Click on WORD or PDF for full content
David Warren is often hard to categorize. But, he leaves you thinking.
We learned a simple thing this week: that the BP clean-up effort in the Gulf of Mexico is hampered by the Jones Act. This is a piece of 1920s protectionist legislation, that requires all vessels working in U.S. waters to be American-built, and American-crewed.
So while, for instance, the U.S. Coast Guard can accept such help as three kilometres of containment boom from Canada, they can’t accept, and therefore don’t ask for, the assistance of high-tech European vessels specifically designed for the task in hand.
This is amusing, in a way: a memorable illustration of … the sort of stuff I keep going on about. Which is to say, the law of unintended consequences, which pertains with especial virulence to all acts of government regulation.
Reagan and Thatcher were eloquent on this, but made little progress against entrenched interests. My reader may imagine exactly what entrenched interest keeps the Jones Act in place.A large part of the function of all regulatory bureaucracies is granting exemptions to the moronic rules. This, in turn, creates the conditions for massive corruption, and in the case at hand, the phenomenon of “regulatory capture” — regulators and regulatees working hand-in-glove.
It is the stuff that brilliant Scottish moralist, Adam Smith, warned us against back in 1776. A “symbiotic relationship” tends to evolve, in 100 per cent of cases, between the big businesses that dominate an industry, and the big government that regulates them. They share such common interests as eliminating competition. …
…For another axiom of David Warren Thought is that everyone is conservative, in a field he knows something about. Reciprocally, there is a tendency to sport more and more liberal views, the greater one’s ignorance of a field (and therefore of its constraints). …
Victor Davis Hanson thinks that letting the academics run the country is a bit like letting the inmates run the asylum.
…Money is as despised in the abstract as it is pursued in the concrete. No one has run a business, worked much in dead-end, physical labor, or felt economic disaster when the economy went south. Tragedy instead for those who make it on the academic gravy train is the absence of an automatic pay increase, a refused sabbatical, or a hiring freeze. Academics damn Wal-Mart’s exploitation, but count on part-timers to work for a third of their own salaries for the same work — and thereby subsidize their own aristocratic perks. The PhD is felt the equivalent of a MD or MBA, and so leisured contemplation focuses on why less well spoken doctors and CEOs cruelly and so unfairly make so much more than far smarter professors. …
…The perverse was always preferred to the logical: so a Mao was better than a Churchill, Lincoln was faulted for not possessing 1999-era academic sensitivity, and FDR not WWII saved the economy from further depression. Versailles explains Hitler rather than his own insane hatreds. The Soviet and Chinese nightmares were problematic and based on misunderstandings of Marx rather than natural conclusions from him. The real fear after 9/11 is backlash, not more terrorism. The non-Christian nihilist Timothy McVeigh or the Columbine Satanists are proof of widespread Christian terrorism; the last 50 aborted Islamic terrorist plots are aberrations.
If you wonder how our present administration’s attitudes toward business, commerce, taxes, finance, race, national security and foreign policy now play out, just drop by a local faculty lounge for a few minutes and listen up — America in 2010 will suddenly make sense, and perhaps scare the hell out of you all at once. It all reminds me of the proverbial first-semester college student who returns home at Thanksgiving to his near-broke parents to inform them of all the “new” things he’s learned at university.
Tunku Varadarajan blogs on last night’s speech.
On Tuesday night, we saw the debut of a new oratorical exercise, one that may, in the short term—though, mercifully, without Nancy Pelosi seated in the background—come to rival the State of the Union (SOTU) address. Let us call it the State of the Oil Spill, or SOTOS. …
In the Las Vegas Review-Journal, J.C. Watts lays the cards out on the table.
…Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is one of the most articulate economic conservatives to recently emerge on the national scene. His “Roadmap” strategy — under-reported by the mainstream media — emphasizes that the truly needy need to be taken care of by government but middle-class entitlements must be reduced for the simple reason that there’s no money in the treasury for them. …
…Conservatives have long and rightly argued that governments do not generate wealth. They only distribute it. Jonah Goldberg in National Review writes that the challenge for both liberals and conservatives is simply to define how much distribution is “enough.” Goldberg asks: “What would an acceptable safety net look like? Who would be taken care of by taxpayers and for how long?” Rep. Ryan offers answers to those questions in his brilliant “Roadmap,” but ideologically driven liberals don’t. They simply scoff at conservative caution. Leading liberals maintain there’s no such thing as enough — a position obviously shared by President Barack Obama.
It has been said before, but bears repeating: The 2010 congressional races are shaping up to be the most important elections since The Great Depression. Will the Democrats be allowed to continue controlling the Congress and proceed to expand government, the deficit and the debt? Or will the voters elect a Republican majority pledging to put the brakes on President Obama’s policies and the dismantling of the private enterprise system? (And will Republicans keep their word this time?) …
Steven Hayward adds logical analysis to the MSM hysteria about the oil spill. The reported reason for the dead zone in the Gulf may surprise you.
…A recent study of seven basic ecosystem types, and their most typical perturbations, found that of ecosystems that make a recovery from various catastrophic events (and, it must be noted, not all do), ocean ecosystems disrupted by oil spills were the fastest to recover, often within a span of one to four years. As the New York Times noted in a 1993 story, the Persian Gulf recovered surprisingly faster than anticipated from the 1.2 million ton spill Saddam Hussein engineered in 1991: “The vast amount of oil that Iraqi occupation forces in Kuwait dumped into the Persian Gulf during the 1991 war did little long-term damage, international researchers say.” By contrast, forest lands disrupted by fire or deforestation can take more than 40 years to recover.
Besides increasing our reliance on tankers, there are two other reasons curtailing offshore production in the Gulf may not reduce the ecological risk to the Gulf Coast. First, other nations are unlikely to curtail their own offshore exploration in the Gulf. Cuba is drilling for oil within 100 miles of south Florida; Mexico has extensive drilling operations in the Gulf (and as mentioned above caused the largest single spill in history). Both Venezuela and Brazil are expanding their offshore exploration and production in deep water, and are likely to expand to the Gulf of Mexico if the United States scales back.
Second, while the Deepwater Horizon spill represents an acute short term shock to Gulf waters and the Gulf Coast, the chronic seasonal depletion of oxygen in the Gulf (aka the 8,500 square mile “dead zone” below the Mississippi River Delta) may be aggravated by one of the policy responses that has been suggested in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon: increased ethanol production. …
…A 2008 study published by the National Academy of Sciences observed that “nitrogen leaching from fertilized corn fields to the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River system is a primary cause of the bottom-water hypoxia that develops on the continental shelf of the northern Gulf of Mexico each summer.” The study concluded that our current ethanol production goals will increase dissolved inorganic nitrogen flowing into the Gulf by as much as 34 percent …
For a time, even Margaret Thatcher went over to the warming dark side. Shows what happens when you listen to the “experts.” But, eventually she became a skeptic.
… She voiced precisely the fundamental doubts about the warming scare that have since become familiar to us. Pouring scorn on the “doomsters”, she questioned the main scientific assumptions used to drive the scare, from the conviction that the chief force shaping world climate is CO2, rather than natural factors such as solar activity, to exaggerated claims about rising sea levels. She mocked Al Gore and the futility of “costly and economically damaging” schemes to reduce CO2 emissions. She cited the 2.5C rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a CO2-enriched world growing warmer. She recognised how distortions of the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing political agenda which posed a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of mankind.
In other words, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to the view of those who, on both scientific and political grounds, are profoundly sceptical of the climate change ideology. …