The Ascendency Of Magical Economic Thinking In The Democratic Contest

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  • It is not difficult for me to articulate an honest argument for the progressive position. In brief summary, it goes something like this: The government is the right vehicle to provide enhanced social services to the less fortunate, and therefore the government must impose an appropriate amount of increased costs on the productive sector of society in order to fund a more generous level of government services than we currently have.

  • And then there is the dishonest argument, which can be summarized as: Costs? What costs? Vast new taxes and corresponding government spending will create a gusher of economic growth and new wealth out of thin air.

  • With all the leading Democratic candidates for President proposing greatly increased federal taxing and spending, it was only a question of time until this magical thinking came front and center into the political debate. And sure enough, it’s now here in full force.

  • But that’s not how this works. Which brings me once again to Elizabeth Warren. She’s the one with the endless list of some 50+ “Plans,” each one of them promising some large new government spending and bureaucracy and/or taxation to grow the compulsory sector of the economy. There will be vast new spending . . . . Clearly, the costs will be large. How could they not be?

  • The answer is simple: You simply announce that each of your new programs will “grow the economy.” And of course you then find that there is an extensive network of left-side journalists, intellectuals and pundits who will buy into this idea and repeat it endlessly, no matter how ridiculous it may be. . . .

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Contrast Of Climate And Energy Policies, And Economic Results, In The U.S. And Germany

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  • If you are reading your normal diet of “mainstream” press, you are getting hit with a constant barrage of climate alarm, together with a near total boycott on any good economic news for as long as Trump remains President.

  • As a result, it is very easy to lose track of the widening chasm in the climate and energy policies, and also in the economic results, between the U.S. and its major European competitors. When you put some easily-available numbers together in one place, the contrast becomes very striking.

  • And then there are the positions on these subjects of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for President. I find those positions beyond belief.

  • You probably know that the so-called “fracking” revolution in oil and gas production has led to a large increase in U.S. production of those fuels over the last ten or so years. The actual numbers are quite remarkable.

  • Over in the economic news category, the U.S. continues to thrive.

  • And then there’s Germany. . . .

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Update On New York's Self-Inflicted Energy Crunch

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  • As I have noted many times before, this whole green energy thing is all just so much talk until the point hits where energy shortages start to emerge or consumer prices begin to soar. At that point, the people will notice. And then, how will the politics shift? Will the politicians press forward with green energy — and impose energy deprivation on the people in the process? Or will they promptly back off the green energy blather, and return to the cheap and reliable fossil fuels?

  • Here in New York, where professing the green religion is the indispensable ticket to entry into polite society, we’re in the early phases of seeing this process play out. Out there in the hinterlands, you may be interested in the dynamics.

  • Our Governor Andrew Cuomo clearly thirsts to be part of polite society. Same with the members of the legislature. Thus, fealty to green orthodoxy must be regularly demonstrated. Result: We have had one measure after another over the past several years to restrict fossil fuels and promote energy from wind and solar sources.

  • But is any of this stuff real, in the sense that it will stand up when the crunch hits?

  • In August, the first inklings of the crunch began to hit. As I reported on September 3, after the cross-harbor pipeline was blocked in May, the natural gas utility named National Grid, which covers Long Island (including the parts of New York City known as Brooklyn and Queens) announced that it could not accept any additional gas customers. By August, some 3000 potential customers in that area had been denied service. . . .

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A Few Things To Feel Guilty About This Thanksgiving Weekend

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  • As a Manhattan Contrarian reader, probably you spent your Thanksgiving day being thankful for the many blessings in your life.

  • Obviously, that is your moral failing. If you had any moral compass, you would have spent the day feeling guilty.

  • But wait, you say. What have I done to feel guilty about? Right there is where you’ve got it all wrong. It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong, or even that you’ve done anything at all. Your guilt is collective guilt, not resulting from your own actions, but rather principally resulting from the sins of your ancestors, and transmitted to you via your genes, and probably based on your race.

  • For our post-Thanksgiving entertainment, let’s consider some of the more unhinged exercises in race-based guilt and shaming taken from the media over just the past few days. There are a near-infinite number of these things to choose from, so I’ll select just a few. . . .

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No Amount Of Disastrous Failure Can Kill The Fantasy Of A Government-Directed "Great Society"

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  • It was 1964 — I was in the 8th grade — when Lyndon Johnson, newly elevated to the presidency by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, announced the launch of the “War on Poverty” and the imminent coming of the “Great Society.”

  • All that was needed was to put the powers of government to work to apply the available societal resources to the problems at hand; and presto! the problems would be solved. This was obvious to all thinking people. Experts within the government agencies would quickly set to work to devise the programs that would use the gusher of federal tax revenue to end poverty and bring about universal fairness and justice in short order.

  • Programs designed by the experts to eradicate poverty proliferated rapidly, both before and after the 1964 election — Medicaid, the Community Action Program, the Job Corps, the Food Stamp program, Project Head Start, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Housing and Urban Development Act, and on and on.

  • Fifty-five years on, is it possible to name any public policy disaster in the United States greater than the disaster of the War on Poverty and Great Society?

  • It’s not just that all the government spending has not reduced the measured rate of poverty nor the number of people in poverty. . . . We have only fomented anger and resentment in the program beneficiaries.

  • For today I’ll just go into the single example of public housing programs. . . .

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Who Is Winning The Climate Wars?

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  • If you get most of your news passively by just reading what comes up in some kind of Facebook or Google feed or equivalent, you probably have the impression that the Climate Wars are over and the Climate Campaigners have swept the field of battle.

  • In my case, I certainly don’t rely on those kinds of toxic sources of information, but I do regularly monitor many of the media sources in the “mainstream” category — the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Economist, Politico, and several of the television networks like CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN. All of those (and plenty more) have clearly put an absolute ban on any news or information that would cast even the slightest negative light on the proposition that there is an imminent “climate crisis” that must be solved by government transformation of the world economy.

  • I’ll give a couple of examples of the lengths to which this has gone. Back in September, mentally unstable Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose only qualification was her ignorant passion for climate extremism, got the platform of the UN “Climate Action Summit” for a big speech.

  • Actually, out there in the world, reality continues to trump hysteria. Do you remember reports from a couple of years ago that China was ceasing to develop fossil fuel power and was becoming a “climate leader” by going all in for trendy renewables wind and solar? Well, that was to fool the dopes. Just this month, something called Global Energy Monitor is out with a new report on what’s going on on the ground in China. Bottom line: 148 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity under active construction or with construction being resumed after suspension. . . .

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