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The Energy Spectator
Hey America! Are You Ready to Go Back to Work?
How much more bureaucracy can we stand before we’re all unemployed?
Read any recent analysis of the election in the mainstream media and it will tell you that the Presidential Election is going to be about: 1) race, 2) Hispanics, 3) the “war on women,” 4) gay rights, …… etc. etc. etc.
As usual, they are wrong. These are side issues. They will invigorate small segments of the electorate, most of whom are going to vote for Obama anyway. They entirely lack perspective — like the New York Times’ front-page story this week telling us how Democratic campaign managers in Chicago see Gay Pride Parades around the country as a potential “Army for Obama.” Good luck with that.
This election is going to be decided by jobs and the economy. And on this Republicans have an overwhelming advantage. They are the party of free enterprise and the private sector, where jobs are created, while the Democrats are the party of big government and bureaucracy, where jobs are created in Washington, D.C. but asphyxiated everywhere else. Outside of the Oval Office and Northern Virginia, plus the offices of the Service Employees International Union, everyone knows that the private sector is not doing fine. If reviving the economy and putting people back to work is the issue, Romney is the one to do it.
Here’s a small example of why we’re in the fix we’re in now. Three years ago the Historical Society of San Juan County, the most thinly populated county in the state of Colorado, decided to cut the $600 monthly electric bills at its Mayflower Mill, a National Historical Landmark, by installing a hydroelectric turbine that would use water crossing the property to generate electricity. The Society raised $100,000, trucked a 300-squre-foot historical shed up from neighboring Eureka to house the turbine, and by last summer was ready to put the system to work. Then it ran into the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
It seems that generating electricity with water anywhere in the United States is a federal matter. That means any project is subject to all manner of environmental, architectural, biological, archaeological, and anthropological oversight and approvals. “First they required us to produce detailed architectural drawings of the shed housing the generator,” says Bev Rich, who heads the Historical Society. “Then they needed a new survey of where the shed actually sits on the property. Next we had to open a 30-day comment period from every federal agency you can think of, including responses from downstream Indian tribes. The whole process added an additional $25,000 and would take months and months to complete.” The end is still not in sight. And this is a project that will generate 8 kilowatts of electricity.
The conceit of Democrats is that this election will be all about race and therefore anyone who votes against Obama is a racist. Heads I win, tails you lose. But race is not the President’s race defining characteristic. He is, above all, an academic surrounded by other academics. Almost everyone in the Obama Administration has come straight out of academia or worked their way through the familiar chain of non-profit organizations and government agencies without ever encountering the private sector or being aware of it except in some computer model. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is a Princeton engineer who worked for the EPA and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, plus several non-profits, before assuming her job. Elizabeth Warren, who was supposed to be given the job overseeing the entire credit industry, was the representative Native American on the Harvard faculty. Her replacement, Richard Cordray, managed only two years of private practice between law school, clerking for various judges and running for public office. Christina Romer, the former head of the Council of Economic Advisers who oversaw the Stimulus, is a career professor at Berkeley whose specialty is building computer models showing how incomes can be equalized. Larry Summers had shuttled back and forth between Harvard and the Clinton Administration before becoming President of Harvard in 2001. John Bryson, who was Secretary of Commerce until last week, was co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council. His replacement, Rebecca Blank, is an economics professor who has specialized in poverty studies and regulation. That’s the Secretary of Commerce! I won’t even bother telling you the credentials of the Secretary of Labor or Health and Human Services.
In other words, the Obama Administration has been one long powwow of academics schooled in John Kenneth Galbriath’s famous dictum that the private sector has “solved the problem of production” and all that is left is for government bureaucrats to save the environment and carve up the fruits of affluence. The outcome has been a high water mark for bureaucracy and a low water mark for the private sector. They generally rise and fall in inverse proportion. The only real question now is whether the current extreme is reversible.
“People are saying that America will never do anything great again.” That was a comment I heard from several people at a conference of nuclear engineers I attended last week. When asked why we were able to build 100 nuclear reactors from 1970 to 1990 but can’t build any more than one every ten years now, I usually remind them that Egyptian Civilization lasted almost 3,000 years but built all the Pyramids in the first 500. Egypt was never able to duplicate its early accomplishment, either.
Indeed, we seem to be following a well-worn path down history’s lane. Practically every civilization that did great things in its youth has ended up mired in bureaucracy. By the time of the Caesars, the Egyptians were famous for a swarm of government officials who did nothing but roam the country collecting exorbitant taxes and telling farmers what to plant. Byzantium, which was the end point of the Roman Empire, created a bureaucracy so dense and impenetrable that it gave us the word “Byzantine.” Chinese civilization stagnated for two millennia under a class of civil servants who gave us yet another term for bureaucracy — “mandarins.” When the British arrived in India in the 17th century they found it ruled by a class of Brahmins that lived off the merchant classes through taxation and regulation. The British were never able to pare it back much and as late as twenty years ago the New York Times was reporting how it took the approval of eight cabinet ministers to start a corporation in India. Over the last twenty years, however, the country has been able to trim back the bureaucracy and make room for a thriving private sector — which means that there is always hope.
Whole books have been written on the subject of why societies reach this point of self-strangulation. Twenty years ago, in The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation and Social Rigidities, Mancur Olsen compared bureaucracy to the accumulation of barnacles on a ship. For a while the ship can carry it along, but in the end the mass becomes so great that the ship can no longer steer and progress ends.
In America today we have the benefit of seeing all these anti-growth forces out in the open in the persona of the Environmental Movement. Environmentalism has combined three deadly strands — 1) the old aristocratic disdain for commerce; 2) the self-satisfaction of any affluent group in trying to prevent others from attaining what it has already achieved; and 3) the intellectuals’ desire to control everything through rules and regulations rather than trade and negotiation — and turned them into a powerful juggernaut that is essentially running the country. Why else would Barack Obama risk his entire presidency in order to prevent the construction of a pipeline?
Just as liberals and the New York Times think they have discovered that the key to all politics is race, so environmentalists believe they have discovered that global warming is the key to controlling all human activity. Everything we do — burning fossil fuels, building manufacturing plants, raising flatulent cattle — must be controlled and regulated. It is impossible to engage in almost any commercial activity in America today without running into the EPA or some other federal agency. The battle is being fought this minute in Congress, where House Republicans have passed a jobs bill calling for cutting back on EPA micromanagement and opening up federal lands in order to foster energy development, while Senate Democrats are stonewalling and President Obama has already promised a veto. The disagreement says all you need to know about why we still have 8 percent unemployment.
A Romney Presidency can change all the first day in office. On the afternoon of January 20 the new President can approve the Keystone Pipeline. That will be a couple of thousand jobs right there. Then it’s only a matter of clearing the regulatory underbrush and letting new enterprises grow again. The stock market will rally and in a matter of months we’ll be talking about the Romney Revival. (Former President Obama, now back at Harvard, will take credit for all of this, saying his four years in office laid the groundwork for the revival. The New York Times will publicize several academic studies backing his claim.)
Nor does this revival have to come “at the expense of the environment,” as Democrats will inevitably charge. In one stroke a Romney Administration can outdo the Obama Administration by placing a simple tax on carbon emissions and using it to reduce other taxes. If you want less of something, tax it. There is indeed reason to be concerned that carbon emissions are warming the earth, in addition to all the pollution put in the atmosphere by coal, oil, and gas. The record-breaking heat in Texas, the long drought in the Southwest that has produced the devastating Colorado fires, the unprecedented temperatures in Russia where wheat fields around Moscow actually caught fire — all indicate that something unusual is happening to the world’s climate. It’s just that we don’t to close down our entire economy in order to do something about it. A simple, revenue-raising carbon tax would accomplish all President Obama ever wanted with his armies of EPA bureaucrats and cap-and-trade. The Heritage Foundation has recommended this for years.
The important thing is that a Romney Administration will have the opportunity from Day One to reduce bureaucracy and revive the economy. As Peggy Noonan wrote last week, anyone who remembers the Reagan Era knows Americans still have another comeback left in us. Just send the bureaucrats home to academia and put America back to work. In fact, that doesn’t make a bad campaign slogan, does it? “Hey America! Are You Ready to Go Back to Work?” Because we are.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (32) | Leave a comment
More Articles by William Tucker
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Appleby| 6.29.12 @ 6:34AM
You had me until you got to the "Carbon Tax." Global warming is fiction. And the last thing we need is one more tax on business.
Jack in Wi| 6.29.12 @ 6:47AM
Amen Appleby: We don't need no more stinking taxes. We need a lot less regulation and exploration. The economy is strangling on taxes and regulation. I don't see a lot changing, with either Obama or Romney. They are both in the pockets of the Banksters, foreign lobbies, military industrial complex, and the insurance companies. Romney may be better on energy but what did Bush do when he had the chance?
Oldefarte| 6.29.12 @ 12:38PM
Oh no the economy was no better when Bush was in office. Oh no, AND THE COW JUMPED OVER THE MOON WHILE THE DISH RAN AWAY WITH THE FRIGGIN SPOON! I don't know what you're sniffin but the rest of us aren't interested. Go back to LJ and kiss Father Ron's scrawney ars!!!!!!!!!
Brooksifier | 6.29.12 @ 1:38PM
"Go back to LJ and kiss Father Ron's scrawney ars!!!!!!!!!"
Ron Paul is too honest to be a politician-- you need a liar such as Romney to lie to you.
Brooksifier | 6.29.12 @ 1:40PM
"you need a liar such as Romney to lie to you."
Redundant- you just need Romney!!!!!!!!!!
Bob K| 6.29.12 @ 9:05AM
You are right about that, Appleby!
Tucker had me there too until he started blathering about a "Carbon Tax" which is nothing more than a value added tax which the European's use.
I believe Tucker is an ex-democrat and I think I got that information from a column he wrote. He seems to have retained from those days a bit of the feeling of superiority over the rest of the citizens of this nation that all liberal journalists seem to have.
Anyone who thinks that our Nation should go on a restricted carbon fuel diet while China, Southeast Asia, India, Russia, Africa and South America are not has not thought out the consequences it will have on our economy.
It is why I won't contribute to The Heritage Foundation.
What is even worse is that he ruined a very good article on the uselessness of big bureaucracies by this gratuitous appeal for a form of Value Added Tax.
Occam's Tool| 6.29.12 @ 1:57PM
Screw the Carbon tax. I recall worse weather when I was growing up. The Coldest day in Chicago history was in 1981, and the next winter, if I recall, it was in the 70s on Christmas day. Weather/Climate is a chaos system and our models suck. The diagnoses in DSM-V for psychiatry are infinitely more scientifically rigorous, and they miss a lot, too.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 7.2.12 @ 9:45PM
Every time I see his photo, I wish to institute a scarf tax on Mr. Tucker, in lieu of a carbon tax on the rest of us.
SCMike| 6.29.12 @ 7:20AM
Er, don’t we already tax carbon? What’s the federal tax on gasoline and diesel other than a carbon tax. Ditto for taxes that appear monthly on my electric / natural gas bill.
As for the wildfires, record-breaking heat here and there across the nation, please provide the data showing these to be outside normal weather variability. Is something going on with the weather? Sure, there always is. But unless and until you can detect the global warming signal in today’s weather you’re going to have a tough time getting conservatives on board for a carbon tax.
TLP| 6.29.12 @ 9:23AM
Actually, it's more of a Tire Tax.
Those taxes at the pump are SUPPOSED TO BE for the Upkeep of the Interstate Highway System.
But then, Social Security was SUPPOSED TO BE for people's Golden Years.
Who knew?
Pecos Pete| 6.29.12 @ 8:52AM
Wildland fires are more likely caused by environmental restrictions on thinning and logging than by something called "earth warming."
As for a carbon tax, if ObamaCare can be construed as constitutional because the mandate is a tax (the ObamaCare Tax), then what's to stop Congress from implementing whatever it wants to if such legislation is founded on a tax?
We are up the creek without a paddle. Welcome to hell.
lost| 6.29.12 @ 10:15AM
Well if you think about it the EPA has the ability to breathing. Since CO2 is pollutant they have the right to regulate breathing
waapiti307| 6.29.12 @ 7:32PM
That's where the Progressive tenet of eugenics comes in. Less people, less CO2 in the atmosphere. Now to kill all cows, elk, reindeer, etc. Of course, every human (left alive after eugenics is implemented) should be vegetarian at the least and vegan at the most. Uh, yeah.
Gueppebarre| 7.1.12 @ 7:52PM
Pecos, this is correct. An additional 4-5 degrees of air temperature does not set wheat fields on fire.
It would be more productive to start looking around for "scientists" associated with East Anglia U walking around with a box of strike-anywhere matches.
The earth warms every year around this time - in real America we call it "summer."
Dan McKay| 6.29.12 @ 9:10AM
The only sector left where job creation will save us is the private sector. We need to rebalance the number of jobs in government to the number of jobs in the private sector.
TLP| 6.29.12 @ 9:49AM
Talk about Being late to the Party.
I don't know what you said, but I do know what you DIDN'T say.
With yesterday's apparent Epilepsy Medication Induced Decision, from an Obviously "COMPROMISED" Chief Justice , the story should be - "America. Are you ready to Never have a Good Job, again?"
Before this Tipping Point, yesterday, Companies were sitting on Trillion$ in Profits, explicitly, to see where this thing was going.
Now, they Know.
They weren't Hiring, before. Now, they may not even BE HERE, very much longer. Do the Math.
1 Dictatorial Leftist President, openly defiant, and AT WAR with the Country's Constitution's System of 3 Coequal Branches of Governmet, and Checks and Balances + 1 Ultra Political Blacks Only Justice Department with a Gun Running A.G. who flouts our Laws, as well as International Treaties covering Smuggling High Powered Aytomatic Weapons in to your Neighbor's Country, and giving them to the Biggest Threat to that Country's Stability + 1 Job Killing Energy Secretary + 1 Job Killing Interior Secretary + 1 Job Killing EPA + 1 Job Killing NLRB + Thousands of Job Killing Regulations, and then throw in all of the Union Only States, and you get 0.
Zero.
Nothing.
No Jobs.
Still think there's No Difference?
Von Mises Jr| 6.29.12 @ 10:04AM
It is astounding that people can't put things into perspective. All the bailouts are for the failures of centrally planned economy from our last 100 years of governance. So the left says they hate bailouts. But their crony capitalism and socialism mandates bailouts.
The call themselves liberals, but words from Von Mises better sum it up:
“The state is a human institution, not a superhuman being. He who says “state” means coercion and compulsion. He who says: There should be a law concerning this matter, means: The armed men of the government should force people to do what they do not want to do, or not to do what they like. He who says: This law should be better enforced, means: the police should force people to obey this law. He who says: The state is God, deified arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force.”
Pete| 6.29.12 @ 10:47AM
You are one mixed up dude, Walker. You spend most of this piece correctly railing against academics and then throw your lot in with the worst of them (mere statistics manipulators) with your climate drivel.
Pete| 6.29.12 @ 10:47AM
Tucker, that is....
Petronius| 6.29.12 @ 12:24PM
There's still the only thing the control freaks can't beat without committing murder: the Black market.
Tom Kyba| 6.29.12 @ 12:27PM
Another pseudo-intellectual using enviro-drivel to fish for new taxes, while making a classic leftist bullsh** argument. Yeah sure Eintein, let's add a carbon tax and then other taxes will be lowered. This guy is as quick on the uptake as purp. And how many minutes will it take, Mr. public policy, until the government decides that the carbon tax isn't collecting enough revenue and is adjusted upwards? And, the door now being wide open, how many minutes will go by before the government decides to create a methane tax, or a nitrogen tax, or an oxygen tax. Take your pretentious metrosexual scarf and shove it.
waapiti307| 6.29.12 @ 8:15PM
Now that the SCOTUS has set precedent à la the PPACA decision, the government can tax anything they deem necessary to tax. I look for a revival of cap and trade, if Obama is re-elected. Why stop at that, though? I'm sure there are more creative taxes, fees, surcharges, etc. that can be conjured up. The more money we have to pay will give us Americans even more incentive to get a job or remain employed, knowing that what we are working our collective keisters off for will keep the planet cleaner, make our lives healthier, and help the poor and underprivileged lead better lives. Let's make sure we tell the next generation of Americans that is what they will be working for, so when they get their paychecks they can feel better about themselves. Meanwhile, back in the real world...
JTO| 6.29.12 @ 12:31PM
Maybe it is time to review these claims of global warming and call bs on the whole thing. Maybe we could stop the Geoengineering projects that have quite the effect on tmperature and rainfall.
Oldefarte| 6.29.12 @ 12:43PM
Government [be it fedearl, state and/or local] could/should be cut by 50% and there would still be excess involved. Government is waste, fraud and abuse all rolled up in toilet paper of stupidity. There one thing that government does right, and that's the military/police. Beyond that, not so much!!!!
Who Knows?| 6.29.12 @ 1:20PM
“The record-breaking heat in Texas, the long drought in the Southwest that has produced the devastating Colorado fires, the unprecedented temperatures in Russia where wheat fields around Moscow actually caught fire -- all indicate that something unusual is happening to the world's climate.”
Oops.
Fatal flaw in reasoning---weather is NOT climate.
Otherwise, your whole detailed history of the deleterious growth of the mandarins was spot on. When you’ve already got it made, the natural tendency is to lose your edge, and essentially become a rent seeker, or the equivalent to those hoary “Lords” of Olde England.
Hence, the burgeoning growth in the numbers of lawyers and the concomitant dearth of engineers and scientists. When I was growing up, in the fifties, only the smartest people were able to become scientists.
It was either a doctor or a lawyer if you wanted esteem, and were merely above average in intelligence. Even engineers aren’t, on average, real high IQ wise.
These days, though, those real smart types who used to go for science are wasting their brains as lawyers---rent seekers all. And, we know what lawyer’s core is---
JUST SAY NO.
They are the ultimate deal breakers. Yes, the naysayers are in control.
waapiti307| 6.29.12 @ 8:51PM
But there is scientific consensus...just ask Al Gore, Joe Biden, the Hollyweird Left, and the scientists, engineers, and professors who agree that global climate change is man-made. They are all that count. We must blindly believe in everything they have to say. After all, they are so much smarter than we are. That is why they had to "hide the decline" in order to determine that man-made global climate change does exist. Oops, I hope I'm not getting too far off-topic.
Occam's Tool| 6.29.12 @ 1:59PM
Actually, MDs tend to average in the low genius range, these days.And many of us are very special, IQ wise. Hell, I joined Mensa at age 17, myself.
cicero| 6.29.12 @ 4:33PM
Doctors, lawyers, engineers, are all pretty high on the IQ scale, and could probably have a lot of fun over a pitcher of martinis arguing which of the professional groups is higher than the others. However, that is not determinative in a democracy such as ours. Success depends on the collective wisdom of the general population. If the population is not adaquately educated in the principles of its culture, or attuned to the necessity of self-reliance, or devoid of basic morality, the democracy falls. It is not like this is the first time this had been tried. Athens fell when the populace lacked collective wisdom adaquate to the task. Same with Rome. Our founders tried to avoid the same mistakes by staying away from a straight democracy. That is why we have a representative democracy.
The problem we have is that our general population has been dumbed down relative to the principles of our original culture, has been deviating from our original sense of morality, and has withdrawn from it's aversion to dependancy. In addition, we have been electing as our representatives people who see their only obligation as that to themselves, and their only goal to stay in offfice.
Albert Constantine Jr.| 7.2.12 @ 9:43PM
I accidentally found the training records of my platoon at The Basic School at Quantico after I graduated some decades ago. Included in the data were the scores from the General Classification Test (GCT), which is the rough equivalent of an IQ score. Only one score out of about 38 was below 120 (it was a 113). Most were in the high 120s, with at least three above 140. More important than the intellectual ability alone, though, I recall most were highly physically fit, and possessed other skills that enabled them to go on and pilot complex aircraft or lead Marines.
When I think back on that crew, I am reminded of the last line in the film version of The Bridges at Toko-Ri: “Where do we get such men?”
Petronius| 6.29.12 @ 5:16PM
May the Gods of The Copybook Headings With Terror and Slaughter Return ASAP.
kiwi| 6.30.12 @ 12:53PM
Mr. Tucker,
I've read your recent book on Terrestrial Energy so it surprises me when I hear you wax on about global warming when there is no evidence our planet is warming; no evidence humans cause it and no evidence humans can do a thing to stop it if it were in fact happening. It's not, we aren't and we can't.
Colorado burns not from global warming, but idiotic Forest Service no burn policies. Fire cures beetle infestations, we fight all fires, beetles destroy and weaken western forests which burn faster and larger. History will show this fire saved / restored the Colorado forest, much like the Yellowstone fire saved that ecosystem.
As far as the forest dwellers who lost their homes, have little sympathy. Much like the risk takers who build on the Outer Banks then whine when a hurricane takes their house, these folks need to face the full costs of living amongst the (sick) trees.
fmm| 7.1.12 @ 9:39AM
Tucker, you don't really believe in global warming, otherwise you would not be wearing that monstrosity of a scarf around your neck.