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.
