"The New Currency Is Obedience"

Wonderful imagery here, and very accurate.

Doctor Zero:

Obama Democrats worship central planning. They have repeatedly expressed the belief that only powerful, maternal government can be trusted to allocate the most essential resources, or manage vital industries. The free market is a playpen, filled with the stuff that isn’t serious enough to merit direct control by the Mother State. When a particular toy causes the children of the electorate to scream, it is quickly snatched out of the pen. The free market can’t even be trusted to deal with airline fees for carry-on luggage… which turned out to be a market response to previous government action. You are expected to sit quietly and swallow your tears if Mother State chooses to beat you over the head with one of your toys.

Central planning is useless if nobody follows the central plans. Where the free market is persuasive, organizing resources by responding to demand and exploiting opportunity, central planning is coercive. It must compel obedience to its designs, and compulsion is always necessary. If people were eager to follow those designs of their own free will, there would be no need for central planning in the first place.

Just an excellent analogy, summarizing the viewpoint and the problem with it...

What could possibly go wrong?

From Tigerhawk comes the scariest statistic yet about an administration filled with them:

Because its efforts have been broken into separate initiatives with different justifications, few people other than news junkies have noticed how extraordinary Barack Obama's agenda is. Perhaps a number will help: 35%. That is the aggregate percentage of United States GDP produced by the three industries that the Democrats hope to restructure from the top down: Health care (17% of GDP), energy (9.8% of GDP), and financial services (8% of GDP). Think about that. Without even considering the transformational impact of proposed anti-business laws of general application, such as the Orwellian "employee free choice act," the Obama administration wants to redesign 35% of gross domestic product from the center. And he proposes to do it all in a rush this summer, lest the decline in his popularity and that of the Congressional Democrats erodes his power to do so.

Well, central control of the economy has worked well everywhere else, right?

"the administration has decided to move forward..."

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been watching this story play out...


The National Council on Environmental Economics has examined the Environmental Protection Agency's Draft Technical Support Document for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act. (As we all remember, the Supreme Court decided that the EPA should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and the EPA promptly decided to regulate carbon dioxide and methane.) So the EPA is preparing an "endangerment" analysis on how Americans are "endangered" by carbon dioxide and methane, and getting ready to propose new regulations.

Of course, you can't do things like that without some analysis of the impact, of the costs and the benefits. so the NCEE has reviewed the draft proposal, and has some comments. But they aren't being released - the EPA is trying to suppress the analysis. Why is that? Well, as the Director of the National Center for Environmental Economics Al McGartland wrote to Alan Carlin, the NCEE scientist who prepared the review:

The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has [sic] decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision...I can only see one impact of your comment given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.

And the comments that would have such a negative impact?

The current Draft TSB is based largely on the IPCC AR4 report, which is at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field...
- Global temperatures have declined - extending the current downtrend to 11 years...at the same time atmospheric CO2 levels have continued to increase and CO2 emissions have accelerated...
- The idea that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new results indicating little evidence for the operation of such processes...
- A new 2009 paper finds that the cruial assumption in the GCM models used by the IPCC concerning strongly positive feedback from water vapor is not supported by empirical evidence and the feedback is actually negative...
- A new 2009 paper...suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in Earth's global temperatures...
...these are just a few of the new developments since 2006...the extensive portions of the EPA's Endangerment TSD which are based upon the old science are no longer appropriate and need to be revised...

But the science doesn't really matter - "the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment..."

Watching the (next) disaster coming

Out to destroy the US economy based on shaky science:

Among the many reasons President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority are so intent on quickly jamming a cap-and-trade system through Congress is because the global warming tide is again shifting. It turns out Al Gore and the United Nations (with an assist from the media), did a little too vociferous a job smearing anyone who disagreed with them as "deniers." The backlash has brought the scientific debate roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan and even, if less reported, the U.S.

Remember when the Obama administration was "about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology?" Yeah, me neither. One of my primary concerns with the "global warming" panic is, and always has been, that it looks to me like an excuse for central planners and anti-US consumptionists to implement the same kind of policies that they've always been looking for a way to implement.

Of course, destruction of the economy is always good for politicians, at least those who can avoid the blame for said destruction. In the United States, those politicians are, primarily because of the whims of the media, called "Democrats." The worse things are, the more call there is for power for government Democrats to make things better. They never do, which is is why the calls continue and the power expands. We call this "positive feedback," and it's a very bad thing. They get power and importance from damaging the private sector - of course they have incentive to damage it further.

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

Well, some politicians. If the US Congress passes the Waxman-Markey abomination, you'll know that either a) they didn't look hard enough at the science or b) global warming amelioration isn't actually the real goal.

When Government runs health care

ReasonTV. Not their best effort, but frightening (and probably accurate) anyway...

"I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help..."

Investors Business Daily:

The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on an anti-stimulus package that in the name of saving the earth will destroy the American economy. Smoot-Hawley will seem like a speed bump.

Not since a misguided piece of legislation imposed tariffs that turned a recession into a depression has there been a piece of legislation as bad as Waxman-Markey.

...

It's what Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, might call a "man-caused disaster," a phrase she coined to replace the politically incorrect "terrorist attack." But no terrorist could ever dream of inflicting as much damage as this bill...

I've actually, for the first time, called my "representative." She'll vote for it anyway, of course.