Let’s all be poor together

A wealthy woman.

American CEOs are much too rich, live in monstrous, gaudy mansions, and we hate them for it. So whines  Dan Thomasson, a columnist for the Scripps Howard New Service (“Not quite your great-great-grandfather’s log cabin”, July 22, 2013), openly declaring his blatant jealousy. Of a similar philosophy, an NPR commentator, recently opining on the purchase of a $250 million work of art by a wealthy banker, complained that that purchase was only possible because the banker was taxed far too little.

What an odd bunch of economically illiterate hypocrites we are. For while bemoaning the wealth and spending ability of capitalists, we never seem to complain about the affluence of the Hollywood elite or star athletes. Who grumbles about Dustin Pedroia’s recent $110 million contract with the Red Sox? Not I, not you – we love Dustin!

But honestly, folks, while Hollywood and Major League Baseball admittedly generate a few jobs, those pale in comparison to the hundred million jobs created and maintained by our nations bankers and CEOs. Yet we hate capitalists. 

Here’s an idea. Let’s deny the rich their trappings. Huge taxes on yachts, mansions, works of arts. Make it so punitive that we’ll see the end of the $20 million castles that give Thomasson such agita. 

Yay! The anarchists, anti-capitalists, and wealth redistributionists will have won. But who loses? No, really, who loses?

Imagine what goes on in building a $20 million home. Here is a short, incomplete list of losers should we successfully thwart its building.

• The landowner who would have sold the lot and the realtor who managed the sale – both losers.
• The architect and general contractor who would have designed the home and planned the building project – losers.
• The excavator who would have cleared and leveled the lot and dug out the basement – a loser.
• The concrete man who would have built forms for the foundation and poured the concrete – a loser.
• The asphalt guy who would have paved that long, winding drive – a loser.
• The landscaper who would have planned and planted the lawn and shrubs and gardens – another loser.
• The framing carpenters and sheetrock hangers and roofers and electricians and plumbers and HVAC guys – all losers.
• The interior designer, cabinetmakers, carpet layers – all losers.
• The local town, whose assessor's office is forgoing a significant property tax revenue stream – a loser.
• And finally, the grocers and hairdressers and launderers and restaurateurs to all of the above losers – all losers, too.

While our national pastime is to revile capitalistic wealth, we seem terribly shortsighted in not realizing that wealthy people create the vast majority of our jobs. And in addition to that, they spend their money – lots of money. We stifle them at our own economic peril.

So instead of jealously, perhaps Thomasson should stick his neck out. Invest in the market or start a new firm. Hire some employees and make the payroll week after week. Learn what it’s like to manage an international firm where business goes on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. See what it’s like to spend scant time with his family.

Either that or shed the hypocrisy and write scathing columns about the wealth of Julia Roberts and Dustin Pedroia, too. After all, if we hate wealth, let’s hate all of it. And then we can all be poor together.

United Mine Workers want their engagement ring back

Professor Freeman Dyson

Climate change is a highly charged emotional issue. It should not be. Anything as deadly serious, with such huge potential human peril and economic impacts, must be analyzed only with the sharp, cutting edge of cold reason. Religious fervor has no role. But we, and our children, are being proselytized that carbon is an evil pollutant, and that human-caused carbon emissions are wrecking the climate. This is a hypothesis, not settled fact. There are very smart people who believe otherwise, but they are dismissed as crackpots. Or worse.

Freeman Dyson is a brilliant physicist who taught for decades at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies after Albert Einstein’s death created an opening. Dyson was considered the only physicist capable of filling Einstein’s enormous shadow. There is just one problem – Dyson is an anthropomorphic climate-change skeptic, and climate warriors have demanded his head – literally. Professor Richard Parcutt of Australia seriously proposes the death of heretics such as Dyson, provided they do not repent (much like Galileo). This is no way to conduct a scientific debate.

Dyson thinks that the computer models used by climatologists are faulty and do not account for the climate cooling effect of clouds. His hypothesis may be credible in that there has been no significant warming in the past sixteen years. Even the august New York Times has said “The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that” (“What to Make of a Warming Plateau”, June 10, 2013).

As Dyson puts it, "there’s more solid evidence for the beneficial effects of CO2 than the negative effects." In spite of that, your president is pursuing policies to impoverish you.

In a recent major policy speech on climate change, President Obama drew a keen bead on the nation’s coal miners. In so many words, he said, if you are a coal miner, it’s time to find another line of work (or sign up for food stamps).

This was not a complete surprise to them. In 2008, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) voiced whole-hearted support and proposed marriage to then-candidate Obama. But by 2012 they had seen the handwriting on the wall and chose to withhold support from either candidate, a shocking turn of events for a staunchly Democratic union. But they had overheard the whispers of the president’s environmental base and were worried.

In April 2013, fulfilling the UMWA’s fears, the president’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reclassified carbon dioxide as a hazard to human life. Shortly thereafter, they revealed a major policy shift buried in the fine print of a regulation on electrical efficiency. The agency raised the “social cost of carbon” from $22 to $36 per ton. The administration was saying that the costs of global warming would be greater than previously thought and that these costs were exacerbated by the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 

By executive fiat, the president initiated a major, wrenching change in the nation’s energy infrastructure with no legislative deliberation by your elected legislators. While generating electrical energy with wind mills or solar panels is a lovely idea, these are nascent technologies. Energy costs, if sharply increased, will cut though the economy like an inflationary great white shark. How would grandma like to buy $15 corn flakes?

Taking the next logical step, what's to prevent the EPA from assessing a fine to parents of each newborn child? Using the administration's current projections, an American child will cause $52,000 of "climate damage" during his or her lifetime, both from simple exhalation and from consuming the fruits of the economy. Instead of a dependent tax deduction, parents would owe the IRS a huge penalty on their next tax return. 
  

Here’s another viewpoint. While our children are being brainwashed that carbon is an evil pollutant, perhaps they should also be taught that they are, themselves, carbon based life forms, and that carbon dioxide is crucially necessary for the growth of plant life on earth. In other words, we would not exist without carbon, and plants could not grow without carbon dioxide. There are demonstrably two sides to a very one-sided story.

What we need is a reasoned debate, with scientists properly playing the role of skeptics and the media, objective investigative journalists. The time for mindless religious cheerleading and witch hunts is past. There is too much at stake.

Sorry, Grandma, I was just texting

A useless sign.

The typical scenario goes like this:

“According to the Platte County prosecutor, Rachel N. Gannon, of Kansas City, was allegedly texting on her cell phone when she lost control of her vehicle and collided with a car driven by Loretta J. Larimer, 72, who was killed in the crash.” Larimer’s 10-year-old granddaughter was injured in the crash. She has recovered, but misses her grandma fiercely. Sixteen-year-old Rachel, charged with second degree murder, regrets her lapse. But that won’t bring Mrs. Larimer back.

And it’s happening a lot. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2011 (last year complete data are available), 3,331 people were killed and 387,000 injured in distracted driving motor vehicle accidents. Don’t discount the injuries – many are life changing, involving paraplegia, quadriplegia, or amputations. This carnage goes on year after year, and we don’t seem to have any effective solutions.

To make matters worse, distracted driving is a major factor in head-on collisions, exacerbating the probability of fatality or severe injury. In a head-on collision, the speed of the two vehicles must be combined to determine the total energy of the collision. While we normally think of violent, dangerous accidents occurring at highway speeds, texting brings these metal-twisting, human-blending accidents to our leafy residential streets. And it all starts with a drift from the lane of travel.

In a tidy bit of local reporting, Monique Ting, writing for the Attleboro Sun Chronicle, gives us insight into the thinking of these distracted drivers (“Sorry, but they still text and drive”, June 19, 2013).  In her story, a number of drivers admit texting, most regretfully. One unnamed driver enlightens us, saying “I would not text if I were driving anybody else besides myself.” This fortunately anonymous driver reveals an odd mix of suicidal sociopathy. He or she is peculiarly willing to kill himself, or you, or me, or our families, but not some incidental passenger in his own automobile. Freud would be perplexed.

Many states have passed laws prohibiting texting while driving. Missouri did, but that didn’t save Mrs. Larimer. The problem, as repeatedly described in this column, is the lack of certainty and severity of punishment. Transgressors don’t perceive adequate risk of punishment to change their behavior. Laws on the books and signs on the roadside alone will not do it.

Here is what we must do. First, police must begin to assiduously enforce laws already on the books which require drivers to stay within marked lanes. When a driver wanders out of her lane, she is impaired or distracted and should be immediately stopped and ticketed. The courts have a role, also, and that is in not forgiving or treating lightly such offenses. The message must be loud and clear – “Wander from your lane and you will be punished!”

A simple thing, it covers so many distractions and impairments, the targets of  dozens of existing separate laws. But enforcing this one law, lane discipline, would make a difference. Let’s make it happen. Loretta Larimer’s granddaughter is watching.

Celebrate! The war is over.

President Obama, in a major foreign policy speech at the National Defense University,  has declared that the war on terror is over. This is a very interesting tactic that might have been very useful if only known to Franklin Roosevelt. In June, 1944, sixty nine years ago, the beaches and fields of Normandy were a muddy, bloody cauldron as allied troops strove to wrest a beachhead from the Nazi juggernaut.  Over 200,000 American, British, and Canadian troops were killed or wounded in a campaign that could have been completely avoided if only Roosevelt had simply declared the war over.

But no matter. The current administration has elected to choose a path of lessening America’s role in the world. The president, his supporters, and confidantes are of the view that America is an enemy of freedom rather that its defender. The newly-appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, has said: “Some anti-Americanism derives simply from our being a colossus that bestrides the earth. But much anti-Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic and military power has played in denying such freedoms to others.”

So in support of this view, the administration is cutting military budgets, withdrawing from the heartlands of radical Islamic Jihadism, and is ceding the world  stage to our benevolent competitors. Surely the military planners in the Kremlin and Beijing are celebrating this wondrous gift. And in the vacuum created by America’s withdrawal, they will surely lead the way in advancing the cause of freedom and individual liberty. (News item – Russia backs Syria’s despotic leader, Bashar Al-Assad, and promises to deliver advanced anti-aircraft missile systems).

In the meantime, while asserting that America in the world is too big, the administration is simultaneously arguing that American government at home is too small. Even though the president has declared the end of the war on terror, his National Security Agency is spending billions to collate the phone calls, emails and tweets of hundreds of millions of Americans. The IRS, soon to be responsible for enforcing the onerous terms of the “Affordable Care Act,” was somehow unable to respect the constitutional rights of those who disagree with the President’s politics. And the Justice Department is going after journalists, wiretapping and threatening charges for simply reporting the news.

Where is this heading? Unfortunately, nowhere good. By reducing America’s presence in the world, the cause of freedom will be harmed. Likewise, by growing government’s scope and power at home, our individual liberties are lessened. If you believe that freedom and democracy are fundamentally good, this is not good news. Is this truly the path we want to follow?