Here’s a bailout we should welcome:
Some rich countries are planning a “great escape” from promises to fight climate change as recession bites and a deadline nears to agree a new treaty, China’s climate ambassador Yu Qingtai told Reuters on Wednesday.
“The only conclusion many people like me are drawing is that some (rich) countries are preparing for the great escape from Copenhagen,” Yu said in an interview. His comments underlined concerns that U.N.-led climate global negotiations in Poznan, Poland, are treading water as many delegates and observers question the chance of agreeing a comprehensive treaty as planned in Copenhagen next year.
It’s time to stop treading water and get out of the pool altogether. We’re simultaneously entering an open-ended cooling period and an open-ended economic downturn. No one’s interested in allocating precious funds to make sure our cold planet doesn’t come to a boil. (Well, no one except our delusional Capitol Hill Democrats, who are certain to burden the newly propped-up auto industry with unnecessary CO2-reduction requirements.)
After an endless election season of myth and fantasy, it feels as if we’re finally entering the season of long-awaited truths. The Iraq War will not end, Guantanamo will not be immediately shuttered, detainee interrogations will continue to be harsh, Iran is not open to persuasion through dialogue, winning in Afghanistan is not a simple matter of redeploying troops from Iraq, Barack Obama was delivered out of a sleazy political machine, and climate change isn’t a real issue. Forget about Obama not being the person you thought he was; it’s the world itself that’s failed to conform to election season renderings.
No, it’s not about growth. It’s about stealing money at gunpoint from productive people, in order to give it over to unproductive ones. Once that latter group comprises a majority of voters–we’re pushing it–then the tyranny of the majority makes further theft all the easier.
“You can, if you like the model of Western Europe, have a high-tax country with very large domestic spending. Or you can have a vibrant free market, with the benefits of higher personal wealth and low unemployment. But we haven’t seen many (any?) instances in which a country was able to manage both”– Jennifer Rubin
Yeah, it’s called America. We blend socialistic and capitalistic policies, and we are making a choice of one over the other only in the fevered minds and overheated rhetoric of the Right.
No one argues for doing away with capitalism — only about how to take the rough edges off. That’s why we do things like retrain workers displaced by free trade deals. Social security, medicaid, medicare, all socialistic. I don’t see any Republicans trying to get rid of them. Progressive tax system — socialistic. How many Republicans are actually calling for a flat tax? So quit with the hypocrisy. We’re as prosperous and competitive as any nation in the world. More so when Democrats are in office. The last president to erase a deficit was a Democrat. The next president to erase a deficit will also be a Democrat.
If you want people to take you seriously, beyond the wingnut bubble, you might want to rein in the hyperbole.
HOLY COW! Did you look at Gallup today? Obama’s approval jumped to 65% — four points in one day. America loves its radical socialists, eh?
I repeat myself, but what are liberty and prosperity compared to the aggrandizement of the media/academic/regulatory elite? For a while it seemed like this might just be Jimmy Carter’s second term, bad enough but recoverable. It now looks as though it might be much, much worse.
If you want people to take you seriously, you might work harder at hiding your idolatry. After you’ve… freshened up, and are ready to conduct a discussion, you might try to answer Rubin and Russell’s arguments, presuming you’re capable of doing so, instead of converting them to straw men or re-stating the obvious. You’d have to be living in some schizophrenic’s alternative reality to be unaware that the US was not and never has been a pure capitalist state. As for the polls, what would be truly unexpected would be if a new President gave a speech to the nation outlining his views and plans, and, rather than moving opinion polls in his direction, lost support.
The traditional (and successful) government-industry partnership for technology development involves federal funding of basic research (very risky, but lower cost per project, thus many “far out” technologies can be tried) and tax-breaks for corporations and venture capitalists to try and commercialize the technologies which seem most promising (more expensive but less risky and with greater potential payback).
PBO’s “green” energy policy is upside down. It pushes technologies to commercialization that haven’t been proven to be cost-competitive. And piling cap-and-trade taxation on top just adds cost to energy, instead of reduces it.
Take wind power. It’s great…for running a mill. But for wind power to be a key contributor to the 21st century power grid requires coming up with economical solutions to practical problems like energy storage and distribution. The time frame for something like this is more like decades, not 2 or 4 or 8 years.
Ari writes: The next president to erase a deficit will also be a Democrat
You’re funny… lol
In the past, we blended socialistic and capitalistic policies.
That is no longer the case.
The democrats and, the useful idiots that support them are making a choice for socialistic policies that will prevent recovery. That is not a ‘blend’ but the abandonment of such.
It’s not a ‘blend’ to tell doctors and insurance companies what treatments they may offer.
It’s not a ‘blend’ to hamstring an economy with cap and trade.
It’s not a ‘blend’ to erect a ‘Fairness’ broadcasting policy that solely targets talk radio while ignoring the blatant bias of the MSM.
It’s not a ‘blend’ to insist that economically non-competitive and unproven but environmentalist approved alternative energies will be promoted while proven, cost effective technologies are effectively banned.
There’s factual substance behind the “overheated rhetoric of the Right” and the refusal to acknowledge it, changes it’s veracity, not a whit.
Business will pass bill to all Obama cultist followers. They are willing and pay homage to their Messiah.
Obama Messiah is too big to fail.
I don’t think it is too hard to see what Obama is up to here.
His self-flattering view of himself as a new Lincoln is a key. Some writers (e.g., Gary Wills) have famously argued that Lincoln redefined the American constitution and the meaning of the Declaration of Independence through his rhetorical initiatives at Gettysburg, in the Second Inaugural, and elsewhere. I think it is clear that Obama is seeking, with the aid of his rhetorical gifts, to redefine the goals and roles of the government in American life–he sees himself as Abe Lincoln II, creating a historic shift in how we conceive of ourselves as a nation and a political community.
For this reason, Obama welcomes our economic recession, wishes to amplify our fear of it, and to thus use it as version of the American Civil War–as an opportunity to create wideranging and deep changes in the political community.
God help us. Honest Abe wasn’t as disingenuous and decpetive over the entire course of his life as Obama is in a single speech, press conference, or titling of a piece of legislation. Obama seems to think that the purpose of rhetoric is to distract the nation from what he is actually doing.
Our current President has me thinking of Thomas Kuhn’s work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Specifically where he discusses the issue of new paradigms either shattering or challenging long held paradigms. However, these new assumptions often run into strong resistance from existing assumptions, especially when they may be incompatible.
What we have is a war of paradigms and the question is whether the public-at-large will accept the ultimate cost of the President’s. I suspect the public does not really have a grasp yet of the path he is going down. It is not a path that will lead to a bi-partisan support. In fact, it may be incompatible.
The author is Russell Roberts, not Robert Russell.
#7,”It’s not a ‘blend’ to tell doctors and insurance companies what treatments they may offer.”
That’s exactly what HMOs,PPOs,and Health Insurance have been doing for twenty years;it’s called practicing medicine without a liscense. They deny legitimate physician proscribed treatment payments under false rationale such as “experimental procedure” etc etc, You can’t beat city hall even if “city hall” is privately owned,(I’m talking from extensive experience on this issue)
9
“Obama seems to think that the purpose of rhetoric is to distract the nation from what he is actually doing.”– aardvarck
So silly. What he’s doing is exactly what he promised he’d do during a two-year campaign. Get out of Iraq. Invest in green energy. Cut taxes on the middle class; raise taxes on the wealthy. Close Gitmo. End torture. Send troops to Afghanistan. Expand healthcare coverage.
Beyond the stimulus plan, which let’s face it, was knocked together in a hurry in response to an acute problem, Obama has stuck to his platform.
It might be more familiar to conservatives if they hadn’t spent all their time during the campaign trying to invent troubling associations. Good lesson for next time. Stick to the issues instead of the character assassination. You’ll still lose, but you won’t be so surprised in the aftermath.
#7
So much confusion.
The Fairness Doctrine is a straw man. Very few Democrats care about it. Obama opposes it.
But to pretend that airwaves are a free market shows that you don’t even understand the boundaries between public and private. The airwaves are public. The government grants local monopolies (licenses) to radio stations, which are obligated to act in the public interest. Now if you have a government-created monopoly and are allowed shut out all opposing voices, how does that serve the public interest? And what if one company owns all the major stations in a market? Then you can really shut out all other opinions. Now, you can tell the local talk station that it must diversify its programming. That is the Fairness Doctrine. Or you can make sure that no one company owns too many stations in a market. That is Obama’s preferred way to ensure diversity of opinion. It increases competition and the free-market-like aspects of broadcasting.
And “cap and trade” is hardly socialistic. It is employing a market-based mechanism to correct a flaw in the free market and allocate costs efficiently. As I’m sure you know, pollution is an externality — its cost is not fully capture in market prices. Let’s say I make circuit boards, and flush the pollution out to sea. The pollution isn’t a cost for me. But consumers pay for it in areas like healthcare. The costs are passed on to society, and I , the manufacture, have no incentive to produce less pollution. Well, if the free markets were working perfectly, the manufacturer who produced the pollution would bear the cost. This is the only way the manufacturer has any incentive to find processes that cut pollution, and the only way to ensure that they are not pushing off costs on others. That’s the aim of cap and trade.
#14,
It’s not the air waves themselves which are in question. The free market regulates by responding to what people find of interest. It’s not conservative talk radio which is ‘shutting out’ competition, it’s the failure of people to respond to leftist points of view. Air America failed, live with it. Instead of having the intellectual honesty to admit it, you falsely characterize it as an issue of ‘fairness’.
Your whole argument collapses when the same logic you apply to radio is applied to TV. Your failure to acknowledge that… demonstrates intellectual dishonesty.
It’s not in the ‘public interest’ for the MSM to dominate TV discussion with left-wing propaganda, yet that bothers you not at all. That indicates an agenda upon your part; “good for me and mine but not for you and yours”…but what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose.
Cap and trade is socialistic. It artificially attempts to make things ‘fair’, by forcing manufacturing to ‘artificially pay’ for a by-product of production. It’s not the needed reduction in pollution that’s the issue. We all agree on that, no one likes pollution. It’s that cap and trade is a socialistic, inefficient means by which to attempt to control pollution.
Taxing domestic producers always results in higher consumer prices. When foreign imports enter the equation, the certain result is domestic products being placed at a competitive disadvantage. Over time, that results in a reduction in our manufacturing base, a concurrent loss of good paying jobs and a greater trade deficit. That results in an increase in deficit spending and all of that adds up to a poorer country.
I don’t doubt that you mean well but like all ‘useful idiots’ you do far more harm than good.
#14
The airwaves are public? Maybe you can make a case that the atmosphere belongs to the public, in that everyone breathes the air, but that certainly doesn’t apply to the invisible electromagnetic spectrum. You might be able to justify the government or, in this case, an organization of governments, assigning the broadcast frequencies to eliminate interference, similar to painting a line down the middle of the highway and assigning traffic to the right side. But that doesn’t mean the “public”, and by extension, the government has any ownership rights to that spectrum or any portion of it. And the public has no investment in the airwaves. Where does that logic end? What about sunlight? If the public “owns the airwaves”, couldn’t they just as logically own the sunlight shining on the country and charge solar panel sunlight “harvesters” for the energy produced? And the air around us, that transmits the sounds we make with our vocal cords, does the public own that as well? I want a big tax on rap “music”.
And the “cap and trade” charade is silly, too. Who determines the cost? There’s no market input on the societal cost. There are already a multitude of regulations governing these issues, cap and trade is just an extortion device to increase government tax receipts.
Leftist does not like to be lecture of their flawed socialism. Let me know if ardent followers/leaders of socialism like Europe pay their taxes.
Power corrupt absolutely.
#12,
It’s true that private insures and HMO’s control costs by limiting expensive procedures.
But comparing HMOs, PPOs,and Private Health Insurance to what is effectively the beginning of government controlled ‘universal’ health care is comparing apples to oranges.
The latter socializes medicine; removing choice and centralizing control. In time, socialized medicine destroys the incentive for pharmaceutical research. It removes the engine of individual ambition and substitutes the inertia of the committee and bureaucratic institution.
It places the statistician at the pinnacle of decision making and, any time number crunchers are in control… humanity is lessened and freedom is lost.
#18
You’re missing the point,they have pre-opted the diagnosis and prescription process from the physician-patient relationship;this is something medicare has stayed away from. If the insurance company(Payer) is in charge of the Medical decisions,who needs a doctor. We’ll just call Blue Cross,email them the symptoms,they’ll classify them under a DRG,and order the treatment. Socialized Medicine could learn something from the HMOs And By the way,the only reason that HMOs are in business is because of a Government Subsidy,which allowed them to operate as an insurance company while waiving the Capital requirements to be an insurance company.
RCAR – yes but the HMO had to offer a good enough plan to attract customers. And why was there a battle on treatment? Because the customer (the employee) and the payer (the employer) were different people. The problem is third party payer systems. We could fix the health care market in just a few years if we made all third party payer systems – employer, medicaid, medicare – go away and tell people to buy their own.
People love to spend other people’s money, and what they have failed to notice is that they have given up pay increases because of it. The reason for the requirement for insurance companies to get involved in setting standards for care – because the provider will spend on treatment like a drunken sailor if someone doesn’t say stop, because the patient will never say whoa. Every hospital in this country has consultants running around telling them how to increase billings/revenue. There is no entity telling them to stop. So employers ask insurance companies to say stop.
And Ari – I was giving you a legitmate hearing because you make some good points – but Cap and Trade. Come on. Go ask Europe how that is working out. There is no market there – it is a tax increase with the government allowing rent seekers to collect the tax and keep a portion for themselves. That doesn’t even get into the question of CO2 as a pollutant.
“The Fairness Doctrine is a straw man. Very few Democrats care about it. Obama opposes it.”
If very few Democrats care about it, Ari, why is Dick Durbin introducing legislation on the Senate floor to bring it back?
#19,
Not considering your point of the HMO’s partial co-opting of the doctor-patient relationship as significant to the discussion is not the same thing as missing it, RCAR.
I’ll only add to JEM’s salient response, that the HMO’s etc. admittedly partial step in the direction of socialized medicine is no more the same as mandatory government controlled universal health care…than a man removing his shirt is the same as the ‘full monty’. They are entirely different things and, HMO’s partial co-optiion in the doctor-patient relationship in no way abrogates the points I made in #18.
Democrats don’t want economic growth, they want power and a more “just” society, which to them means more government (and more power for themselves).