May 31, 2023

Are There Any Democrats Left Who Are Not Fully On Board With The Agenda Of The Radical Left?

May 31, 2023/ Francis Menton

A phenomenon of politics on the Left as practiced today is that new and ever more radical orthodoxies continually pop up and demand adherence from all members of the faith.
No longer is the common agenda just a simple commitment to more government spending to enhance perceived justice and fairness in society. Instead, a list of new demands for government actions grows ever longer and more extreme.
Many long-time Democrats of my acquaintance consider themselves political moderates, although generally supportive of government efforts to uplift the poor through spending and programs. But the internal councils of the Democrats are now dominated by radicals demanding complete loyalty to the full agenda.
Thus the question is, if you vote for any Democrat for public office, do you inevitably get someone who will go along with every single element of the most radical agenda of the Left?

May 29, 2023

Bureaucrats Completely Incapable Of Making Reasonable Trade-Offs

May 29, 2023/ Francis Menton

In economic life, trade-offs are a constant issue for everybody. Maybe you want to buy some better clothes, so you decide to economize on groceries. Or you postpone upgrading the bathroom because the kitchen needs upgrading first. Or you skip a vacation this year in order to buy a new car. Everything you buy means something else you can’t buy, so every buying decision necessarily involves trade-offs. And the same principle applies to use of your time: every hour you spend on one thing you can’t spend on something else. Learn Spanish this year, or train for the marathon — you’ll never find time for both.
Government faces the same necessity for trade-offs, but unfortunately is subject to bad incentives that often render the making of reasonable trade-offs next to impossible.
This phenomenon of inability to make remotely reasonable trade-offs has been on full display in some of the environmental news of the past couple of weeks.

May 25, 2023

May 25, 2023/ Francis Menton

Today, the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit issued its Judgment in the case of Concerned Household Electricity Consumers Council, et al. v. EPA. I am one of the lawyers for CHECC in this matter, where the Petitioners seek to have the court order EPA to reconsider its ridiculous 2009 Endangerment Finding (EF) that CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” constitute a “danger” to human health and welfare.
To no one’s surprise, the court dismissed our Petition. The sole ground for the dismissal was what they call “standing.” The court did not reach or discuss the merits of the Petition, namely whether data and evidence accumulated since the 2009 EF had rendered the Finding definitively false and in need of reconsideration.
Also today, the Supreme Court decided the case of Sackett v. EPA. The Sackett case involved a different EPA rule, called the Waters of the United States rule. Thus the two cases may seem to be unrelated. But in fact they are closely related. . . .

May 23, 2023

May 23, 2023/ Francis Menton

From time to time I like to check in on the latest from the New York City Housing Authority. NYCHA (along with many other municipal housing authorities) is one of the purest examples in the U.S. today of socialist-model economic organization.
When we last looked back in 2018, NYCHA had just been sued by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for failing to maintain “decent, safe and sanitary” conditions, including failing to remediate lead paint, failing to control mold and vermin, and failing to provide consistent heat, hot water., and elevator service. NYCHA had promptly settled that lawsuit with a Consent Decree in which it promised to spend some $4 billion of New York City taxpayer money to fix the identified problems.
In the intervening close to 5 years, NYCHA has been mostly out of the news. Surely, the large infusion of funds has turned things around, and all is now going smoothly?

May 20, 2023

May 20, 2023/ Francis Menton

As discussed here many, many times, the big problem with generating electricity from wind and solar sources is that they are intermittent. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes they don’t work for days on end. The times when both wind and sun fail at the same time for multiple days tend to be concentrated in the very coldest days of the winter. This poses a huge problem for central planners’ dreams of “net zero” electricity. Try to solve the problem with grid-scale batteries, and suddenly you’re talking wildly unaffordable costs in the trillions of dollars.
Not to worry. Recently everywhere talk has emerged of a new and seemingly easy solution to the problem of intermittency. Have you heard of it? It’s the “Virtual Power Plant.” I mean, today pretty much everything can be “virtual” if you want it to be. We have the “virtual” meeting, the “virtual” office, and the “virtual” school — even “virtual” reality. So why not a “virtual” power plant?
But, in the context of generating electricity, what does this business of “virtual” mean?

May 17, 2023

May 17, 2023/ Francis Menton

The recurring themes at this blog all concern one or another badly misguided government policy that ends up being counter-productive or even greatly destructive of the welfare of the people. Examples include: undermining a functioning energy system in a delusional attempt to control the weather; spending vast sums on “anti-poverty” programs that never reduce poverty even a little; or indoctrinating young children and university students with idiotic and failed Marxist dogma.
All of these themes (and many others that I have covered) are individually important, even very important, measured by potential harm to the well-being of the people. But, however bad government actions in each of these areas may have been, there are even worse things that the government and/or the President can do.
So let’s step back from the news of the day, and consider in the abstract what could be the very worst possible things that the federal government or the President might do.