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Perhaps someday there will be an explanation why the worst environmental actors are governments. Examples would be anyplace in the former Soviet Union, nuclear weapons production sites in the United States, and now we learn about China in WSJ’s Saturday Essay, “China’s Bad Earth” from last weekend.
In Dapu, a rain-drenched rural outpost in the heart of China’s grain basket, a farmer grows crops that she wouldn’t dare to eat.
A state-backed chemicals factory next to her farm dumps wastewater directly into the local irrigation pond, she says, and turns it a florescent blue reminiscent of antifreeze. After walking around in the rice paddies, some farmers here have developed unexplained blisters on their feet.
“Nothing comes from these plants,” says the farmer, pointing past the irrigation pond to a handful of stunted rice shoots. She grows the rice, which can’t be sold because of its low quality, only in order to qualify for payments made by the factory owners to compensate for polluting the area. But the amount is only a fraction of what she used to earn when the land was healthy, she says. The plants look alive, “but they’re actually dead inside.”
The experiences of these farmers in Dapu, in central China’s Hunan province, highlight an emerging and critical front in China’s intensifying battle with pollution. For years, public attention has focused on the choking air and contaminated water that plague China’s ever-expanding cities. But a series of recent cases have highlighted the spread of pollution outside of urban areas, now encompassing vast swaths of countryside, including the agricultural heartland.
Estimates from state-affiliated researchers say that anywhere between 8% and 20% of China’s arable land, some 25 to 60 million acres, may now be contaminated with heavy metals. A loss of even 5% could be disastrous, taking China below the “red line” of 296 million acres of arable land that are currently needed, according to the government, to feed the country’s 1.35 billion people.
Rural China’s toxic turn is largely a consequence of two trends, say environmental researchers: the expansion of polluting industries into remote areas a safe distance from population centers, and heavy use of chemical fertilizers to meet the country’s mounting food needs. Both changes have been driven by the rapid pace of urbanization in a country that in 2012, for the first time in its long history, had more people living in cities than outside of them.
Yet the effort to keep urbanites comfortable and well-fed has also led to the poisoning of parts of the food chain, and some of the pollution is traveling back to the cities in a different—and for many, more frightening—guise. …
Richard Epstein posts on the president’s first “pivot to the economy” speech.
… The President’s speech at KnoxCollege needs some close deconstruction because it sheds harsh light on a problem that has dogged his domestic policy agenda from the beginning: intellectual rigidity. The President, who has never worked a day in the private sector, has no systematic view of the way in which businesses operate or economies grow. He never starts a discussion by asking how the basic laws of supply and demand operate, and shows no faith that markets are the best mechanism for bringing these two forces into equilibrium.
Because he does not understand rudimentary economics, he relies on anecdotes to make his argument. He notes, for example, that the Maytag plant that used to be in Galesburg is no longer in operation—it closed in 2004—but he never asks what set of forces made it untenable for the business to continue to operate there. He never mentions that Maytag’s relocation of its manufacturing operations to Mexico may have had something to do with a strong union presence or the dreadful economic climate in Illinois.
Unfortunately, our President rules out deregulation or lower taxes as a way to unleash productive forces in the country. Indeed, he is unable to grasp the simple point that the only engine of economic prosperity is an active market in which all parties benefit from voluntary exchange. Both taxes and regulation disrupt those exchanges, causing fewer exchanges to take place—and those which do occur have generated smaller gains than they should. The two-fold attraction of markets is that they foster better incentives for production as they lower administrative costs. Their comparative flexibility means that they have a capacity for self-correction that is lacking in a top-down regulatory framework that limits wages, prices, and the other conditions of voluntary exchange. …
… The President seems utterly incapable of seeing the downside to any of his policy choices. They are announced from on-high as all gain and no pain. In the face of stagnant growth, weak corporate earnings, and continued high unemployment, he shows not the slightest recognition that some of his programs might have gone amiss.
It is easy to see, therefore, why people have tuned out the President’s recent remarks. They have heard it all countless times before. So long as the President is trapped in his intellectual wonderland that puts redistribution first and regards deregulation and lower taxation as off limits, we as a nation will be trapped in the uneasy recovery that will continue to dog us no matter who is chosen to head the Federal Reserve.
Charles Krauthammer has words.
I find it astonishing that he goes around making speeches in which he deplores the state of the economy, the growing income inequality, chronic unemployment, staggering middle class income, and it’s as if he has been a bystander, as if he’s been out of the country for the last five years. It’s his economy; he’s the president.
He’s talking as if this is the Bush economy, I don’t know, the Eisenhower economy, and he just arrived in a boat and he discovers how bad the economy is. This is a result of the policies he instituted. He gave us the biggest stimulus in the history of the milky way, and he said it would jump start the economy. The result has been the slowest recovery, the worst recovery since World War II, and that is the root of all of the problems he’s talking about, the income inequality — the median income of the middle class of Americans has declined by 5% in his one term. So who’s responsible for that? Those were his policies. He talks about this in the abstract and he actually gets away with it in a way that I find absolutely astonishing, it’s magical. This is his economy and he’s pretending he’s just stumbled upon it. And the policies he proposes are exactly the ones he proposed and implemented in the first term. (Special Report, July 29, 2013)
In the speech on Tuesday, we heard the old meme about the minimum wage. Jason Riley posts on it.
… There continue to be better alternatives to minimum-wage increases, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, if the goal is to help the poor. But then, his rhetoric notwithstanding, Mr. Obama isn’t pushing for a higher minimum wage to help alleviate poverty. He’s advocating it, first and foremost, in deference to Big Labor. Unions like minimum-wages because they price people out of the labor force, and fewer workers means higher wages for their members. As Thomas Sowell, a student of Stigler’s at the University of Chicago, writes in “Basic Economics,” “Just as businesses seek to have government impose tariffs on imported goods that compete with their products, so labor unions use minimum wage laws as tariffs to force up the price of non-union labor that competes with their members for jobs.”
Mr. Obama wants a higher minimum wage because that’s what a key Democratic special interest wants. The impact on the poor is at best a secondary concern.
And while the president visited Chattanooga Tuesday, the local Times Free Press editorialized; ”Take your jobs plan and shove it, Mr. President: Your policies have harmed Chattanooga enough”
… Welcome to Chattanooga, one of hundreds of cities throughout this great nation struggling to succeed in spite of your foolish policies that limit job creation, stifle economic growth and suffocate the entrepreneurial spirit.
Forgive us if you are not greeted with the same level of Southern hospitality that our area usually bestows on its distinguished guests. You see, we understand you are in town to share your umpteenth different job creation plan during your time in office. If it works as well as your other job creation programs, then thanks, but no thanks. We’d prefer you keep it to yourself.
That’s because your jobs creation plans so far have included a ridiculous government spending spree and punitive tax increase on job creators that were passed, as well as a minimum wage increase that, thankfully, was not. Economists — and regular folks with a basic understanding of math — understand that these are three of the most damaging policies imaginable when a country is mired in unemployment and starving for job growth.
Even though 64 percent of Chattanooga respondents said they would rather you hadn’t chosen to visit our fair city, according to a survey on the Times Free Press website, it’s probably good that you’re here. It will give you an opportunity to see the failure of your most comprehensive jobs plan to date, the disastrous stimulus scheme, up close and personal.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 helped fund the Gig to Nowhere project, a $552 million socialist-style experiment in government-owned Internet, cable and phone services orchestrated by EPB — Chattanooga’s government-owned electric monopoly. …
Rich Lowry has more on the execrable Howard Zinn.
… A People’s History is a book for high-school students not yet through their Holden Caulfield phase, for professors eager to subject their students to their own ideological enthusiasms, and for celebrities like Matt Damon, who has done so much to publicize it. If it is a revelation to you that we treated Native Americans poorly, and if you believe the Founding Fathers were a bunch of phonies, Zinn’s volume will strike you with the power of a thunderclap. And one day, maybe, you will grow up.
The caterwauling in the Daniels controversy about the importance of academic inquiry is particularly rich, given that Zinn didn’t believe in it. He had no use for objectivity and made history a venture in rummaging through the historical record to find whatever was most politically useful, without caring much about strict factual accuracy. “Knowing history is less about understanding the past than changing the future,” he said. He joined his propagandistic purpose to a moral obtuseness that refused to distinguish between the United States and its enemies, including Nazi Germany. …