Ray Harvey

From a Providence newspaper, local fishermen are infuriated over the Obama administration’s junk science catch limits: “All these politicians scream about is jobs, jobs, jobs. Why are they putting us out of business?”

Another local fishermen took out the following full-page ad in the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette:

EDGARTOWN, Massachusetts – Aug 24, 2010 – The Northeast Seafood Coalition has taken out a full page ad in today’s Vineyard Gazette. The ad is an open letter to President Obama from Russell Sherman, captain of the Fishing Vessel Lade Jane of Gloucester, Massachusetts. The text follows:

“MR. PRESIDENT, WE NEED YOUR HELP”

Dear President Obama,

My name is Russell Sherman, and I am a life-long fisherman. Like New England fisherman before me have done for 387 years, I take my vessel, the 72-foot F/V Lady Jane from the port of Gloucester, Massachusetts, into North Atlantic waters to bring back cod, haddock, flounder, and other groundfish for America’s table. I hope that while you’re in New England, you and your family are enjoying a few meals of our fresh catch – there’s none better tasting or healthier in the world.

Mr. President, my fellow fishermen and I need your leadership. We are small businessmen and women who want to continue the profession we love. We have worked hard over the past 16 years to rebuild groundfish stocks. Today, some stocks are fully rebuilt, and most others are expected to rebuild in three years, by 2014. According to federal forecasts, a fully rebuilt fishery will yield a sustainable catch nearly five times current landings.

At a time when we should be hopeful about the future of our businesses, we are desperate instead. We are being driven from our work and the fishery we have helped to rebuild. Ironically, what’s putting us out of work are the rules to rebuild the fishery. The most recent version of these rules – effective on May 1, 2010 – impose very low annual catch limits on stocks for the next three years, and at the same time institute a
“catch share” system.

Take my case. Under the 2010 rules, my permit allows an annual catch of only 60,000 lbs of groundfish. At an average price of $1.50 a pound, that’s an annual gross of $90,000, or about one-quarter of my business’ gross income last year. I simply cannot run my business and support my crew of four – each with a family – on only $90,000 a year.

My business is only one of hundreds facing extinction. While there will be a small handful of “winners” under these new rules, the vast majority of us will be losers. And when we “losers” are forced out, jobs will be lost, coastal communities gutted, and crucial commercial fishing infrastructure gone forever. Is this the way to rebuild our storied, centuries-old groundfish fishery?

I belong to an organization called the Northeast Seafood Coalition, a New England-wide organization of 255 small, entrepreneurial fishing businesses and allied support businesses that participates in the public process. The Coalition has tried to bring this matter to the attention of your Department of Commerce. We have tried to offer constructive solutions to the challenge of rebuilding fisheries without at the same time destroying them. But our efforts have fallen on deaf ears.

Mr. President, we desperately need your leadership. We ask that you please direct your Department of Commerce to listen to us and work with us. We know that we can meet this challenge by working together.

Sincerely yours,
Russell Sherman, Captain, F/V Lady Jane Port of Gloucester, Massachusetts

Here’s the video footage:

Jim Cox is one of my favorite living economists. His slim but pregnant book — The Concise Guide To Economics — is a miniature masterpiece. The following comes from Chapter 37:

The Spanish Scholastics of 14th through 17th century Spain had produced a body of thought largely similar to our modern understanding of economics. The work of these scholars was largely lost to the English speaking world we’ve inherited. The French physiocrats carried the discipline forward in the 18th century with prominent economists of the time including A. R. J. Turgot and Richard Cantillon. A strategic error was made by these French advocates of laissez-faire as they attempted to change policy by influencing the King to embrace free markets, only to have the institution of monarchy itself delegitimized. Thus a guilt by association undermined the credibility of the laissez-faire theorists.

In 1776 Scotsman Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations only to set the discipline back with his cost of production theory of value. (Smith did properly emphasize specialization and the division of labor in his analysis.) The correct subjective theory of value had been understood by both the Spanish Scholastics and the French laissez-faire school. Why Adam Smith chose the faulty cost of production theory over subjectivism is a mighty mystery as it is clear from Smith’s lecture notes that he had endorsed marginal utility analysis prior to the publication of his book. The marginal revolution of the 1870′s–with Carl Menger in Austria, William Stanley Jevons in England, and Leon Walras in Switzerland each writing independently and in differing languages–reestablished the correct marginal approach. As stated by Joseph Schumpeter in The History of Economic Thought:

It is not too much to say that analytic economics took a century to get where it could have got in twenty years after the publication of Turgot’s treatise had its content been properly understood and absorbed by an alert profession. p. 249

Unfortunately, the theory was perverted into a mathematized method with the rush to positivism in the 20th century.

The Austrian tradition of Menger was completed in the theories of Ludwig von Mises with the application of marginal utility analysis applied for the first time to money, which in turn led to the correct business cycle approach during the 1920′s. This approach was gaining headway in the English speaking world with F. A. Hayek’s appearance in England in the early 1930′s. But in the late 30′s the well-named Keynesian Revolution displaced the Austrian theories–not by refutation, but by neglect–taking economic theory to the bizarre point of splitting macro-theory from an underlying micro-emphasis; a point where it still is today.

Jim Cox is an Associate Professor of Economics and Political Science at the Gwinnett Campus of Georgia Perimeter College in Lawrenceville, Georgia and has taught the principles of Economics courses since 1979. Great Ideas for Teaching Economics includes nine of his submissions. As a Fellow of the Institute for Humane Studies his commentaries were published in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Wichita Journal, The Orange County Register, The San Diego Business Journal, and The Justice Times as well as other newspapers. His articles have also been published in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Margin Magazine, Creative Loafing, The LP News, The Georgia Libertarian, The Gwinnett Daily News, The Atlanta Business Chronicle, The Gwinnett Post, The Gwinnett Citizen, The Gwinnett Business Journal and APC News. Cox has been a member of the Academic Board of Advisors for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, and is currently on the Board of Scholars of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.

(Link)

Not quite ten years ago, in May of 2001, Robert Tracinski wrote the following:

Past regulations have been imposed in the same manner that the new, less-restrictive process is being adopted: by executive-branch decree. The result of those decrees over the past three decades has been a vast environmentalist land grab, with millions of acres of land sealed off from logging, mining, grazing and even recreation. This is a basic technique used by the Left to achieve through the regulatory agencies what they could not achieve in an open vote. The technique is to introduce legislation to achieve some vague, positive-sounding generality, such as “worker safety” or “environmental protection” – things no politician will want to go on record voting against….

Consider that federal regulatory agencies make thousands of rulings each year, adding about 80,000 pages annually to the Federal Register. Do you think Congress can exercise “oversight” by debating all 80,000 pages of these regulations? Do you think the president, his advisors and his cabinet officers can consider and personally approve all of these decrees?

Of course not.

And the very process which Robert Tracinski describes above, far from diminishing, has suddenly accelerated. To wit:

On April 16th, 2010, Barack Obama released a so-called Presidential Memorandum, which he and his clownish administration termed “A 21st Century Strategy for America’s Great Outdoors.” Did you hear about it? You’re not alone. In fact, that’s part of the point: legislation by stealth.

Quoting Michelle Malkin:

Across the country, White House officials have been meeting quietly with environmental groups to map out government plans for acquiring untold millions of acres of both public and private land. It’s another stealthy power grab through executive order that promises to radically transform the American way of life….

Take my home state of Colorado. The Obama administration is considering locking up some 380,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management land and private land in Colorado under the 1906 Antiquities Act. The Vermillion Basin and the Alpine Triangle would be shut off to mining, hunting, grazing, oil and gas development and recreational activities. Alan Foutz, president of the Colorado Farm Bureau, blasted the administration’s meddling: “Deer and elk populations are thriving, and we in Colorado don’t need help from the federal government in order to manage them effectively.”

The bureaucrats behind Obama’s “Great Outdoors Initiative” plan on wrapping up their public comment solicitation by November 15. The initiative’s taxpayer-funded website has been dominated by left-wing environmental activists proposing human population reduction, private property confiscation, and gun bans, hunting bans and vehicle bans in national parks.

Make no mistake: this issue is entirely about private property, which is the crux of freedom, and which the religion of environmentalism explicitly seeks to do away with.

You say you want a revolution?

Well, just recently the following article appeared in Investors Business Daily. I reproduce it here in full because America is currently under the thumb of people like this:

From Investors Business Daily:

The Internet is a large-scale version of the “Committees of Correspondence” that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington’s failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.

People are asking, “Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?”

Pruning the power of government begins with the imperial presidency.

Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There’s no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.

Bill Clinton lowered the culture, moral tone and strength of the nation — and left America vulnerable to attack. When it came, George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily.

Barack Obama, however, has pulled off the ultimate switcheroo: He’s diminishing America from within — so far, successfully.

He may soon bankrupt us and replace our big merit-based capitalist economy with a small government-directed one of his own design.

He is undermining our constitutional traditions: The rule of law and our Anglo-Saxon concepts of private property hang in the balance. Obama may be the most “consequential” president ever.

The Wall Street Journal’s steadfast Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote that Barack Obama is “an alien in the White House.”

His bullying and offenses against the economy and job creation are so outrageous that CEOs in the Business Roundtable finally mustered the courage to call him “anti-business.” Veteran Democrat Sen. Max Baucus blurted out that Obama is engineering the biggest government-forced “redistribution of income” in history.

Fear and uncertainty stalk the land. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke says America’s financial future is “unusually uncertain.”

A Wall Street “fear gauge” based on predicted market volatility is flashing long-term panic. New data on the federal budget confirm that record-setting deficits in the $1.4 trillion range are now endemic.

Obama is building an imperium of public debt and crushing taxes, contrary to George Washington’s wise farewell admonition: “cherish public credit … use it as sparingly as possible … avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt … bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue, that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not … inconvenient and unpleasant … .”

Opinion polls suggest that in the November mid-term elections, voters will replace the present Democratic majority in Congress with opposition Republicans — but that will not necessarily stop Obama.

A President Obama intent on achieving his transformative goals despite the disagreement of the American people has powerful weapons within reach. In one hand, he will have a veto pen to stop a new Republican Congress from repealing ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank takeover of banks.

In the other, he will have a fistful of executive orders, regulations and Obama-made fiats that have the force of law.

Under ObamaCare, he can issue new rules and regulations so insidiously powerful in their effect that higher-priced, lower-quality and rationed health care will quickly become ingrained, leaving a permanent stain.

Under Dodd-Frank, he and his agents will control all credit and financial transactions, rewarding friends and punishing opponents, discriminating on the basis of race, gender and political affiliation. Credit and liquidity may be choked by bureaucracy and politics — and the economy will suffer.

He and the EPA may try to impose by “regulatory” fiats many parts of the cap-and-trade and other climate legislation that failed in the Congress.

And by executive orders and the in terrorem effect of an industrywide “boot on the neck” policy, he can continue to diminish energy production in the United States.

By the trick of letting current-law tax rates “expire,” he can impose a $3.5 trillion 10-year tax increase that damages job-creating capital investment in an economy struggling to recover. And by failing to enforce the law and leaving America’s borders open, he can continue to repopulate America with unfortunate illegals whose skill and education levels are low and whose political attitudes are often not congenial to American-style democracy.

A wounded rampaging president can do much damage — and, like Caesar, the evil he does will live long after he leaves office, whenever that may be.

The overgrown, un-pruned power of the presidency to reward, punish and intimidate may now be so overwhelming that his re-election in 2012 is already assured — Chicago-style.

• Christian, an attorney, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Ford administration.

• Robbins, an economist, served at the Treasury Department in the Reagan administration.

Please remember: the revolution will not be televised, but it will be broadcast live right here. Stay tuned.