The weekend's interesting reads

"A Glorious Mess" WSJ editorial:

"For months, the little tyrants of the global warming caucus – Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman, Ed Markey – have been trying to force the EPA into declaring that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant under current clean air laws, which could result in a cap-and-trade program by regulatory decree. Such posturing allows Democrats to display crocodile outrage and take credit for "leadership" on a popular goal, while shifting the blame for the costs of achieving it onto the EPA. In the bargain, it insulates them from political consequences and avoids the grubby business of actually crafting some global warming "solution."

The charade is too much for Mr. Dingell, the Chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee. Diverging from his prepared remarks, he said it was leading to "a glorious mess" and called the liberal bluff: "As a matter of national policy, it seems to me to be insane that we would be talking about leaving this kind of judgment, which everybody tells us has to be addressed with great immediacy, to a long and complex process of regulatory action."

If the conclusion on CO2 is desperately self-evident for the EPA, Mr. Dingell suggested, then the same should be true for the Democratic majority – even more so. Regulating carbon involves "inherently political decisions that should be made by the Congress. It should not fall to EPA by default."

I really got a kick out of this. Why are Democrats pushing so hard to force the EPA to do something? Why are congressional leaders letting the presidential candidates duke it out with their various plans if global warming is such a big problem? In Hayek's The The Road to Serfdom he talked about how in a socialist society, more and more details of how that society is to be run will be delegated to bureaucrats. Do we really want big issues, standards, etc decided by unelecteds with virtually no accountability? Why are Democrats letting it fall to these types? I think the answer is that they don't want to political blame to fall to them. They'd just rather it fall to someone else.

"An Alternative to 'Net Neutrality'" WSJ editorial:

"The good news is that while politicians and MoveOn were busy exploiting the episode to push a pro-regulatory agenda, Comcast and BitTorrent were fleshing out a new network management plan. It will allow file-sharers to use Comcast's network without slowing service for everyone else. And it shows that the private sector is perfectly capable of handling these issues on its own.

Government's role here, properly understood, is not to tell Comcast how to manage its network. Rather, it is to make sure consumers have alternatives to Comcast if they are unhappy with their Internet service. Today, almost everyone in the country has the choice of receiving Internet service from a cable provider or from a phone company. And the percentage of people who don't have that choice is shrinking rapidly.

BitTorrent doesn't want resistance from the Internet service providers that its users depend on, and Comcast doesn't want to lose customers to telcos because of bad service, so both companies had every incentive to work out their differences. And whaddaya know? They did. Maybe someone should tell the FCC's Mr. Martin that markets work."

"Pennsylvania Divided" WSJ op-ed by Jerry Bowyer:

"When there is liberty, he argued, some men will create more wealth than others. Property and class factions are the result. Members of these different economic classes are tempted to pass laws which help themselves at the expense of the overall public good. Over time this excessive self-regard distorts the gift of reason and causes people to think and speak in ways that seem strange to the country at large.

If that sounds a little like the Democratic Party today, it may be because the party...has come to be dominated by factions. In the Keystone State, those factions include African-Americans who dominate the inner-cities, upper-class white voters in the suburbs, working-class voters in the middle regions of the state, and Latinos, seniors and college students who are dispersed in geographic pockets. And of course, ubiquitous unions."

I think it's sad how politicians go after certain segments of the people and try to woo them in. I can't blame them for doing it, though. The idea is to, I think, start with a large base of voters and then add to that base by bringing in other, smaller groups without turning away your base until you reach a majority. The more concessions you give to the other groups, the greater your risk of some other candidate swooping in and taking them out from under you. Reagan did it with his coalition of social, defense, and economic conservatives. I even read this morning of how FDR did it also:

"If he followed his political instincts, furiously converting ephemeral bits of legislation into solid law for specific groups of voters, then he would win reelection [in 1936]. He would focus on farmers, big labor, pensioners, veterans, perhaps women and blacks."

You get elected by offering enough (at least minimally) non-conflicting carrots to the various groups of people until you have a majority.

"Horrors of a 'Crisis'" Washington Times editorial by George Will (HT: Cafe Hayek)

"The proportion of people aged 55 to 64 who are working rose 1.5 percentage points from April 2007 to February 2008, during which the percentage of working Americans older than 65 rose two-tenths of one percentage point. The Journal grimly reported, "The prospect of millions of grandparents toiling away in their golden years doesn't square with the American dream.

Oh? The idea that protracted golden years of idleness are a universal right is a delusion of recent vintage. Deranged by the entitlement mentality fostered by a metastasizing welfare state, Americans now have such low pain thresholds that suffering is defined as a slight delay in beginning a subsidized retirement often lasting one-third of the retiree's adult lifetime."

In 1935, when Congress enacted Social Security, protracted retirement was a luxury enjoyed by a tiny sliver of the population. Back then, Congress did its arithmetic ruthlessly: When it set the retirement age at 65, the life expectancy of an adult American male was 65. If in 1935 Congress had indexed the retirement age to life expectancy, today's retirement age would be 75."

We kind of have an entitlement issue here in America. Young people think they are entitled to the lives their parents live IN THEIR 50's! They want big homes, nice cars, fancy vacations in their 30's without having to put in the time and work to get there. As a result, they are putting off marriage and children for more lucrative pursuits. It appears the same occurs at the high end of the scale as well. People who are miffed they have to work an extra couple years before retirement. The quote from the WSJ is classic. To me, the "American Dream" isn't necessarily a life of luxury whenever you want it. It's the idea that you work hard for what you get. No one stands in the way of your ability to eat what you kill. But, you still bear the risks of the process to get there. If you're out hunting bears, you just might get eaten yourself. If you don't want to run the risk of getting eaten by a bear, don't hunt bears. I loved this line from the end of the article:

"The 96 percent of mortgage borrowers who are fulfilling their commitments, often by scrimping, may be grumpy bystanders if many of the other 4 percent -- those who found the phrase "variable rate" impenetrably mysterious -- are eligible for ameliorations of their obligations."

"Will Greenery Promote Growth, Save the World (and Money)?" WSJ letter (HT: Cafe Hayek):

"Fred Krupp's op-ed "Climate Change Opportunity" (April 8) overlooks what most climate change skeptics are skeptical of: government's ability to effectively regulate the economy. If there is a way to make money from alternative energy sources, the market will find it. There is no need for bureaucrats to lead the way. Government regulations at best distort the market to benefit politically favorable (read "green") industries, and at worst create unintended consequences that increase the cost of energy and energy innovation. Congress doesn't need to act in order for energy efficiencies to be realized by business; it needs to stay out of the way.


David Smith
Boston"

Don Boudreaux quoted a few of these letters, but I liked this one best.

"Nature is Not Bountiful" at the Say Anything blog (HT: Cafe Hayek):

"There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who “love Nature” while deploring the “artificialities” with which “Man has spoiled Nature.” The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of “Nature"-but beavers and their dams are. But the contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and hatred of dams erected by men (for the purposes of men) the “Naturist” reveals his hatred for his own race-i.e., his own self hatred.

In the case of “Naturists” such self-hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most at any rate."

This is a quote from the Robert A. Heinlein character Lazarus Long from the novel Time Enough for Love. When I mentioned this to my wife, I reminded her of this post at Cafe Hakek where Don compared the Earth Hour pledge to turn off the lights (and other electrical devices) for an hour to a commendation of Kim Yong-il and North Korea:

"[T]he WWF should award some special prize to the North Korean government, for that government keeps North Koreans not in any meager "Earth Hour," or even "Earth Day," but in what WWFers might call "Earth Decades" -- very little light ever. This picture of the Korean peninsula speaks volumes -- the Dark Ages today; a society keeping its carbon footprint tiny. Of course, in doing so it keeps itself also desperately poor, often even to the point of starvation."

She thought that the guys at Cafe Hayek were primarily opposed to nature-loving when it stood in the way of commerce. That might be true, though indirectly. The biggest thing they oppose is when environmental concerns stand in the way of human progress. Human progress is really the only way to pull the poor out of abject poverty. Giving them jobs, giving them power, giving them access to even a few of the things we enjoy in developed countries will help them the most. By choking off innovation and progress before it has a chance to get to them, we ensure they never get out.

I guess Don is in a nature-type mood, because he also left this post over the weekend:

"Optimal Population"

He was responding to Jeffrey Sachs in his book Common Wealth where he suggests the optimal world population is 8 billion. He says:

"So on this resources-are-very-tightly-limited supposition, as people decrease their material standard of living, the earth can sustain a larger population.

How do we know today at what average standard of living persons alive in 2050 will seek to achieve? We don't. It's conceivable that the typical person alive in 2050 will have become so devoted to saving the earth that the prevalent culture and norms will dictate that most persons settle for material living standards lower than those that ordinary Americans enjoy today -- or, perhaps even lower than ordinary Americans enjoyed in 1950. If so, then surely the "optimal" global population in the year 2050 will be lower than it would be if most persons alive in 2050 will seek to achieve living standards much higher than ordinary Americans now enjoy.

A much deeper problem with Sachs's eight-billion number is that, in calculating it, there is no way to predict how human creativity will alter the world during the next 42 years. It's ludicrous to pretend that we can know now what, say, the average MPG will be for internal-combustion engines in 2050. Hell, we don't even know if automobiles and lawnmowers and the like will still use such engines then."