The Market Fundamentalist

Well, what do you know!

It seems like the anti free market left who nevertheless wants pot legalized has just come up against an economic fact of life–producers who enjoy a special government monopoly (in this case a relatively benign black market) that boosts their profits don’t want economic liberty!

Who would have thunk it?

Only those crazy libertarians, who bothered to read books like Gabriel Kolko’s seminal work, the Triumph of Conservatism! or happened to study that libertarian school of economics called Public Choice!

It seems that pot growers in California are just like any government protected industry. Busts and violence? Not so much of it in hippy Mendocino valley. Arrests? That’s for the hispanics and blacks in LA.

So, the cries of DONT LEGALIZE IT are coming not just from the PURITANICAL RIGHT, who are still watching “Reefer Madness”, but from the lefty pot growers themselves.

Remember when I talked about “Baptists and Bootleggers” in other contexts when it comes to fighting against free markets and consumer choice! Well, here is another gold plated example.

The Baptists–Those who sincerely believe that government has to protect us from ourselves, provide a stern one size fits all morality, protect “the children”, etc.

The Bootleggers–Those who profit now from government privileges, or who would profit from government subsidies (T Bone Pickens) or who would lose privileges if economic and personal liberty is expanded and/or reinstated (the pot growers and the police, DA, etc.)

Often seemingly political opposites jump into bed together to gain access to political power. The religious right and the feminazi left calling for government censorship of pornography, for example.

If one of the new bedmates stands to gain financially, or looks to protect what it already has financially, then you have the baptists and bootleggers scenario.

Like what is happening in California now with the Initiative to legalize pot.

Keep in mind the State of California has not put this on the ballot out of altruistic classical liberal desires to protect individual liberty.

They are doing it because they have shamelessly spent themselves into oblivion, and are looking for a new revenue stream.

Which was the main reason why Franklin Delano Roosevelt worked to overturn Alcohol Prohibition.

Money always talks. Only libertarians understand that the best way to promote social justice is to let it have its say.

The gap between Israeli Interests and US Interests is becoming wider. More important, it is becoming more visible to American citizens.

At the Washoe Co Republican Convention in Reno, I threw down the libertarian/paleocon gauntlet to the neocons and evangelicals who dominated the convention.

It started with the preamble, which declared the belief in US “exceptionalism” and praised the US for “spreading freedom around the world”.

To a libertarian, American exceptionalism is based on the idea that we were the first nation (after Switzerland) that proclaimed a belief in individual liberty and unalienable rights. It encompasses the radical notions of property rights, limited government, federalism, free trade and non interventionism. We are still the most famous nation that believes in these principles, but as we become more “Europeanized” or in other words more soft shoe fascist, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Asian Tigers. IF we do not reverse this trend, the 21 Century will truly be the Asian Century.

To a neocon and an evangelical Republican, the idea of American Exceptionalism includes the wrong headed idea that we have a “duty” to spread our “freedom” at the point of a gun. In other words, perpetual wars fought for perpetual peace.

I began my objection by at least congratulating the platform committee for NOT using the word Democracy, which is a complete surrender to Wilsonism. That the US should remake the Middle East in the name of Democracy, closely supervised by America of course, was justification for the IRAQ War used by George Bush and the neocons after they admitted that Saddam Hussein had no “weapons of mass destruction.”

To paraphrase Harry Truman, the “US wants to help all those who think like us, be themselves”.

I moved that the word “peacefully” be inserted into the phrase as “The US should PEACEFULLY extend freedom throughout the world.”

All hell of course broke loose.

One delegate even snickered that if my idea was passed it was equal to saying that the American Revolution should have been “peaceful”.

Later I encouraged him to read George Washington’s Farewell Address. See http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp

Washington, Jefferson and John Q Adams among many others understood that the American Revolution was NOT about spreading liberty around the world. It was about creating a new nation, one that would look to ITS OWN VITAL INTERESTS first, and NEVER play favorites or make needless enemies with other nations.

It was James Madison who declared that the quickest way to lose our liberty was to be in a series of wars. War, as Randolph Bourne pointed out more than a century later, is the health of the state. And when the state is healthy, the liberties of the people are weak.

Now only a few days after the Washoe County Convention, the world was startled by the confrontation between Vice President Biden and Bibi Netanyahu over the new West Bank Settlements.

Then another news bombshell-this one not so heavily commented on by Fox News. Biden was heavily motivated to confront Bibi because of GENERAL PETRAEUS, who has filed a report (perhaps with the White House itself) that says that Israeli policy is directly against US interests, and is costing American lives.

During the debate at the WCR convention over my motion to amend the Preamble, comments were made by delegates that Israel is “our greatest ally in the war on terror.”

Whoa, Kemo Sabe. Not so fast. Also in the news is the story of the assassination er the murder of Mahmud al-Mabhuh in Dubai on 19 January 2010 by the Mossad . It has come to light that the murder was facilitated by Israeli officials who cloned the passports of unsuspecting tourists in order to provide cover for its black ops overseas.

Identity theft is NOT cooperation with the US in the war on terror. It is endangering our efforts to provide security, not helping it.

The fact is that Israel is a nation, as even one delegate to the WCRC admitted, that was itself founded in terror, like many nations, and it is no better or worse than other nations. It is looking after its own self interests first. Its interests DO NOT ALWAYS COINCIDE with the vital interests of the US.

Those Americans who claim to be patriots and at the same time pledge undying fealty to the interests of a small nation that presents no VITAL INTEREST to the US should rethink their patriotism, instead of pointing fingers at the libertarians and paleocons who object to the SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP of the US and Israel.

Let’s face it. Israel has no oil. If the US has any vital interest in the Middle East, it is about protecting the free flow of oil. Our vital interests lay more with the Arab and Persian nations, not with Israel.

Our “special relationship” with Israel has more to do with SPECIAL INTERESTS who have powerful lobbies and can bring out the vote than with our national security or government’s basic duties under the Constitution of protecting Individual Liberty.

The Democrats used to be the most beholden to Israel. After the rise of the neocons and the Evangelicals in the Republican Party, both parties are locked into the “special relationship.”

But if the politicians are locked into it, the American People are not. The events in the news of the last few weeks are bound to cause many of them to rethink how the Israeli tail seems to always wag the American Dog.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/breaking-anti-lobbyist-obama-administration-recruited-left-wing-lobbyists-to-sell-bogus-green-jobs/?singlepage=true

I have reported several times regarding studies done in Europe (Spain, Denmark, Germany) that have concluded that government subsidized “green jobs” actually destroy more productive jobs than they create.

Now unlike Bob, who has dismissed all three studies as somehow the product of big oil, the Obama administration has taken them quite seriously. Seriously enough that the anti lobbyist Obama administration has asked George Soros to help fund a rebuttal study backed by (not big oil of course) but by BIG WIND. BIG WIND is an entity known as the American Wind Energy Association which has as its funders not just corporate welfare seekers like GE but numerous EUROPEAN wind and solar power companies who are panicked that the European studies criticizing their domestic subsidies might not only hurt that welfare stream, but also that they could damage the potential huge new export market known as the USA. In fact, Germany, France and Italy have made some efforts to reduce feed in tariffs and other subsidies as their consumers suffer under high energy costs in a deep recession.

Which just goes to show that it is not lobbyists in general that the left doesn’t like, but only those lobbyists that pitch facts and figures that they don’t approve of.

So,

Big Oil lobbyists BAD. Big Wind lobbyists, GOOD.

The Freedom of Information Act has been used to ferret out the cozy ties between the Administration and BIG WIND. Some of the requests have been denied, and are on appeal. But the very reason for the denial is alarming. The administration has claimed it denied the requests because the email correspondence between the administration , ie

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Boulder, Colorado.

NREL is an extension of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). EERE is run by Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi, who, until assuming this post, served as CEO to Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. Zoi is responsible for many millions of the “green jobs” stimulus dollars pushed for and designed by Van Jones (this according to Jones himself).

and the Soros foundations is “inter agency correspondence”. In other words, between GOVERNMENT AGENCIES. Are we then to make of this that George Soros and his foundations ( especially the Center for American Progress ) are in fact government agencies? Very interesting.

Now there is a spat between the administration and NREL about who asked who to generate the rebuttal report, which was not written by economists, but by two activists in NREL. EERE says NREL took it upon themselves to write the rebuttal. NREL says EERE told them to.

Aside from the battle of the acronyms over who spilt the milk, the milk itself is curdling rapidly. The substance of the rebuttal report is not about the conclusions of the European studies trashing welfare for green energy, but about the methodology.

The Spanish paper suffered from a “lack of rigor.”

– The Spanish paper applied “consensus economics.”
What pray tell is “consensus economics”? Why, nothing more than the same economics that are applied in the real world to solve real problems about how to allocate resources. What would the Obama lefties prefer that the European studies used? Why it would be: input-output (or Leontief) methodology designed for central planning, in which all is assumed to be knowable, controllable, and static. This method has been discredited outside of social democratic government agencies and select associations

The problem with Leontief modeling is ( as I have posted a while ago) that it is similar to GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE modeling–that it is garbage in, garbage out. You have to have massive amounts of data input into a funnel that spews out predictions but, what if the data is incomplete? In global warming modeling, it is becoming more and more apparent that the data on water vapor was always woefully incomplete. For economic modeling, how can any central planner have enough knowledge in his mind when knowledge is dispersed throughout society in millions of minds ? What if real people in the real world do not react to the data as you assume they should?

All central planners believe they know enough to play God with real people. But, as ADAM SMITH said in the eighteenth century, people are not pieces on a chess board. There are all sorts of unintended consequences that cannot be modeled as real people react to real life incentives and barriers that they are confronted with by agencies backed by the guns of the state.

So, in real life government subsidies to industry, whether it is old established industry like big oil, or new industry like wind and solar, will produce unintended consequences that will lead to inefficiencies and waste.

Better to let the real people in the real world make their own decisions based on market choices than have technocrats try to decide what is best for them, and for some big abstraction, like “the planet”.

Brendan