Cribbing from Ayn Rand

What should you expect to happen when you block a huge oil pipeline from your neighbor and closest ally from coming into your country?

If you're a Democrat, apparently you expect your neighbor to just shut down the project and not work with your biggest geopolitical rival.

Alas, reality doesn't conform itself to Democratic demands. China's major oil company CNOOC is poised to acquire a large stake in the Canadian oil company Nexen.

Why would Nexen even consider selling itself to a Chinese company? If you're a Democrat, it's a complete mystery. Canada betrayed us. There's no other explanation. If you live in reality, this was an all too obvious, and obviously foreseeable, consequence of Obama blocking the Keystone pipeline earlier this year.

Is it this administration's intent to bring Atlas Shrugged to life? It's eerie how closely events under this President track with those in Ayn Rand's opus.

More oil + more gas = a cleaner planet?

Absolutely, if history is any guide. Walter Russell Meade does it again in the fourth part of his analysis of the effects the shale oil and gas boom will have on the globe. Up for analysis this time: environmentalists.

Environmentalists are addicted to a Malthusian worldview. They seem unable to relinquish the fundamental premise that there is (or soon will be) a massive shortage of resources, and that our only hope as a species lies in a radical reordering of our political and economic systems. And this addiction blinds them to a the reality that an age of renewed fossil fuel abundance is a good thing.

The shale boom hasn’t turned green success into green failure. It’s prevented green failure from turning into something much worse. ... [T]he real winner of an oil and gas shortage is… coal. ... The US and China have oodles of coal, and rather than walk to work from our cold and dark houses all winter, we’d use it. Furthermore, when and if the oil runs out, the technology exists to get liquid fuel out of coal. It isn’t cheap and it isn’t clean, but it works.

The newly bright oil and gas future means that we aren’t entering a new Age of Coal. For this, every green on the planet should give thanks.

The second reason why greens should give thanks for shale is that environmentalism is a luxury good. People must survive and they will survive by any means necessary. But they would much rather thrive than merely survive, and if they can arrange matters better, they will. A poor society near the edge of survival will dump the industrial waste in the river without a second thought. It will burn coal and choke in the resulting smog if it has nothing else to burn. [snip]

An age of energy shortages and high prices translates into an age of radical food and economic insecurity for billions of people. Those billions of hungry, frightened, angry people ... will butcher every panda in the zoo before they see their children starve, they will torch every forest on earth before they freeze to death, and the cheaper and the meaner their lives are, the less energy or thought they will spare to the perishing world around them.

But, thanks to shale and other unconventional energy sources, that isn’t where we are headed. We are heading into a world in which energy is abundant and horizons are open even as humanity’s grasp of science and technology grows more secure. A world where more and more basic human needs are met is a world that has time to think about other goals and the money to spend on them.

Read the whole thing.

Why is capitalism important?

Charles Murray does an excellent job answering this question in an article answering a slightly different question: why are capitalists so reticent to defend capitalism's tarnished reputation? (His answer to the second question boils down to capitalism being decoupled from virtue, so not only are capitalists more likely to behave badly, but moral capitalists lack the vocabulary and philosophical framework with which to criticize them.)

But his answer to the question at the heart of this post is wonderful enough.

Capitalism is the economic expression of liberty. The pursuit of happiness, with happiness defined in the classic sense of justified and lasting satisfaction with life as a whole, depends on economic liberty every bit as much as it depends on other kinds of freedom.

"Lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole" is produced by a relatively small set of important achievements that we can rightly attribute to our own actions. Arthur Brooks, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has usefully labeled such achievements "earned success." Earned success can arise from a successful marriage, children raised well, a valued place as a member of a community, or devotion to a faith. Earned success also arises from achievement in the economic realm, which is where capitalism comes in.

Earning a living for yourself and your family through your own efforts is the most elemental form of earned success. Successfully starting a business, no matter how small, is an act of creating something out of nothing that carries satisfactions far beyond those of the money it brings in. Finding work that not only pays the bills but that you enjoy is a crucially important resource for earned success.

He then lays out a very compelling case for limited government.

Making a living, starting a business and finding work that you enjoy all depend on freedom to act in the economic realm. What government can do to help is establish the rule of law so that informed and voluntary trades can take place. More formally, government can vigorously enforce laws against the use of force, fraud and criminal collusion, and use tort law to hold people liable for harm they cause others.

Everything else the government does inherently restricts economic freedom to act in pursuit of earned success. I am a libertarian and think that almost none of those restrictions are justified. But accepting the case for capitalism doesn't require you to be a libertarian. You are free to argue that certain government interventions are justified. You just need to acknowledge this truth: Every intervention that erects barriers to starting a business, makes it expensive to hire or fire employees, restricts entry into vocations, prescribes work conditions and facilities, or confiscates profits interferes with economic liberty and usually makes it more difficult for both employers and employees to earn success. You also don't need to be a libertarian to demand that any new intervention meet this burden of proof: It will accomplish something that tort law and enforcement of basic laws against force, fraud and collusion do not accomplish.

What a great test.

Can you imagine how many worthless or positively harmful laws would be avoided if its proponents had to reasonably prove that X law will expand people's ability to pursue happiness in a way that tort law enforcement of basic laws against force, fraud, and collusion do not? I don't doubt that many people will still be able to justify plenty of stupidity on those grounds, but there would be so much less of it in the laws than there is now.

Definitely read the whole article. It's well worth your time.

Obama: "Our plan worked!"

"And by our plan I mean the plan Bill Clinton put in place 20 years ago."

Me: Great! Bill Clinton's plan. You mean the one where you buck your party by expanding free trade and reforming welfare?


Obama: Uh, no.

Me: Well maybe it's the plan where you focus on paying down the deficit instead of cutting taxes or giving money to special interests?


Obama: Nope. Wrong again.

Me: Oh! I get it! You mean the plan where you raise taxes and hope for a massive economic bubble that won't pop until you're out of office!

Obama: Yes!


Me: Awesome. Let me know if you see one of those in the next 100 days, or so.

Support this man!

Especially if you live in Maryland.

His name's Dan Bongino. He's running for the US Senate seat there, and he gets it.

Something important to remember

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as bad luck.

-Robert Heinlein

Or, as our Lord himself said, The poor you will always have with you ... (Mark 14:7)

Neither an excuse for ignoring poverty, nor for refusing to help the poor better themselves and escape poverty. Just a clear-headed acknowledgement of facts. Which are, as our second President noted, stubborn things.

Who pays "their fair share" of taxes?

If you listen to President Obama and folks on the Left, the answer is not the rich.

If you listen to people who can do math, the answer is not the poor.

[The Congressional Budget Office] reports that the top 1% of income earners paid 39% of federal individual income taxes in 2009, while earning 13% of the income.  That means their share of federal income taxes was three times their share of income. ...

CBO further reported that in 2009 the top 20% of income earners, those earning more than $74,000, paid 94% of federal individual income taxes, virtually all of the net total. That was 85% more than the share of national income they earned.

Yet, in that same year, the middle 20% of income earners, the true middle class, paid 2.7% of total federal individual income taxes on net, while earning 15% of before-tax income.  And the bottom 40% of income earners, instead of paying some income taxes to support the federal government, were paid by the IRS cash equal to 10% of federal individual income taxes on net.

That means altogether the bottom 60% of income earners, which includes the middle class, paid less than 0% of total federal individual income taxes as a group on net. Instead, as a group, they received net cash payments from the IRS on net.

Of course, the designation above may not be accurate. It's quite likely that the President and his fellow travelers can do math passably well, but just have a difference in philosophy. To them, the situation where the rich pay 3 times the ratio they take in while the rest of society pays nothing on net and actually gets paid by the IRS isn't fair ... for the rest of society. Obama & Co. clearly want the ratio to be even more stacked against "the rich," by which they mean people making over $200,000 a year.

But is that just? Is it fair? To me, it clearly isn't. I think most folks in this country would probably be strongly inclined to agree with me, if they were presented with the facts of the CBO report referenced above. The situation is not just and it is not fair. Making it even less fair won't help.