The New York Times Shows Democrats How To Run On "Energy Affordability"

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The New York Times Shows Democrats How To Run On "Energy Affordability"

  • In my post of October 7, I asked “How Can Democrats Possibly Run On Affordability?” The post specifically focused on energy affordability, and on consumer electricity prices, because, for reasons that I don’t understand, the price of electricity seems to be a big issue for Democrats in the upcoming elections.

  • The post cited easily-available data from the federal Energy Information Administration showing that, among the contiguous 48 states, there is a sharp divide between states run by Democrats — which have the highest prices — and those run by Republicans — which have the lowest prices. The six states with the highest prices consist of California plus five Northeastern states that have joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in an effort to intentionally drive up their consumer electricity prices. The twelve states with the lowest prices are all solidly Republican with the sole exception of purple Nevada (where the Governor is a Republican). Prices per kWh in climate-obsessed California and the Northeast are double and more the prices in many Republican-run states. If you study the issue even a little, it becomes obvious that the higher prices in the blue states are driven in part by higher taxes and more regulations, but particularly by so-called “climate” policies that in practice greatly drive up costs.

  • So how can you possibly turn this into an issue that somehow favors Democrats in the election on the issue of “affordability”? For the answer, I take you to the front page of yesterday’s print New York Times. . . .

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When Ignorant Ideologues Take Control Of Major Economic Decisions

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  • As previously mentioned, I have been reading Frank Dikötter’s trilogy on the history of China during its years under the rule of Mao Zedong (1949-76). Of the three books, the one covering the middle years of 1958-62 is titled “Mao’s Great Famine.” The name given by Mao and his gang to these years was “The Great Leap Forward.”

  • The story told in this book is the sort of critically important and easily-available information about how the real world works that all our newly-minted elite college graduates have somehow missed. The short version is that a clique of political ideologues with zero knowledge of how things are actually produced takes control of making the major economic decisions. They have what they think are brilliant ideas about how to transform the economy and do everything better. In short order, output collapses and people are starving.

  • It is impossible not to notice the close analogy between the events that led to China’s catastrophe and the ongoing energy disaster being imposed on various U.S. states and other Western countries by an equally ignorant clique of political ideologues.

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France Is The Future Of The Progressive Project

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France Is The Future Of The Progressive Project

  • Probably, you have read about the recent round of riots in France. They began in late September, and are now in their fourth week.

  • This round of riots features mostly students, and the stated bases for the protests certainly appear quite mundane, if not trivial, and certainly out of proportion to the scale and intensity of the riots. What are they so worked up about? They are demanding things like hiring more teachers, repair of dilapidated school buildings, more and better air conditioning and heating, universal school lunches at 1 euro, and so forth. (Here is a list of the demands (in French) from something calling itself the Union of Students.).

  • Meanwhile the riots have involved hundreds of thousands of participants on many days, multiple schools burned down, lots of violence, and thousands of arrests (the majority, but far from all, being high school students).

  • The big picture is that France has painted itself into the inevitable corner at the end of the progressive project.

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Hurricane Isaias: The Data Are In

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Hurricane Isaias: The Data Are In

  • We finally had our first hurricane this season in the North Atlantic region: Isaias. Isaias formed on October 7 as a tropical storm in the Gulf of America, and made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane on October 10 near Destin, Florida.

  • Paul Homewood of Not a Lot of People Know That collects the relevant data in a post from October 11.

  • Homewood notes that Isaias represents the latest ever first hurricane for the North Atlantic, at least since the satellite era (1966) has provided full data:

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ICE Arrest In Far Uptown Manhattan Ends In Shooting: Two Versions Of The Story

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ICE Arrest In Far Uptown Manhattan Ends In Shooting: Two Versions Of The Story

  • On Thursday afternoon, October 8, a guy named Oscar Belgal was shot by ICE agents in the very most northern neighborhood of Manhattan known as Marble Hill. Belgal suffered a non-life-threatening injury to his neck, and received treatment at the uptown campus of the New York Presbyterian Hospital. Here is a picture of Belgal from the New York Post:

  • The shooting immediately set off a round of protests from local activists, calling for abolition of ICE as well as various other of the usual demands.

  • In the two days since the event took place, both the New York Post and the New York Times have provided extensive coverage. The contrast between the coverages of the two papers could not be more dramatic.

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How Can Democrats Possibly Run On "Affordability"?

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How Can Democrats Possibly Run On "Affordability"?

  • We are now less than a month out from the mid-term elections, and the single biggest theme that the Democrats have chosen to run on appears to be “affordability.”

  • How can this possibly be? We live in the age of immediate availability of information, let alone artificial intelligence to track down anything that might previously have been challenging to find. If you want a state-by-state comparison of costs for any particular thing, you can get it in a fraction of a second.

  • The results are in: the Democrat-run states are less “affordable.”

  • The Democrats and Republicans propose opposite strategies for dealing with the economy. The Democrats advocate for higher government spending, higher taxes, and more regulation of business; and the Republicans advocate for lower spending, lower taxes, and less regulation of business. The states are the “laboratories of democracy,” where we get to see the consequences of disparate policies play out, and to evaluate the results. Neither party is perfect in implementing what it advocates, so there are always some complexities. But in the main it is easy to collect data that give a relatively clear picture of the results of Democrat versus Republican policies.

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