The Long March From California to Copenhagen
Victor Davis Hanson
http://pajamasmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-long-march-from-california-to-copenhagen/The Great Debate Oddly Is Not Over
We are still in a great public debate between capitalism and socialism, and individual freedom versus statism — odd since hundreds of millions worldwide have escaped poverty the last 30 years due to the spread of Western-inspired free markets.
Many choose sides in the debate based on their own predicaments. Sometimes the more independent and secure who have thrived under capitalism promote it, the more dependent who have not detest it.
At other times the realist mind is opposed to the idealist. And we can also envision the split as an age-old dichotomy between the tragic view and the therapeutic: either man is born pretty awful and must toughen himself through denial of the appetites, or he is by nature wonderful but corrupted and hurt through the burdens placed on him by society.
Free Will
In whatever way we frame the debate, again more than ever Americans are choosing sides.
On the one, are those who believe personal freedom and liberty trump egalitarianism and fraternity. Oh, they don’t believe in letting the less successful perish, but they seek to help those who do not do as well in the open arena through three mechanisms:
1) a limited government that in extremis would support only the needy, sick, disabled and aged (no more self-esteem counseling, 6-year student loans, or research grants for self-adjustment);
2) reliance on entrepreneurship, freedom of action, and private enterprise to allow real economic growth that enlarges the pie itself rather than perennially haggling over the pieces of a shrinking whole.;
3) A culture of shame that makes the more successful help those less so in his family, in his community, and in his nation through philanthropy and private giving.
Collective Concern
On the other side are those who wish a large government to ensure an equality of result. Their notion is that personal responsibility, talent, behavior, luck, fate, etc. do not so much determine why one is well off and another not so. Instead, there is insidious racial, gender, and class oppression everywhere — sinister forces at work that conspire to keep those down who otherwise in a fair system would thrive.
Therefore a big paternalistic — all-knowing, all-powerful — government must step in, rein in the wild horses, break them, and harness them to pull the collective cart. At the end of the day, those who like to work long hours, start businesses, or take risks can continue for the sheer enjoyment of it; while others who chose not to will end up with about the same house, car, medical care, college, and travel opportunity. Does the son who likes to lay inside on Saturday mornings go unfed, just because he won’t help his brother mow the lawn? Is he any happier for his sloth, the other any better for his zeal?
Key to the statist mind is the acceptance that compensation is inherently unfair: why should a brain surgeon who takes out 3 meningiomas successfully a day make any more than the poor floor cleaner who washes the linoleum between operations? The former gains more status anyway, so why deepen the wound of inequality through unequal pay for the latter?
Ultimately that is what the present struggle is over. The Obamians wish to err on the side of egalitarianism rather than freedom of the individual. Traditionally there has been a balance in the US, but we are witnessing a genuine attempt to swing the pendulum hard to the left.
Example 1: California
Nowhere is there a better example of the collective effort than in California. Politics don’t matter here; both Republicans and Democrats embrace statism, high taxes, and growing entitlements.
So — we have the highest gasoline taxes, highest income taxes, highest sales taxes and collect enormous amounts of revenue to pay the highest-compensated and most numerous state employees in the nation to allot these revenues for others. We have the largest number of illegal aliens, and offer the most generous state subsidies for health, welfare, and education and legal aid. We pay more per prison convict than anywhere else, and have more of them per capita as well.
State Worker Paradise
If one is a teacher, a public nurse, or a state bureaucrat, and stays close to home, life is not too bad. Two tenured teachers at midlife can easily make together $160,000 with summers off — far more than the owner of a brake shop or a farmer of 40 acres of trees — and without worry over burdensome regulations or the daily need to drive down the 99 for a living, or to fly out of LAX for business, or to depend on the local CSU to provide literate, skilled employees. Life is therefore pretty good, at least so far.
But if you are a private company, dealing with high taxes, all sorts of regulations, a crumbling infrastructure (take a 300-mile drive from Gilroy south on 101; spend a day at LAX, or try finding a convenient east-west route out of California in the winter), and poorly educated employees, the experiment in egalitarianism has failed.
Answer? The best job in California is a state one; the worst a private-sector one. Result? 3,500 flee per week with capital, education, and know-how; 2,500 arrive with far less capital and training.
The state is billions in the hole; the public employee unions are furious that there is no “they” left to fork up more money.
And the big companies are gearing up to leave as well. Agriculture is under assault by affluent green state-employed professors, biologists, lawyers, and park officials. Prison union employees, prison administrators, lawyers etc. are all haranguing each other over shrinking funds. Los Angeles is a mess — broke, subpar schools, a place where grandees arrive for the work day and leave asap at 5. San Francisco survives by its natural beauty that snags tens of millions of tourist dollars; without it, it would devolve into Lima or Cairo.
On the National Scene
This California model is important because Obama is adopting it as a blueprint on a national scale. If he wins (and don’t count him out), life really would be more patterned on an equality of result. New payroll, income, state, local, and health care surcharge taxes would hit those over $200K with about a 70% take of one’s income. The public sector employees double in number, unionize, and demand ever more from “them.” Cap-and-trade charges raise monthly utility bills 20%. Things like SUVs, Winnebagos, and private jet travel are taxed out of reach — except for a guardian class that uses public moneys for a rarefied lifestyle of governance and enforcement (sort of like the jets parked on the tarmac at Copenhagen or Barack’s night out on the Big Apple).
We would all want a job at the DMV but would never want to go there for any service — a model for health care to come. In short, the poor get a little better off, the better-off a lot worse, and America becomes a sort of collective lower middle class at about a 1950s lifestyle, praised and congratulated for ending “poverty.”
And On to the World
Hugo Chavez was greeted as a rock star at Copenhagen, despite his anti-democratic, anti-Semitic, violent and corrupt rule. The climate change conference doesn’t seem to be just about climate change, but rather is degenerating into a call for universal socialism, with money going from West to the South.
America’s model, we see now at Copenhagen, can be expanded globally as well. The “poor” nations (many fabulously wealthy, like Zimbabwe, in natural resources) demand money from the wealthy West to even the playing-field under the guise of carbon-offset penance.
The West taxes its populace to hand over trillions to those without as many polluting cars and industries — on the socialist belief that impoverishment in Latin America and Africa is due to oppression, neo-colonialism, and economic imperialism rather than endemic corruption, tribalism, ethnic and religious strife, gender apartheid, the lack of legal protection for property and the individual, and statist bureaucracies. “They,” not “we,” did it to “us.”
(Never mentioned is the corollary of the Copenhagen shake-down: wealthy countries produce the steel, plastics, and information-based knowledge that poor countries use: paying a Zimbabwe billions for using less carbon would be as asinine as charging them billions for R&D full costs for the cars, industries, pharmaceuticals, eyeglasses, and technology their people use, but have not invented, fabricated, and in most cases maintained and repaired.)
The Great Chain of Socialism
In other words, we are seeing a strange era in which the once last bastion of capitalism, the free-market US, is trying to emulate the California model—and in turn the world wishes to follow what the Obama administration is trying to do in America.
Note well: California depends on “them” producing real wealth in food, fiber, manufacturing, oil, gas, timber, construction, and high-technology. In turn, the US depends on 50 states doing the same to provide for the expansive regulatory and administrative federal class, and the world relies on the US economy to provide the growth and capital to redistribute. (e.g., We can’t all be the Obamas, Valerie Jarretts, David Axelrods, Rahm Emanuels, Van Jones, Timothy Geithners, etc. who have made good livings as advocates, regulators, bureaucrats, legislators, etc. without having to worry about meeting a payroll).
The Unsung?
In truth, in some ways, the world economy depends every day on some engineer, farmer, architect, radiator shop owner, truck driver or plumber getting up at 5AM, going to work, toiling hard, and producing real wealth so that an array of bureaucrats, regulators, and redistributors can manage the proper allotment of much of the natural largess produced.
The whole system from California to Copenhagen will keep on working as long as the productive classes feel there are still incentives to jump out of bed at 5AM. When they don’t, the power is cut off to thousands of gears and cogs — and the world looks more like Ecuador or Somalia than the U.S.
Global Wealth Can Heal the Planet
Free-market nations are better at protecting their environments than statist regimes.
By Jonah Goldberg
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjA3ZmUxYzc5NWVjM2UzZmMxMTFjNjJmYjZiNmZhYTQ=As the Copenhagen climate summit comes to a close, it seems fair to say that rarely has a gathering of so many doing so little gotten so much attention. But Copenhagen does have its uses. For starters, it reminds us that environmentalism continues to be a cover for uglier agendas.
Bolivian president Evo Morales was interviewed by Al Jazeera television while in Copenhagen. “The principal obstacle to combating climate change is capitalism,” he explained. “Until we put an end to capitalism, it will continue to be a big obstacle for life and humanity.”
Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe proclaimed in a speech: “When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it’s we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere, who gasp and sink and eventually die.”
Right. That is, unless Mugabe kills them first.
The big name in the anti-capitalism club was, of course, Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan national-socialist strongman. In a typical stem-winder, he belched: “Capitalism is a destructive model that is eradicating life, that threatens to put a definitive end to the human species.”
I don’t know how to say “chutzpah” in Spanish, but you’ve got to hand it to the leader of the world’s No. 5 supplier of oil for bemoaning the system that keeps his regime afloat by buying his product.
Now, I know that nice, moderate progressive types are rolling their eyes at my cynical effort to associate their noble activism with support for socialism and thugs. Fair enough. Let us concede that many, perhaps even most, proponents of draconian restrictions on carbon emissions have no sympathy for socialist dictators and do not want to chuck capitalism in the dustbin of history. But surely it should trouble these responsible greens that they’re in bed with a Star Wars cantina of villains and monsters.
Also, if environmentalists want to avoid the “watermelon” charge (“green on the outside, red on the inside”), maybe the delegates and activists in the audience shouldn’t have given Chávez such a loud and boisterous round of applause? Perhaps the folks who gave him a standing ovation didn’t help either?
The simple truth is that hostility to freedom (i.e., economic liberty and political democracy) and fondness for non-democratic statism suffuses much of the environmental movement. I will confess to having a minor obsession with the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, who consistently writes of his confessed envy for China’s authoritarian regime. But I am trying to wean myself off Friedman-bashing lest he get a restraining order.
So consider instead Diane Francis, a ballyhooed Canadian pundit. In a recent Financial Post column, Francis wrote that the “‘inconvenient truth’ overhanging the U.N.’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.” She insists that “the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate” is to implement a “planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy.”
Population control has always been at the heart of the progressive project, so it’s no surprise that it’s in fashion once again.
But Francis’s proposal is particularly disgusting, not least because Francis has two children. I think the hypocrisy charge is overused in political debate these days, but when you tout a totalitarian police state’s population policy of, among other things, forced abortions, you might try harder to practice what you preach. Think globally, act locally and all that.
But Francis’s argument is also stunningly stupid, as are virtually all of the complaints about capitalism being the root of the problem.
The historical record is clear: Democratic free-market nations are better at protecting their environments than statist regimes for the simple reason that they can afford to. West Germany’s environment was far cleaner than East Germany’s. I’d much sooner drink the tap water in South Korea than North Korea.
Mugabe rails against capitalism as if he has a better idea of how to run things. That’s almost funny given that Mugabe has destroyed what was once a great cause for hope in Africa, in large part by abandoning capitalism and democracy. Zimbabwe now has the highest inflation rate in the world and one of the lowest life expectancies. Let’s hope nobody was taking notes when he was giving out advice.
Moreover, capitalism, and the wealth it creates, is the best means of bending down the population curve. Don’t take my word for it. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledges that “affluence is correlated with long life and small families” and that growing prosperity will cause world population to decline even further.
Want to know the best way to heal the planet? Create more rich countries. Want to know the best way to hurt the planet? Throw a wet blanket on economic growth.
Mass insanity in Copenhagen
By Lorrie Goldstein
http://www.torontosun.com/comment/editorial/2009/12/19/12209836-sun.htmlA good definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.
In that sense, the approach of the United Nations in Copenhagen to addressing climate change has been insane.
As they did 12 years ago in Kyoto, Japan, world leaders have apparently jammed together an eleventh-hour deal in an atmosphere of manufactured hysteria and artificial deadlines.
This is a farcical way to deal with what these leaders claim is an existential threat to mankind. Whatever they've agreed to has nothing to do with cooling our planet.
It has everything to do with some of the world's most corrupt dictators and regimes extorting billions upon billions of dollars from the developed world -- us -- which they will then spend not on reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), but in any way they please.
Never mind that the European cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions spawned by the Kyoto accord and financed by carbon credits, is riddled with profiteering, fraud, corruption and has been infiltrated by organized crime, which has already stolen billions of dollars.
Never mind that cap-and-trade -- soon to go global -- has done nothing for the environment, while driving up the cost of energy for consumers and funneling billions in undeserved profits to hedge funds, speculators and energy companies.
Never mind that Kyoto and everything it has spawned is unfair and punitive to a big, cold, sparsely populated, energy-producing country like Canada. Or that, Canada, responsible for 2% of global emissions, was one of only three dozen countries required to reduce emissions under Kyoto.
Never mind that 150 other nations, including China and the U.S., the world's two biggest emitters responsible for 40% of global emissions, didn't have to do anything under Kyoto.
Canada should never have ratified Kyoto -- a spectacularly irresponsible decision by then prime minister Jean Chretien, who then did nothing to implement it. In an ideal world, we wouldn't be in Copenhagen.
In the real world, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has to match what U.S. President Barack Obama pledges, to ensure our businesses have continued access to our largest trading partner.
But make no mistake. The insanity in Copenhagen is bad news for us.