Much to the horror of progressive school boards, teachers and administrators everywhere, the parents of kids in public schools are becoming increasingly irate at various flavors of poison being mainlined into their kids: the imposition of Critical Race Theory or whatever it is being called this week in order to deflect criticism mask mandates and inappropriate sex education which amounts to the sexual grooming of K-12 students. Or what is even worse; schools tolerating, excusing, and covering up lawless behavior committed by students of the favored minority group o’ the month. The simple fact is that normal parents are practically guaranteed to go berserker on anyone or anything which threatens harm to their child. This seems to come as a surprise to school administrators.
Big Government
Recent Reading
Four mini-reviews in this batch:
—Splendid Solution, by Jeffrey Kluger
—Red Plenty, Francis Spufford
—Instruments of Darkness, Alfred Price
—The Scarlet Thread, Mandy Rice-Davies
Splendid Solution is about the development of the Salk polio vaccine. The book gives a vivid picture of the devastation wrought by epidemics with no vaccines and without meaningful treatments, both the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic and the successive polio epidemics, and the public health measures used in attempts to control such epidemics. It describes how the Salk vaccine was developed, some of the conflicts among scientists, and the vaccine rollout, including media reactions and early manufacturing problems. Very interesting reading, especially in the light of our present vaccine situation and controversies.
Red Plenty is about Soviet economic planning, as seen from the inside. (I’ve reviewed it previously here, but recently re-read it in conjunction with an online book discussion group.) It’s part fiction and part factual history: the characters include factory managers, economic planners, mathematicians, computer scientists, and “fixers.” Very well-written and also well-researched and footnoted.
Instruments of Darkness is about electronic warfare during WWII, primarily on the European front but also touching on the Pacific war. Covers ‘the battle of the beams,’ in which Britain attempted to interfere with the radio guidance system used by the Germans to support night bombing, and the jamming and spoofing which was directed at communications between night fighters and their ground controllers.
The author was himself an electronics warfare officer with the RAF during the war, so speaks from a position of knowledge.
A Scarlet Thread is a historical novel about Israeli settlements in what was then called Palestine, at the time of the First World War. Faced with increasing exactions and depredations by the Turkish rulers, a group of Jews resolve to support the British war effort by providing intelligence information–if they can find anyone in the British government who is willing to accept such information and take it seriously, that is.
The author became famous (or infamous) as one of the two women involved in the Profumo sex scandal of 1963-64, which brought down Prime Minister Macmillan and the Conservative government. She married an Israeli, moved to Israel, and converted to Judaism–this book (published in 1989) is a pretty decent historical novel, not just an attempt at capitalizing on her celebrity.
The “Green Agenda” is already killing the energy industry.
Recently, we have read of energy shortfalls in Germany, the UK and even China. The Chinese energy problems may be contributing to the supply chain issues. What all these stories have in common, with the possible exception of China, is the “Green Agenda.”
Germany’s problems were predicted. The country decided to shut down nuclear power and rely on wind and solar. Relying on solar in Germany’s climate was ludicrous.
Germany’s Energiewende, or energy transition to renewables, is leading to an insecure supply of energy and is affecting the nation’s economy. Germany plans on phasing out all its nuclear plants by 2022 and its coal plants by 2038 in favor of renewable energy, primarily intermittent wind and solar power, which is causing electricity prices to spike and its electric grid to falter. If Germany continues to phase out both coal and nuclear, it will lose the equivalent of 43 percent of 2018 secured output. German electricity prices are already 45 percent above the European average (and 3 times U.S. average residential prices) with green taxes now accounting for 54 percent of household electricity prices.
The Greens are taking down the German economy.Russia and the new pipeline for natural gas cannot supply enough power.
The Political Economy of Environmentalism
“People, like any creature with no natural predator, will continue to spread beyond the capacity of their environment.”
Should I live to 80, the global population will have increased fourfold in my lifetime, more than double the population when the Club of Rome called for zero growth in 1972. For the average non environmental scientist, it is easier to divide the environment into the original Greek elements: fire, water, earth and air. Fires are currently raging, considered (unscientifically) as evidence of “global warming,” modified to “climate change” when the planet started cooling. Land use is also a serious global problem as the run-off into rivers and oceans is unbounded.
People respond to visual cues: when the Cuyahoga River burned in downtown Cleveland for weeks, America cleaned up its rivers. When scientists vividly described a hole in the ozone layer, consumers replaced chlorofluorocarbons in cars and refrigerators in 1987 as part of the Montreal Protocol.
Unlike the Cuyahoga River fire, environmentalism today is rather like the US debt, another intergenerational transfer that also reflects human nature. Current sacrifices can potentially reduce the projected magnitude of sacrifices forced upon future generations, but some economists argue based on UN income forecasts that future generations will be so wealthy that the high costs we would bear today will be relatively painless in the future, the environmental equivalent of “growing out of the debt problem.”
Paying for Biden’s Dreams
President Biden says, in connection with his ‘infrastructure’ plan, that “We’re going to pay for everything we spend.”
Actually, it’s you that would pay for this proposed spending. Exactly how much you would pay, and what forms your cash outflows would take, are dependent on your individual situation, but make no mistake: you would pay.
You would likely pay through higher direct taxes–yes, it is claimed that there would be no tax increases for those earning less than $400K/year (family income), but there are spending increases built into or implied in the ‘infrastructure’ bill that imply much higher spending…and taxing..over time. You would pay, in higher prices, lower wages, and reduced investment returns for those corporate tax hikes, which Biden seems to view as a source of free money. You would likely pay in terms of reduced job opportunities…possibly even outright job loss…as a consequence of a damaged US business climate.
Above and beyond the specific details, the ‘infrastructure’ plan and its supporting tax represent an attempt to redirect a greatly-increased part of the national income generated by Americans into the hands of government and of those whose relationship with that government is key to their finances. Such increases in government scope are of direct financial value to a lot of people, including high-income as well as lower-income people…see my post here for discussion of this point. Increasing the scope of government also represents a tremendous ego and status benefit for many people, most definitely including Biden himself…who actually met with history professors to get ideas on how he could build up his ‘legacy’ and who, I think, is more interested in a legacy of doing Big Things than in what the benefits of those Big Things might be.
Nancy Pelosi, in reference to the ‘infrastructure’ bill, stated that: “The dollar amount, as the president has said, is zero.” This is nonsense. The fact that money for a program will come from somewhere doesn’t mean that the cost of that program is zero. If a division of a company embarks on an expensive project and gets the money from their parent corporation, that doesn’t mean that the cost of that program is zero. Same if the division get the money by raising prices and/or selling more to their existing customers–the program still costs what it costs.
The Biden/Pelosi view seems to be that the United States exists to support the Federal government and that category of people who are most closely linked to that government. Increasingly, government and the ‘extended government’ are acting like medieval robber barons, plundering the surrounding countryside to keep themselves and their retainers wealthy and powerful.
See also this post at Ricochet: Economic Illiteracy on Parade and my post The Logic of Insatiable Centralization.