened with Greenspan and the housing bubble.

- Market bubbles are an inevitable part of capitalism. You can't kill bubbles without killing capitalism. It is only when bubbles are combined with a very cheap money supply that they become truly dangerous in size.

- Recessions, as a part of the business cycle, are an intregal part of capitalism. Recessions are necessary for our system to correct market imbalances. You can't stop recessions without killing capitalism.

- The much maligned derivative market brought tremendous financial benefit, particularly to the world's poor. They allow for the efficient allocation of risk, thus increasing the availability of cheap credit. Some have recommended greater transparency for the market by funneling them through a clearing house that would create a record of the swaps.

- Big banks do not bring any economy of scale and, therefore, we should consider limiting the ability of banks becoming "too big to fail."

- Big banks should not enjoy taxpayer protection because that harms free competition, putting smaller banks at a disadvantage

- Reasonable regulations are necessary to efficient markets, and that includes requiring sufficient reserves. Banks become far too overleveraged, leaving them vulnerable during the economic downturn.

- Republicans need to stand up more forcefully for markets.

- Ballooning American and European debt poses a huge threat to long-term prosperity.

- By increasing taxes and imposing the wrong regulations, Western governments are hindering entrepreneurship and hence growth, that is the path to long-term prosperity.

The one thing Guy Sorman touches upon in his article does not go into any great detail about is the dismantleing of traditional lending standards. It is critical to note that Democrats dismantled our lending standards in the 1990's on a now discredited assertion that racism was endemic in the mortgage and loan industries. Even though now fully discredited, the race based standards remain in our laws and have actually been strengthened by Obama as part of the financial regulatory overhall recently passed into law.

Sorman does make one interesting point in addressing this issue. That is that, in comparing U.S. to Canadian home ownership, the Canadians fared better because of higher down payment requirements, yet the overall home ownership percentage between the U.S. and Canada are the same, suggesting the final irony, that Democrats destroyed our credit system for nothing. Here is how Sorman addressed the issue:

. . . [E]asy money helped expand a massive credit bubble. And that credit helped fund a wild proliferation of risky subprime mortgages, often issued with little or no money down, thanks to relaxed mortgage-lending laws and to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the now-infamous “government-sponsored enterprises” that busily bought mortgages from lenders to keep homeownership expanding. The bursting of the bubble in 2008 brought the U.S. banking system, which had invested extensively in the subprime mortgages, to its knees. Given the enormous scale of the crisis, Taylor says, it’s clear that the private sector could not have caused it on its own. “Distorted incentives encouraged private speculation,” he says. “Central banks should return to their former global targets against inflation and be less erratic and more predictable.”

Taylor’s analysis draws support from a comparison of the financial crisis in the U.S. and Canada. Canadian banks, it turns out, weathered the financial storm much more effectively than American banks did. The reason: Canadian mortgages, unlike American ones, legally required robust guarantees, usually a 20 percent down payment. That helped keep homeowners from running away from their mortgage payments when things turned south, as happened in the United States. Canada and the U.S., it’s worth noting, still have the same percentage of homeowners—roughly 67 percent—meaning that the American incentives that favored risky bank behavior failed to increase ownership levels.

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Demonizing Credit Default Swaps

If you listen to Obama and the left tell the story, the cause of our economic meltdown had nothing to do with Fannie, Freddie, fraudulent bond ratings, or - at the heart of all of these - race based market distortions introduced by Democrats and protected with the race card right up until Fannie and Freddie failed. The left's boogyman is Wall St. greed as expressed through transferring risk to Fannie and Freddie and the use of Credit Default Swaps. And this meme has been picked up in Europe as regards Greece's fiscal meltdown.

I blogged on Credit Default Swaps in a long post on the origins of our economic meltdown here. Credit Default Swaps are basically insurance - a way of managing risk. There is nothing untoward about them - though they failed during the mortgage meltdown because of mark to market accounting rules along with a big assist from fraudulent bond ratings.

Now, the left, and the Europeans, want to place substantial restrictions on Credit Default Swaps. It is suffice, it to say, an unwise idea. This from Prof. Bainbridge:

. . . This is just absurd.

Let's review what credit default swaps are and how they work:

Credit default swaps (CDS) are a form of insurance. Let's say you borrow money from me. I'm worried that you might default. So I hedge that risk by purchasing a CDS. If you end up unable to pay me back, the seller of the CDS will cover my losses. (The insurance analogy admittedly is not exact, but it suffices for present purposes.

As the Journal explained, banning the use of CDSs as a hedging device would have adverse consequences, just as banning insurance would:

Any attempt to restrict CDS trades could result in unintended consequences such as more risk for the financial system and higher borrowing costs for a range of nations and companies, some analysts and investors warn.

Restricting credit-default swap trading could push up borrowing costs for various nations if investors feel they have fewer ways to protect themselves if the bonds' prices decline. . . .

. . . As the Journal explained:

[A] study released Monday by Germany's financial regulator, BaFin, found no evidence that credit-default swaps have been used to speculate against Greek national debt. The study showed the net volume of outstanding credit-default contracts on Greek national debt has remained unchanged since January at about $9 billion. This compares to total Greek government debt of about $400 billion. "The market data do not show massive speculation in CDSs," the regulator concluded. . . .

There is much more. Do read the entire post. The bottom line is that CDS perform an important function, and to regulate them out of existence or to severely circumscribe their use is very likely to have unwanted consequences. And the last thing the world economy needs now is more volatility.

Of course, that is the rational way of looking at it all. For Obama, who has shown that he is quite willing to demonize anyone (Chysler secured debt holders) or anything (insurance companies) for political ends, rationality would seem to be of little consequence.

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Obamadness - EPA To Start Regulating Carbon Emissions From Energy Producers Next Year

Our economy is in dire straights with the combined total of unemployed and underemployed well into the depression era levels of the 1930's. As the NYT pointed out a few days ago, many of those out of employment today can expect to be out of employment for years. The Obama administration has warred on private enterprise - paying not but lip service to the creation of jobs in the private sector. And now, the next shell is loaded in the Obama's howitzer aimed at private industry and the unwashed masses. Obama's EPA announced today that they will impose regulations on our energy industry next year in an effort to curb the dangerous pollutant that is carbon dioxide - all in an effort to stem global warming.

This from WaPo:

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson laid out the timetable for regulating greenhouse gas emissions Monday, writing in a letter to lawmakers that she plans to start targeting large facilities such as power plants next year but won't target small emitters before 2016.

The letter makes it clear the Obama administration will move ahead with curbing global warming pollution under the Clean Air Act unless Congress moves to stop it. Jackson emphasized that the administration was required to act under a 2007 Supreme Court decision that said greenhouse gases from motor vehicles qualified as a pollutant under the 40-year-old air-quality law. Jackson was responding to a letter several coal-state senators sent her late Friday.

"I share your goals of ensuring economic recovery at this critical time and of addressing greenhouse-gas emissions in sensible ways that are consistent with the call for comprehensive energy and climate legislation," she wrote.

Under the plan Jackson outlined, major emitters of carbon dioxide that are already seeking air-pollution permits would face regulation as early as the start of 2011. Medium-size emitters such as a large liquor distillery would not face restrictions until the second half of 2011 at the earliest, and smaller facilities such as dry cleaners and hospitals wouldn't come under the rules until 2016. . . .

Wonderful. The science of anthropogenic global warming is, today, in absolute tatters. As discussed here, the best that can be said about AGW today is that it is unproven. They are figuring that out in Europe (though it would seem that nary a word of that is appearing in our MSM). Yet the Obama administration isn't even blinking on this, thus proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that global warming is a political - not scientific - issue. Even treating it as a political issue, does it make any sense to impose higher costs on our energy sector - all of which will be passed on to the end user - during our greatest fiscal crisis since the Great Depression. It makes as much sense today as the Smoot Hawley Tarrif did in 1930. This administration doesn't just need to be voted out of office, they need to be banished to a Siberian gulag where they can contemplate global warming for the rest of their very cold lives - and not do any further damage to our nation.

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Thomas Sowell On Govt. Regulation

Thomas Sowell weighs in on Barney Frank, our government's role in causing this economic mess, and the stimulus. Prof. Sowell is always worth a listen.

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EPA's Latest On CO2 - Utterly Bizarre, But Hardly Unwelcome

Under questioning about the OMB document below, the One's EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, said that "a finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a public health danger won't necessarily lead to government regulation of emissions, an apparent about-face for the Obama administration." This is a reversal of her previous position that the EPA finding of carbon dioxide as a pollutant subject to the Clean Air Act would "trigger" EPA regulation.

Why the reversal - its unclear. What are the ramifications? I agree with the Chris Horner at the NRO on this, that Jackson's reversal in light of the release of the OMB document will have the effect of making it less likely that Waxman's Cap and Trade legislation will pass:

Without sufficient support from masochistic industry (to join the slavish rent-seekers actually behind the bill), Waxman-Markey won't pass Congress — maybe not even the House. So why should any fence-sitters support it now that the admiinistration has backed off its CO2 regulation through EPA? Wasn't the principal argument in favor of Waxman-Markey that "you'd rather be at the table while Congress is writing this than let EPA regulation open some devil-you-don't-know can of worms" (an argument that was nonetheless hard to accept for anyone who actually read Waxman-Markey)?

Well, no longer. Not now, with the EPA coquetishly indicating it may not write such a scheme after all. Any rational actor would take their chances with an iffy EPA, and then in the courts — especially in light of internal administration revelations, and given the climate-alarmism industry's arbitrary and capricious reliance on unverifiable and now disproven computer models.

Read the entire post. This is both a bizarre - yet welcome - turn of events. We will see how long it lasts before Ms. Jackson changes her position yet again at the behest of our thugocracy. Anyone care to bet on how long it takes for a horse's head to mysteriously appear in Ms. Jackson's bed?

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Obama Finally Finds Deregulation He Can Support

From telecommunications to electricity to banking to accounting, [Obama, during the Presidential campaign,] blamed the failures as a product of markets out of control, with not enough government regulations to rein in "an ethic of greed, corner cutting, insider dealing, things that have always threatened the long-term stability of our economic system."

According to Obama, deregulation, even under the Clinton administration, produced an “'anything goes' environment that helped foster devastating dislocations in our economy.” The proper government regulation can prevent the ''chaotic, unforgiving” nature of capitalism.

- John R. Lott Jr., Obama Bitter About Free Markets

While our Moral Compass In Chief may want to vastly expand the reach of government regulation in most every area of our economy and life, we now know that there is at least one area where he feels that the people involved are sufficiently upstanding, law abiding and with a proven track record of honest and fair dealing that deregulation is warranted.

Its Big Labor.

This from the Washington Times:

The Obama administration, which has boasted about its efforts to make government more transparent, is rolling back rules requiring labor unions and their leaders to report information about their finances and compensation.

. . . The regulation, known as the LM-30 rule, was at the heart of a lawsuit that the AFL-CIO filed against the department last year. One of the union attorneys in the case, Deborah Greenfield, is now a high-ranking deputy at Labor, who also worked on the Obama transition team on labor issues.

Labor officials declined to say whether she played a role in the new policy, noting that Ms. Greenfield is abiding by all government ethics rules. In court filings, she and other union attorneys called the 2007 rules "onerous."

The Labor Department also is rescinding another key labor financial disclosure regulation. The expansion of the so-called LM-2 rule, approved during the last days of the Bush administration, requires unions to report more information about finances and labor leaders' compensation on annual reports.

Critics worry that the rollback of union reporting requirements will keep hidden potentially corrupt financial arrangements aimed at rooting out corruption, but unions say the Bush administration reporting rules were unfair and burdensome.

. . . Under the Bush administration, the department defended the rules in court. In court filings, government attorneys argued that the new rules were needed to "bring to light a wide variety of financial transactions and arrangements - whether proper or improper - that pose conflicts of interest arising from the relationships between unions, their officers and employees, employers and businesses." . . .

Read the entire article.

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A Washinton Post Front Page Hack Job

The Washington Post is running a front page story that reads as an Obama press release. It is the worst piece of agenda journalism masked as news that I have yet seen. The story, "McCain Embraces Regulation After Many Years of Opposition," is explicitly premised on the latest Obama talking point that McCain is out of touch, vacilating on regulation of industry, and just now coming out in favor of greater regulation in the wake of the fall of AIG.

AIG is the insurer whose fiscal woes are wholly predicated on the sub-prime crisis and the fall of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nowhere in Shearer's piece does he note that it was McCain who co-sponsored legislation in 2005 to tighten regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. You can read here McCain's remarks in support of that bill and warning of the crisis that is now upon us.

McCain's bill died in committee under the leadership of Chris Dodd, the Senator who was the greatest recipient of largesse from Fannie and Freddie. He is also the same Senator who got below market mortgages from Countrywide, an institution that was tied at the hip to Fannie and Freddie. There is not a single mention of any of this in Mr. Shearer's article.

I said in the post below, McCain needs to come out swinging on the issue of the Fannie / Freddie meltdown and its reverberations thoughout our economy. This was a Democratic debacle from day 1, and it was Democrats who protected Fannie and Freddie against stringent regulation proposed by the Bush Administration and then McCain, quite literally creating the current fiscal crisis. Obama didn't propose or co-sponsor any of that legislation - he was busy at the bank cashing checks from Fannie and Freddie. This absolute piece of fantasy on the front pages of the Washington Post is part of a concerted effort to paint McCain and the Republicans with the sins of the Democrats. If the Democrats are allowed to rewrite history on this, it could be a game changer. And as this tripe from WaPo shows, the Democrats have the full support and complicity of the MSM.

And as a final aside, this ridiculous article seems to take the position that all regulation is good while deregulation is a bad. To call this piece anti-capitalist in its bent would be a fair assessment. Indeed, it could have been penned by Karl Marx himself.

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Environmentalists & Dems Opposed To Alternative Energy

If you listen to Obama's ad running during the Olympics, the only reason we do not live in alternative energy utopia today is because we have held back building it. Merely elect the One and he will "fast track" alternative energy to solve our needs and create millions of new jobs. It is the modern equivalent of promising to feed the masses with a few fish and loaves.

And the Goracle is pushing the same snake oil in television ads. His latest organization, WeCanSolveIt.org, is running its an ad pushing for a compete change to a carbon free U.S. in ten years. According to his site, with $4 gas prices, we can not longer afford to wait to get rid of gas and oil.

Alternative energy is far from ready for prime time. None of it is close to being cost effective nor is any of it proven to scale. Wind power and solar power combine to provide less than 1% of our energy today and both suffer significant drawbacks in their current form. That does not mean we do not want to toss a great deal of R&D money at it. But it does mean that anyone today who promises to replace oil, coal and gas with solar, power and bio-fuels is either insane or has an ulterior motive. And don't tell me that subsidizing the alternative energy is the key. That is simply hiding the true cost of energy by paying for the bulk of it through taxes. Further a massive change in infrastructure is going to take years - much of it because of opposition from Democrats and environmentalists.

But in at least one comparison, oil and gas exploitation stand on precisely the same footing as alternative energy. That is that both are exposed to the same insane environmental laws that hand the keys to the court house to every radical environmental group in and out of the U.S. And, as the WSJ points out today, when one goes from the utopian rhetoric to the real world practicalities, Democrats and the environmental lobby are as opposed to exploiting alternatives as they are to exploiting oil and gas:

This from the editors at the WSJ:

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live. In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%.

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."

California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a "renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a national renewable mandate. But the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.

Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.

Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.

Read the entire article. If we are going to stand any chance of addressing our energy needs before our economy gets truly hurt over the next one to two decades, the first thing that has to happen is a massive overhaul of the legal and regulatory framework that I blogged about here. The overhaul does not mean that we need to stop common sense protection of the environment, but it does mean that we need to take the ultimate decisions out of the hands of a judiciary and streamline the process for dispute resolution.

Update: EU Referendum notes a similar situation on their side of the pond:

Of course, we are experiencing exactly the same dynamic over here, as the greenies get their knickers in a twist over the conflict between saving the little tweetie birds and indulging in their wet dreams of a carbon-free future.

But then, since the real greenie agenda is to force us back into the Stone Age – as long as we don't light any fires with our flints – this sort of confusion is grist to the mill. There is nothing quite so carbon-free as no power at all – the inevitable consequence of this greenie schizophrenia.

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The EU Regulatory Burden

A recent report shows the soaring costs to the UK from over-regulation, with 2/3rds of it imposed or driven by the EU. In the last year alone, the cost of complying with new regulations rose an additional £10 billion ($20 billion). And the EU is just getting started.



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I blogged here of the tremendous costs that EU membership is imposing on the people of Britain. One portion of that bill is the direct and indirect cost of EU regulaitons.

The technocrats in Brussels are hardly evil people. But they suffer under the leftist's delusion that the answer to problems is ever more government regulation. Nirvana is possible with just that next bit of legislation. And to call some of it simply over-regulation would be too kind, such as the recent passage of legislation that will reduce Britain's carbon footprint by less than two hundreths of one percent, but will cost UK businesses £250 million pounds in lost business.

Combine that mindset with an EU government where democracy is minimized in a government form that provides no checks and balances, no way for any party to review the impact of new regulations once they are imposed by the technocracy, and you have a recipe for catastrophic over-regulation. As Der Spiegel put it, the EU is attempting to "perfect a system of total control."

This from Christopher Booker at the Telegraph:

A shock-horror report in last week's Sunday Times, based on the latest annual "barometer" from the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC), showed that the cost of new regulations to UK businesses, according to Government figures, had soared last year by a record £10 billion.

Their total cost since 1998 is a staggering £66 billion. . . .

. . . [T]he origin of these regulations were clearly apportioned between the EU and our own Government. And by far the most costly examples, such as the regulations on working time (£16 billion), vehicle emissions (£9 billion) and data protection (£7 billion), all originated from Brussels.

Of the top 10, eight were based on EU directives and the remaining two both had a strong EU dimension. These 10 alone imposed a total cost of £43 billion. . . .

Read the article.

The EU is not completely out of touch. They have, of late, decided to withhold imposing some of the more economy busting and questionable regulations, even after they have been rubber-stamped by the European Parliament. That said, but for a few such acts, the regulatory burden combines with mismanagement and grows largely unabated. One wonders which EU member state will be crushed under the burden first. I don't know, but I do know that in the UK, the pinch is just really starting to be felt.

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A Textbook Example Of EU Overregulation

A move to do away with outdoor heaters to combat climate change poses tremendous costs to Britain. In light of what it will accomplish, this is a textbook example of EU overregulation.


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A few weeks ago, I blogged about a long article in Der Spiegel describing how the EU is involved in a "tireless effort to regulate everything" - apparently oblivious to the tremendous economic costs and the impact on quality of life of such regulations. And today, the Daily Mail provides a textbook example of the EU in action.

The latest regulatory idea to come out of Brussels is to ban outdoor heaters "in order to tackle climate change." The fact that the carbon released by such heaters is so infitesimal - a total of .002 of one percent of Britain's total carbon emissions - as to have "no impact" on global warming is apparently besides the point. And apparently so is the economic impact of such regulations on the UK, where the cost to pubs, cafes and caterers of this regulation is estimated at a staggering £250 million a year in lost business. And since Britain has transferred to the EU the right to pass binding laws to combat global warming, Britain will have no choice but to comply with this new regulation once passed. The fact that the regulation makes no economic sense and will only detract from the quality of life in Britian matters not.

Read the article. As I noted here, the impact of the EU on Britan, of which overregulation is one aspect, portends to be economically opressive indeed.

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Slouching Towards Brussels & Economic Oppression

And what rough beast,
its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Brussels
to be born?''

My apologies to Yeats, from whom I request some indulgence for the minor rewording of the final stanza of his poem, The Second Coming.

The rough beast to which I refer is the European Union, now about to emerge from the treaty of Lisbon as a super-state and the central government for all its subordinate members. And from the vantage point of the average middle class person in Britain, the EU can only be seen as a rough beast indeed. The economic costs of this beast are only beginning to be felt. They portend to get much worse.

The average per capita GDP in the UK is estimated at £23,500 and is rising at about 2.9% annually. Enter the EU.

Food Costs –

The most basic expense for all people is food. And here, the EU is doing no one any favors. Their insane insistence on biofuel production is taking arable land and world wide agriculture out of the food business and into the energy business. Supplies of food are decreasing while demand is rising world wide. The outcome does not require a degree in economics to figure out. According to a recent Telegraph article, "food prices are accelerating at their fastest rate since records began, fuelling a rise in the average family's shopping bill of £750 a year." And to add insult to injury, we now know that biofuels are far less environmentally friendly than fossil fuels. The global warming enthusiasts at the EU who have politicized the science of climate change for their own ends still have not yet come to grips with that last bit.

Energy Costs –

Get ready for energy costs to make a real rise in the coming decade, compliments of the EU. The estimate right now from Open Europe is that households will have to pay up to £730 a year to fund plans to tackle climate change." That is assuming all goes as planned. The fact is that the numbers might only rise more as the brilliant plans hatched to meet EU targets for renewable energy appear to be boondoggles waiting to happen.

The cleanest source of renewable energy is atomic power which, right now, provides almost 20% of Britain’s energy needs. But aging plants will almost all be decommissioned before 2023, and while plans exist to build some replacement plants, the projection today is that atomic energy will be providing only 7% of Britain’s energy by 2020.

What is planned instead are a series of two very ambitious – and highly questionable – projects to meet the EU targets. The first is Severn Barrage Tidal project which is hoped to provide 5% Britain’s energy needs when built prior to 2020.

The cost of the 10 mile barrage is estimated at a minimum of 15 billion and would be the largest world wide. . . [T]he barrage could . . . provide up to 5% of UK electricity . . . The Renewable Energy Centre released a cautionary statement highlighting its concern that the Government, in its urgency to meet its carbon targets has "plumped for a project which will cost billions of pounds, take over ten years to construct and which may prove in the long term, not to be a cost effective or sustainable solution."

. . . The Barrage relies on the ebb tide and so produces energy only at these times in the tide cycle. Bearing in mind the fundamental principle that electricity can not be stored, this in effect creates supply spikes to the National Grid. In order to keep the power supply constant, the barrage will need to be supported by several gas fired power stations which in turn will produce carbon emissions. This will not only affect the cost effectiveness of the barrage but contradict the aim of finding other energy alternatives to fossil fuels.

Read the entire article. Other problems involve the impact on wildlife and sustainability of the barrage in light of silt build-up.

But then there is the real boondoggle - the insane plan hatched by Labour to turn Britain and its coastline into a giant wind turbine farm. Current plans are to generate 30% of Britain’s energy by wind turbines by the Year 2020.

The problem is that wind turbines are far from effective – and indeed, indications are that relying on wind power for anything over 10% of electricity needs destabilizes the power grid. That said, the one place that wind turbines have been tried in serious numbers – Denmark, which built enough wind turbines to generate 19% of their power needs- there have been all sorts of problems associated with them to the point where all further wind turbine construction has been halted. There is a good essay of the massive negatives associated with wind turbines here, and an excellent essay by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph not long ago. The bottom line is, between the insanity of the Labour government and the hubris of the EU, the middle class Brit is going to be taking it in the shorts on energy costs in the coming decade.

Immigration related costs -

The first thing to understand about immigration is that, for all practical purposes, it is the EU and not Britain which controls Britain’s borders. EU Treaties dating back to the 1957 Treaty of Rome require that Britain open its borders to all people from EU countries. Further, EU law plays the majority role in requiring Britain to allow in people from outside the EU – and than prevents Britain from getting rid of the worst of them.

And immigration into Britain is now at record levels, exceeding half a million foreign nationals each year – with corresponding record levels of British nationals emigrating. Beyond that, "a migrant baby boom is fuelling the fastest growth in the UK's population since the 1960s - with one in every five children now born to foreign mothers." The rate of immigration into the UK and the immigrant baby boom pose to add 50 per cent to today's population" in four decades. Indeed, the number of immigrants is so significant as to threaten the Central Banks controls on inflation. With that in mind, do recall that in 2004, the Home Office was telling Britain that immigration from the new EU states "would be no more than 13,000 a year."

One ramification of this is that now, "in a total of 1,338 primary and secondary schools - more than one in 20 of all schools in England - children with English as their first language are in the minority." This is putting a severe strain on school funding. And not surprisingly, it is putting a severe strain on all aspects of Britain’s infrastructure. Another aspect is the loss of jobs for Brits in their own country. "More than half a million British-born employees have vanished from the UK workforce since the influx of Eastern European immigrants." Gordon Brown made a pledge in September to "create British jobs for British workers" – but has since had to quietly bury the plan because it would be an illegal practice under EU law. One would think the Prime Minister might know how EU law effects his country and his ability to govern – particularly before signing away Britain’s sovereignty to the EU.

The increase in immigration is also driving a corresponding above inflation increase in local council taxes to meet the increasing demands on local infrastructure. The average local council tax is now up to £1,145. The average rise in council taxes is 4%. As an aside, the problems here are being compounded as Labour is redistributing council tax revenues from the strapped south to Labour electoral strongholds in the north.

And lastly, there has been an explosion – in some areas by more than nine-fold - in crime associated with the vast increase in immigrants, particularly those from Romania. They are lured by Britain’s "generous benefits system" and do appear to be making the most of it.

Dane geld to the EU -

Parliament which just approved a massive transfer of wealth to the EU after only a bit more than 3 hours of debate. As the EU Referendum calculates, that works out to a transfer of British tax dollars at a rate of "£481 million a minute." As it stands now, the UK’s "net contributions to the EU will increase from an already horrendously large £4.7 billion" to £10 to £11 billion in 2011. A warning to the UK citizenry – gird your loins and keep your hands on your wallets. The tax man cometh.

EU Regulation of the Economy -

The EU is still in its nascent stages – with its full powers far from reaching their zenith. Yet even now it is apparent that the EU is making "a tireless effort to regulate everything." And of course, all new regulations inevitably impose some financial cost to implement and enforce – and in the EU’s case, to decipher. In addition, many regulations impose additional burdens by raising the price of existing goods and services or making less costly options unavailable. For example, see here, here, here and here.

Then there is the other not quite salutary effects of regulation – making it difficult for new businesses to enter into and compete in highly regulated markets. It would seem the EU excels at that.

Update: See this humorous application of EU regulation. It falls into the category of "you just can't make this stuff up."

Summary:

So how much, in toto, is all of this going to cost the average Brit, today and a decade from now? If I had a supercomputer and a year to analyze direct and indirect costs, perhaps I might be able to find an answer. In any event, it is fair to say that the costs are already significant and will only rise based on all of the above. Given all the above, the cost of the EU for the average Brit portends to become oppressive over the next decade. The EU is seen by those on its gravy train as a socialist utopia. I doubt that vision will be shared by anyone not on that train, even today. Which is why Europe is in the midst of a coup, with the EU slouching towards Brussels to be born while the people of the UK and Europe are denied any say in its birth.

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Things Heat Up In The Anti-Capitalist Church Of Global Warming But Cool Down Everywhere Else

Science is only tangential to the orthodoxy of the Church Global Warming, the new religion of modern socialists and communists who have as their holy Trinity High Priest Goracle, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the European Union. Its interesting to note that the real religions are not too happy with this increasingly apocalyptic secular one. The Pope weighed in the other day "on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology."

But that will not stop the socialist acolytes of the Goracle. The new religion is beloved by socialists because they can use it to justify those things they hold most precious - centralizing power, regulating people's lives, redistributing wealth - and lastly because its a very rich gravy train for its clerics.

Indeed, the EU has now gone so far as to make global warming a part of their new Constitution created by the Treaty of Lisbon yesterday. By Article 4 of the new Constitution, the EU takes primacy to pass laws on the "environment." The 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. What mischief can the EU do with this new constitutional mandate? Europeans are already choking from massive over-regulation by the EU as described in this article by Der Spiegel. Something tells me they haven't seen anything yet.

And now, the holy trinity is holding their Holy Mass in Bali. And its no surprise that the homily at the Bali Conference was a call for a massive transfer of wealth from the US and rich capitalist nations to the UN for redistribution:

A panel of UN participants on Thursday urged the adoption of a tax that would represent "a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations." "Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs," Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, told Inhofe EPW Press Blog following the panel discussion titled "A Global CO2 Tax."

Schwank is a consultant with the Switzerland based Mauch Consulting firm Schwank said at least "$10-$40 billion dollars per year" could be generated by the tax, and wealthy nations like the U.S. would bear the biggest burden based on the "polluters pay principle." The U.S. and other wealthy nations need to "contribute significantly more to this global fund," Schwank explained. He also added, "It is very essential to tax coal."

The UN was presented with a new report from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment titled "Global Solidarity in Financing Adaptation." The report stated there was an "urgent need" for a global tax in order for "damages [from climate change] to be kept from growing to truly catastrophic levels, especially in vulnerable countries of the developing world." The tens of billions of dollars per year generated by a global tax would "flow into a global Multilateral Adaptation Fund" to help nations cope with global warming, according to the report.

There’s an economy buster for you - not to mention an invitation to fraud and graft on an unheard of scale. Yet High Priest Goracle has given such taxes his personal blessing. And lest you think this anything other than an anti-capitalist, socialist movement . . .

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.

And here . . .

The environmental group Friends of the Earth, in attendance in Bali, also advocated the transfer of money from rich to poor nations on Wednesday. "A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources," said Emma Brindal, a climate justice campaigner coordinator for Friends of the Earth.

One can almost hear their slogans now. No doubt it would be a mixing a bit of the Goracle with classical Karl Marx - say . . . "Global Warming Victims of the World Unite."

But while there are a lot of things heating up inside the Church of Global Warming, one of them is not the temperature. "The latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level. . . [Further] the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934."

And remember the melting of the Greenland Ice Cap. That has long been a centerpiece of the "proof" of global warming. Yet now, it seems the problem is not CO2 from above causing the problem, it magma seeping up through the earth’s crust underneath Greenland.

To believe in global warming, one has to accept the climate models used to predict the coming catastrophe as accurate. But it appears that might be a bit of a problem.

. . . [R]esearchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate "models" — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth’s surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions. . .

Indeed, these and a host of similar facts led a lot of heretical scientists who dissent from the global warming orthodoxy to attend the service at Bali where, in the spirit science, they were welcomed into the nave and asked to air their disagreements to the participants so that a searching discussion could ensue, all in the names of scientific advancement and intellectual honesty.

HAH

These scientists were less welcome at the IPCC's Bali Conference than an infestation of crab lice. The IPCC censored all "dissenting voices at Bali," preventing dissenting scientists from addressing the press and "from participating in panel discussions, side events, and exhibits." This from the (Senator) Inhofe EPW Press Blog (a font of global warming heresty):

An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to "have the courage to do nothing" in response to UN demands.

Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, had a blunt message for UN climate conference participants on Monday.

"Climate change is a non-problem. The right answer to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing," Monckton told participants.

"The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)" Monckton added.

Monckton also noted that the UN has not been overly welcoming to the group of skeptical scientists.

"UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I should not come to this conference. They have also made several attempts to interfere with our public meetings," Monckton explained.

"It is a circus here," agreed Australian scientist Dr. David Evans. . .

Evans, a mathematician who did carbon accounting for the Australian government, recently converted to a skeptical scientist about man-made global warming after reviewing the new scientific studies.

"We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don't cause global warming. We have the missing [human] signature [in the atmosphere], we have the IPCC models being wrong and we have the lack of a temperature going up the last 5 years," Evans said in an interview with the Inhofe EPW Press Blog.

Evans authored a November 28 2007 paper "Carbon Emissions Don't Cause Global Warming." . . .

"Most of the people here [at the UN conference] have jobs that are very well paid and they depend on the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. They are not going to be very receptive to the idea that well actually the science has gone off in a different direction," Evans explained.

And there is more. A group of 100 scientists sent the following letter to the UN Secretary General yesterday, raising concerns both about the faulty "science" underlying global warming and the manner in which it is politicized and edited by the IPCC:

Dec. 13, 2007
His Excellency Ban Ki-Moon Secretary-General,
United Nations
New York, N.Y.

Re: UN climate conference taking the World in entirely the wrong direction

Dear Mr. Secretary-General,

It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, . . .

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions. On top of which, because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it.

The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by government representatives. The great majority of IPCC contributors and reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts. . . .

Do read the entire letter. The High Church of Global Warming is the penultimate socialist scam. While it is very wise to conserve energy and to look for cheaper and replenishable fuel sources, that is not what is driving the socialists of global warming. We have to keep a close eye on this religion. They are passing the collection plate and demanding far more than a tithe. But, then again, what’s a little questionable science when there is world socialism, the destruction of capitalism and the redistribution of American wealth to be had. Let us all bow our heads and regulate.

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