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Agriculture: How Subsidies and Socialization Destroy Good Farming



Farm subsidies have never made any sense — and despite almost a century of entrenchment, this remains as true today as it ever was — and I will show you specifically how: how and why, I should say, the subsidization of agriculture devastates the vital, beautiful industry of farming and agriculture.

My notions, first of all, are not just theory. The world has plenty of examples — including the United States, in times and in sectors when and where it’s been left free — but here are two of the best:

In New Zealand, farms were liberated from state interference following an agricultural crisis back in the 1980s. Farmers were left without subsidies after the market reforms, ultimately resulting in Kiwi agriculture booming into one of the most diverse and efficient markets in the world.

Not only were prices decreased, but previously ignored sectors popped up as well — including the now-booming New Zealand wine industry.

In Australia, it’s much the same story.

Like New Zealand, Aussie farmers are among the world’s least subsidized. Also like New Zealand, the Australian agricultural economy is diverse and efficient, resulting in the gross value of production in that sector reaching record levels this year at AU$62.8 billion.

Seeing how unsubsidized farmers flourish down south, one is forced to question why we stick with protectionism in Europe and the US.

Implementing protectionist principles in the agricultural sector raises prices for consumers, promotes overproduction, damages developing economies, and lowers efficiency and innovation.

On the other hand, free farming results in diversification, growth, and efficiency. Consumers pay less for better products, and healthier foods are more readily available. Diversification also leads to new markets and sectors, resulting in a higher availability of jobs.

Let’s stop pretending that agricultural protectionism helps anybody — especially the poor and working class. Europe and the US need to follow in our Southern Hemisphere cousins’ footsteps: Free the farms, and feed the poor.

(Link)

Did you know?

The federal government of the U.S. spends more than twenty-billion dollars annually on subsidies for farm businesses.

Roughly forty percent of the nation’s 2.1 million farms receive subsidies, the overwhelming majority of that money, however, going to the large government-crony producers of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice.

Federal aid for crop farmers is deep, complex, and comprehensive — dating back to at least 1862, when the Morrill Act of established the land-grant colleges to teach agriculture and other subjects.

The Hatch Act of 1887 funded agricultural research, and the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 funded agricultural education.

The Federal Farm Loan Act of 1916 created cooperative banks to provide loans to farmers, which in-and-of-itself is no big deal, but that developed into today’s Farm Credit System — a thoroughly government-sponsored financial system with more than $280 billion in assets.

Also, “the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 created the Federal Farm Board, which tried to raise crop prices by buying up and stockpiling production. That did not work, and after spending $500 million this early agricultural boondoggle was abolished in 1933.”

And yet it was during the Great Depression of 1930s and FDR’s disastrous policies that the socialization of agriculture really began in earnest and included wage-and-price controls, commodity price supports, supply regulations, import barriers, and much more. And this, not coincidentally, is when farming conditions started to become horrific.

Among numerous other things, all this taxpayer money shields farmers against price-and-market fluctuations and seasonal yields, as it also funds their insurance coverage, marketing, export sales, research (however whimsical), and other activities.

Agriculture is no more (or less) risky than any number of other industries, and, like all other industries, it does NOT require a complicated maze of government subsidies and regulations.

United States farm subsidies are promoted as “saving family farms and protecting the food supply,” but in actuality, in terms of sheer dollars spent, they’re America’s largest crony-corporate welfare program in existence, surpassing even healthcare.

These subsidies also burden American families with higher taxes and higher food prices.

Yes, I know: farm subsidies are intended to alleviate farmer poverty, but I know also that the majority of subsidies go to commercial farms with individual net worths of nearly $2 million.

Most damaging of all is not how undeniably costly farm subsidies are to taxpayers, but in how these subsidies harm the economy and the environment and diversity of food:

Subsidies and socialization discourage farmers from innovating, cutting costs, diversifying their land use, and taking other actions needed to prosper in a vibrant, competitive economy.

Laissez-faire market forces, on the other hand, as with all other goods and services, create a food-and-agricultural sector that is free to diversify and flourish when left alone, as it has and does in New Zealand, for instance. This, in turn, results in readily available, inexpensive food for all.

The problems, as usual, only come when the state gets involved — the state, that “coldest of all cold monsters, which bites with stolen teeth.”

Agricultural protectionism comes in many shapes, sizes, and forms. Farm subsidies are the most common, and they almost invariably result in overproduction and waste, but there are plenty of others:

Tariff and nontariff barriers to foreign entry are also common and aim to prevent farmers from foreign countries from providing cheaper products and undercutting local producers (ironically almost exactly what subsidized farmers do after overproducing).

Blocking foreign competition, however, usually results in higher prices for agricultural goods due to a lack of competition. As a result, consumers in protected economies usually wind up paying more for foodstuffs than if the market were free.

There’s even evidence that subsidies contribute to obesity. In the United States, the majority of farm subsidies go to crops like corn, wheat, and soy — primarily used as food for livestock and as sweeteners — whereas subsidies for fruit fall far shorter.

As a result, unhealthy foods have their prices artificially lowered while the healthy stuff stays expensive. Thus, poorer members of society are not only made to pay more, but they often have to [to some extent] forgo a healthy diet to do so.

(Link)

My point? The usual:

It’s government that creates the problems to begin with and then the “free-market” (that doesn’t actually exist) is the one blamed so that deeper government controls can then be demanded, and then the problems worsen, and the cycle begins anew, et cetera ad infinitum.

And so it goes.

My point is this:

Laissez-faire et laissez-passer, le monde va de lui même.

“Let it be and let goods pass: the world goes by itself.”

Human society contains within itself the capacity for ordering and managing its own path of development, without that monstrous apparatus which democrats and republicans alike love so much:

“Government is solely an instrument or mechanism of appropriation, prohibition, compulsion, and extinction; in the nature of things it can be nothing else, and can operate to no other end….” (Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine, 1943).

Because one of the greatest ironies of agricultural-socialization-versus-laissez-faire is that some of the loudest voices calling for more and ever more and ever bigger government are also some of the loudest lamenters of the horrible farming and agriculture conditions which have been created by the very big government they’re calling for MORE of.

It is inarguable — it is indubitable — that FDR’s policies of unadulterated socialism wrecked farming for decades that have stretched into the present day.

As Jeffrey Tucker once put it: we should all be more conscious of the cause-and-effect relationships operating in the world of human action, which give rise to the unbelievably elegant order of that thing called the free economy: an order, as he said, “fueled by human choices, entrepreneurship, relentless learning, experimenting, imitating, copying, private property, and the freedom to trade; for these are the institutions bestowing miracles on us ever day. We also need to be aware of its opposite, the gargantuan apparatus of compulsion and coercion called the state that operates on principles that are anachronistic to the core. Its principle is violence, and its contributions to the social order are prisons, economic upheaval, and war. It is lumbering, stupid, and angry as hell, and it is the main drag on the world today. The contrast with laissez-faire is overwhelming.”

Nine Farm Subsidy Myths Pushed by Special Interest

Ideas and Consequences: Of Meat and Myth

Market Demand is Reforming Bad Farming

How Laissez-Faire Creates Cleaner, Better Farms

The Absurd World of Agricultural Subsidies




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Speaking of Corporations and Capitalism and Privilege

I recently wrote about some of this, and then just last night I read the following.

Native American Senator Elizabeth Warren, in kicking off what many think will be her 2020 Presidential run, proposes what she calls — apparently without irony — the Accountable Capitalism Act.

As actual legislation, it will go nowhere and it’s not intended to: it is more of a symbolic proposal to show people where she stands and the direction she wants to take the democrats:

Under the legislation, corporations with more than $1bn in annual revenue would be required to obtain a corporate charter from the federal government—and the document would mandate that companies not just consider the financial interests of shareholders. Instead, businesses would have to consider all major corporate stakeholders—which could include workers, customers, and the cities and towns where those corporations operate. Anyone who owns shares in the company could sue if they believed corporate directors were not meeting their obligations.

Employees at large corporations would be able to elect at least 40% of the board of directors. An estimated 3,500 public US companies and hundreds of other private companies would be covered by the mandates.

(Source)

I’m writing about this now because it occurred to me that it’s a near-perfect example of how precisely backwards the Progressives understand the science of economics — and I’m not being snide here when I say that but literal and sincere — in this case specifically: how government intervention and meddling will create actual privilege:

You see, back in the days of feudalism, when property wasn’t recognized as a right but the crown held all property in “tenancy,” that same crown — i.e. the Monarch — granted “prerogatives and privileges in exchange for services rendered back to the king.”

This is in principle exactly — and I mean exactly — what Native American Senator Elizabeth Warren’s proposal would re-establish: by abolishing the right of free-and-clear property ownership, it would make ownership a state-granted privilege.

“In America, and to some extent in Britain and Europe, as the legal remnants of feudalism were being cleaned up, the basis for the law of corporations was changed from one of privileges to one of rights. A corporate charter wasn’t [any longer] a special favor the sovereign granted in exchange for special services. It was a recognition of free-and-clear ownership of the corporation by its shareholders.”

(Source)

Quoting again from her proposal:

The proposal would create a new Office of United States Corporations within the Department of Commerce, which would be responsible for granting the charters—and which could revoke a charter if a state attorney general requests it, and the office finds the firm has a history of egregious and repeated illegal conduct and has failed take action to correct it.

This is another textbook example of the antiquated, regressive nature of modern-day Progressivism, which is so shockingly and dangerously closed-off and naive to economic history and fact.

The left has a long history of antipathizing free-and-clear ownership — most people know this, even leftwingers:

[The left has] always hated the concept of free-and-clear ownership, and they have been struggling all along to go back to a neo-feudal system in which all economic activity takes place only with the permission of the sovereign. They merely give it a gloss of democracy by claiming that the sovereign, this time, will be ‘the people’ [which is only composed of individuals, not all of whom agree].

You can get a sense of this neo-feudal approach in the way that corporations, in [Elizabeth Warren’s] proposal, would be attached to the land like medieval serfs, unable to move or change without the permission of the cities and towns where they operate. While in theory this is a way of making corporations answer to ‘the people’ in the same way that feudal barons answered to the king, notice that in practice this proposal gives power to bureaucrats and ambitious, self-promoting politicians.

(Source)

Yes.

Yes, indeed.

In closely related news, your tax dollars at work for self-described Democratic-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, friend of the working man, reminding us again how easy it is to spend other people’s money:




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The Unknown Rebel, Tiananmen Square, & the Twenty-Ninth Year Anniversary of a Socialist Massacre

Tank Man — or the “Unknown Rebel,” as he’s sometimes called: so small and yet so large.

That photo is of course from Tiananmen Square, twenty-nine years ago today, June 4th, when the entire world watched an anonymous Chinese man stand alone in front of advancing tanks, not backing down in the face of socialist totalitarianism.

Whether you associate more closely with the so-called leftwing or the so-called right, I urge you in all sincerity to please take a brief moment and ask yourself:

What would lead a person to such an incredible act — standing in front of a column of tanks knowing virtually for certain that you were going to die?

I write about Tiananmen Square every year on its anniversary because I think it’s vital that the world never fully forgets.

I ask you to think of the Unknown Rebel next time you see another enviro group lauding praise on the socialist Che Guerva, a proven child murderer (read some of it, please — please — I implore you to: “Murdered by Che: Che Guevara, Mass Murderer and Terrorist” and please take a moment and scroll through the documented victims here) — Che, a man who explicitly called for Russian nukes to wipe out New York City, which even the Huffington Post doesn’t ignore.

Here, incidentally, is some Che Guevara paraphernalia from an Occupy protest, all those years ago in 2011-2012: young women and men who are perfectly okay idolizing a mass murderer and socialist totalitarian, but who, at the same time, don’t at all like the people and the country who provide them with the wealth, health, cleanliness, and the pure freedom to protest these things which keep them alive. Let’s put it this way: women and men who wouldn’t be allowed to protest this way under the very man whom they praise — Che — but would have to do it like Tank Man (see above), in which case, also like Tank Man (it is believed, though no one really knows), they’d be rapidly executed.

Yes, America sucks — it’s so hip and cool to think so — except when it doesn’t:

Think of Tank Man next time you see a “Feel the Bern” bumper sticker — and they’re still everywhere — and think of Bernie himself in one of his three (American) mansions saying (and I quote from his own website): “These days, the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina, where incomes are actually more equal today than they are in the land of Horatio Alger” and then in the very same paragraph asking, ostensibly in all seriousness, in reference to Venezuela-versus-the-United-States (where his mansions are all located): “Who’s the banana republic now?” as the Chavez regime tore through Venezuela leaving a vast swath of poverty.

Think of Tank Man next time you see Bill Ayers, and his book called Prairie Fires, which he dedicated to Chairman Mao Zedong, and think of all the other Obama progressives in positions of power praising the man himself: Chairman Mao Zedong, who is the one most responsible for creating the regime that (likely) killed Tank Man — and much, much more:

The regime that is undeniably 100 percent culpable for hundreds of millions of murders, forced famines, and wrongful imprisonments.

Because when people in some of the highest positions of power in this country overtly and explicitly praise someone like that and the majority of citizens see absolutely nothing wrong with it or, seeing something (they don’t quite know what), choose instead to look away, you can be sure there is a kind of mass lunacy and ignorance at work.

And then please, after that — please — tell me how none of this is true socialism, and that those of us who believe in the absolute sanctity and inviolability of individual person and property, tell me how we are the foolish radicals because we know that the moment you concede that principle — the principle of individual rights — you’re fucked, as history has proven, time and again and again and again and again and again and again….

And then tell me that behind every major victory for personal liberty — legalizing gay marriage, for instance, or pot legalization, justice for Native American children, or allowing insurance companies the freedom to trade across state lines, abolishing trade tariffs, et cetera — tell me what bedrock principles you find there undergirding such acts of true justice.

I’ll give you a hint: you won’t find collectivist principles.

This week, think of this and Tank Man for just a moment, before you go back to business-as-usual.

Surely, Tank Man is one of the defining photos of the 20th Century, but let us also never forget, as socialists already have — or, rather, never paid attention to to begin with because it’s not real socialism — Chengdu:

June 4th indeed marks the twenty-ninth year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China — when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

At that time, other protests, in other Chinese cities, sprung up as well. Do you know about Chengdu?

Twenty-nine years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators remained in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, day after day, until their protests were brutally suppressed by the Chinese army — on June 4. Hundreds died; to this day, no one knows how many.

The media captured some of the story of the massacre in Beijing. But Louisa Lim, NPR’s longtime China correspondent, says the country’s government has done all it can in the intervening 25 years to erase the memory of the uprising. Lim’s forthcoming book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, relates how 1989 changed China and how China rewrote what happened in 1989 in its official version of events. Her story includes an investigation into a forgotten crackdown in the southwestern city of Chengdu — which, to this day, has never been reported.

It was in Chengdu, which is now a bustling mega-city with a population of 14 million, that Lim met Tang Deying (source).

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force — which, really, is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

“Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government” (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout China, including Shanghai. These others remained relatively peaceful, however — except the now virtually forgotten Chengu:

Protests in Chengdu mirrored those in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, with students mourning the sudden death from a heart attack of reformist party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. This soon morphed into mass protests, followed by a hunger strike beginning in mid-May.

Students occupied Chengdu’s Tianfu Square, camping at the base of its 100-foot-tall Chairman Mao statue and proudly proclaiming it to be a “Little Tiananmen.” The initial move by police to clear protesters from Tianfu Square on the morning of June 4 went ahead relatively peacefully.

But on hearing the news that troops had opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, the citizens of Chengdu took to the streets once more. This time they knew the risk; they carried banners denouncing the “June 4th massacre” and mourning wreaths with the message: “We Are Not Afraid To Die.”

Soon the police moved in with tear gas. Pitched battles broke out in Tianfu Square. Protesters threw paving stones at the police; the police retaliated by beating protesters with batons.

At a nearby medical clinic, the bloodied victims of police brutality lay in rows on the floor. Kim Nygaard, an American resident of Chengdu, recalled that they begged her: “Tell the world! Tell the world!”

A row of patients sat on a bench, their cracked skulls swathed in bandages, their shirts stained scarlet near the collar, visceral evidence of the police strategy of targeting protesters’ heads.

But the violence went both ways: Dennis Rea, an American then teaching at a local university, watched, horrified, as the crowd viciously attacked a man they believed to be a policeman. The crowd pulled at his arms and legs, then dropped him on the ground and began stomping on his body and face, crushing it.

Eight people were killed that day, including two students, according to the local government’s official account. It said the fighting left 1,800 people injured — of them, it said, 1,100 were policemen — though it described most of the injuries as light.

But U.S. diplomats at the time told The New York Times they believed as many as 100 seriously wounded people had been carried from the square that day.

Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city’s smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that one of the most brutal — and largely forgotten — episodes of the Chengdu crackdown played out after a crowd attacked the hotel (source).

It isn’t known exactly how many people died altogether in these Chinese protests, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600 for Tiananmen Square alone, a number which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

From the previously quoted article entitled “After 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen“:

“What happened in Chengdu 25 years ago matters enough that the local government continues to devote financial and human resources to muzzling Tang. Her treatment shows how scared the Chinese authorities are of their own recent history.

“A quarter-century ago, the government used guns and batons to suppress its own people. Now it is deploying more sophisticated tools of control — censorship of the media and the falsification of its own history — to build patriotism and create a national identity.

“Though China’s citizens have become undeniably richer and freer in the post-Tiananmen era, Tang Deying’s experience shows the limits to that freedom. Simply by keeping alive a memory that others have suppressed or simply forgotten, Tang has become seen as a threat to social stability.

“What happened in Chengdu matters because it shows the success of the Chinese government in not just controlling its people, but also in controlling their memories. In the China of today, that most personal space of all — memory — has become a political tool.”

Because the only true rebel — like Tank Man — is the person who follows not the crowd or the group, but reason and the independent mind.







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Anarchism, Egalitarianism, Gresham’s Law, & the Fundamental Flaw of Socialism



The fundamental flaw in every variation of socialism — and this includes the watered-down versions we enjoy today (i.e. progressivism or welfare statism) — is the idea that human survival is or should be guaranteed.

Therefore, says the theory, it follows that the legitimate function of government is to ensure everyone’s survival.

This is achieved through massive applications of expropriation and other force.

The reason this is a fatal flaw is that survival by definition is not assured or guaranteed — not for any living thing — because life by definition is effort.

Life is work.

Survival — even human survival, which unique among the animals is physical and epistemological — requires effort.

Ultimately, this effort is an effort that can only be made and maintained by each individual, because human survival is rooted in the power of thought. This is where it begins and ends.

We can and properly should help others if we choose, but our charity and help must always be voluntary.

No one person can think for another person.

If you come down on the side of socialism — any form of it, no matter its mutation — you necessarily come down on the side of force.

Force is why from a purely moral standpoint socialism is fatally flawed.

From a practical standpoint — which is to say, an economic standpoint — it’s fatally flawed on any number of different levels.

It cannot work.

If you come down on this side of the issue, you’ve come down on the wrong side — the side of force and non-consent — and no amount of equivocation, rationalization, circumlocution, or permutation will change that.

Egalitarianism

Egalitarianism is the defining characteristic of all forms of socialism and virtually all leftist political theory.

Full egalitarianism is the belief in total equality — not equality before the law (which is the only legitimate meaning of that term in a political context) but metaphysically equal: in personal attributes, including most importantly ambition, desire, motivation, drive.

But humans don’t possess the same attributes — not even close — nor are they born into the same circumstances, and that is why the implementation of egalitarianism by definition requires force.

Humans when left alone naturally stratify, as several experiments have demonstrated.

Egalitarianism is essentially the view that all humans must be made equal. For this precise reason, egalitarianism requires massive and continual applications of expropriation and the bureaus who enforce it.

Morally speaking, egalitarianism is an injustice.

Practically speaking — because human are limitlessly varied — it’s impossible to implement full egalitarianism, though Pol Pot’s murderous and cataclysmic Khmer Rouge, which was downplayed by leftists like Noam Chomsky until it couldn’t be downplayed any longer, is one of the nearest successes in modern times.

This is egalitarianism:

A woman who has worked hard to become a great runner — and who has succeeded — goes to the doctor to have her injured ankle mended, but instead of mending it, the doctor breaks the ankles of twenty other women and tells them all that this will make the patient feel better. When everyone has broken ankles, the doctor advocates for laws making it mandatory that everyone has broken ankles at all times, so that everyone is slightly crippled, and in this way the “unfairness” of nature is to that extent equalized.

Anarchy: anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-capitalism

Despite the fact that both ideologies nominally (and only nominally) reject all forms of government, there is a significant ideological difference between left-wing anarchism and right-wing anarchism — most commonly, anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-capitalism — and that difference reduces down to egalitarianism, which in turn hinges upon the principle of private property.

Anarcho-syndicalism, which is leftist and Marxist (or Neo-Marxist) in the extreme, is the anarchist theory that believes industrial unions, or some similar collective, will control the property and thus the economy.

Anarcho-capitalism is the anarchist theory that private property is just and therefore all things should be privatized — so that even national defense, police, and courts to adjudicate honest disagreements are, says the theory, privatized.

Both forms of anarchism — indeed, anarchism in general — will amount to mob rule or a de-facto government: e.g. the private firms that hold the weapons for national defense.

The real paradox of anarchism-versus-laissez-faire is from my perspective that true laissez faire is actually much closer to true anarchism than the brand of anarchism most stated anarchists espouse: a kind of non-conformists variety of conformity, albeit one that takes the longer way around to get there. Where?

Authoritarianism.

Which, I think, is why ninety-nine percent of self-described anarchists I know vote unswervingly and unhesitatingly for whichever left-wing pundit, no matter how gigantic (and corrupt) the government programs said pundit explicitly calls for.

As I recently wrote, everything is complicated until it’s reduced — and reducing is often the most complicated part. But once it’s reduced, it becomes simple:

There are only two fundamental forms of government: freedom and non-freedom.

Freedom is the absence of coercion. It simply means that you are left alone.

Most governments are a mix — but one must always remember the iron-clad law:

Bad principles drive out good.

This is a variation on Gresham’s law.

The fight is always a fight for principles.

Thus, when people — even good people — accept doctrines the premises of which they do not know and do not seek to fully understand, they’ve instantly come a long way in conceding the principle.

And that is the process whereby bad governments, whether rightwing or left, come gradually to control the land.

And neither cronyism nor colonialism nor corporatism is laissez-faire but just the opposite.



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Creative Destruction

Did you know that America prospered for 140 years without a Federal Reserve or a National Income Tax, both of which are barely 100 years old, though now they’re so thoroughly entrenched, as is social security, medicare and medicaid, all of which are even younger, that the overwhelming majority of American people can’t imagine life without any of those things?

Did you know that John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler, who founded Standard Oil, once held over 90 percent of all oil sales in the United States? This is called a non-coercive monopoly.

Did you know that there’s never been a proven case of so-called Predatory Pricing — or “cutting-to-kill” — which is another anti-laissez-faire myth, another urban legend, totally false and provably so?

Standard Oil (like Walmart today) kept its prices at rock-bottom precisely because Rockefeller understood that if he jacked up his prices, competitors would come in and he’d lose his share of the market.

Only coercive monopolies — i.e. government monopolies — can fix prices.

The real point, though, is that nobody — not John D. Rockefeller, not Henry Flagler, not anybody — could have foreseen that because of laissez-faire and the innovation it fosters, the competitor who would put the biggest hit on his oil-market was not in the oil business at all.

Do you know who it was?

Thomas Edison and his lightbulb, which abolished kerosene and other oil-burning light. (Petroleum, by the way, abolished whale oil.)

It’s called creative destruction.

In a laissez-faire system, consumers, who pay their hard-earned money for the things they want, always determine the success or failure of a given idea or product or service.

If you want to rid the world of Walmart — or whatever — you must simply do away with the consumers who choose to shop there, including, of course, all the poor people who save so much money in shopping there.

There’s a reason that America, vilified as she is by so much of the world, still gives by FAR the most foreign aid to the entire world.

There’s a reason that only America can afford such multi-trillion-dollar-per-year extravagance, decade after decade, and that reason, paradoxically, is the same reason so many people who receive America’s aid absolutely love to hate America:

She creates by far the most.

America is the most productive.

Pollution, waste disposal, externalities, these, no matter what you’re told by government-lovers of every stripe, these require technological solutions — not bureaucratic solutions — and laissez faire, with the vast technological superiority it creates, is not only the best system for such a thing: it’s the only system equipped to deal with technological problems.

Which is why you see, for instance, the utter and nonsensical waste of government-sponsored catastrophes like Yucca Mountain.

It’s why government “solutions” often lead to UNDER-environmental protection and more cronyism.

It’s why from 1950 through 1970, the amount of volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide in the air fell by more than 20 percent, even though total vehicle miles traveled increased by 120 percent — this, before the 1970 Clean Air Act and government involvement.

It was all brought about by means of better, more efficient technology. It was therefore adopted naturally, without coercion.

This is also why the level of sulfur dioxide in the air began falling as early as 1920.

And it’s why the total amount of airborne particulate matter has been reduced by 79 percent since 1940.

Technology, which comes about through wealth-creation, is why water pollution has decreased as world-wide wealth has increased.

And that’s only the beginning …


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Obama And the White House Reject Costly Ozone Regulations

But what about “the environment”? Economics are meaningless compared to Mother Earth, aren’t they? And anyway, there’s no connection between wealth and clean, healthy environments.

Well, the enviro-friendly White House seems to be rethinking that edict, as is usually the case whenever the rubber meets the road:

White House Rejects Controversial Ozone Regs

President Barack Obama on Friday asked the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw a proposed regulation for ozone air quality standards, citing the nation’s wobbly economy.

President Obama, in a statement, said that by requesting withdrawal of the ozone regulations “I have continued to underscore the importance of reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty, particularly as our economy continues to recover.”

A passenger enters a Kansas City Metro bus that warns of an Ozone Alert in Kansas City, Missouri, last month.

The EPA’s ozone rule has been among the more controversial regulations proposed by the environmental agency. Republicans and industry groups say the rule would be too costly to implement and lead to a slowdown in economic growth. Earlier this week, House Republicans said they would hold a vote this winter on a bill to prevent its implementation.

(Link)



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The Left-Winger’s Big, Big Problem

It is the insurmountable flaw in all leftist philosophy, the insoluble contradiction, the problem that cannot be overcome: No matter what form that leftist philosophy takes — whether it be progressive, egalitarian, democratic-socialist, welfare-statist, communistic, or any other name those of this mindset wish to call it — in order to redistribute wealth, there must first be wealth to redistribute.

Somebody must produce, and the left-winger cannot exist without this person.

The welfare state cannot exist without the producers of welfare.

For exactly this reason, the left-winger is at the mercy of the very person he seeks to plunder. The left-winger relies on those he so often denigrates.

The state by definition cannot produce. It is (by definition) an agency of force. If you have any doubt about that, consider this:

The state cannot spend or redistribute a single cent unless it first either borrows, taxes, or prints.

As Janet Daley so felicitously phrased it in her recent London Telegraph article:

This was the heaven on earth for which liberal democracy had been striving: a system of wealth redistribution that was merciful but not Marxist, and a guarantee of lifelong economic and social security for everyone that did not involve totalitarian government. This was the ideal the European Union was designed to entrench. It was the dream of Blairism, which adopted it as a replacement for the state socialism of Old Labour. And it is the aspiration of President Obama and his liberal Democrats, who want the United States to become a European-style social democracy.

But the US has a very different historical experience from European countries, with their accretions of national remorse and class guilt: it has a far stronger and more resilient belief in the moral value of liberty and the dangers of state power. This is a political as much as an economic crisis, but not for the reasons that Mr Obama believes. The ruckus that nearly paralysed the US economy last week, and led to the loss of its AAA rating from Standard & Poor’s, arose from a confrontation over the most basic principles of American life.

Contrary to what the Obama Democrats claimed, the face-off in Congress did not mean that the nation’s politics were “dysfunctional”. The politics of the US were functioning precisely as the Founding Fathers intended: the legislature was acting as a check on the power of the executive.

The wealth that the left-winger wishes to “spread around,” as Barack Obama famously put it, must originate somewhere.

Where?

Only one place: production.

That in a nutshell is the awesome logic of Say’s Law.

Production, said Jean Baptiste Say, is everything.

He was correct.

Capitalism, as the very name implies, is the engine of capital production.

But what is capital?

Capital is the the amount of wealth owned by a person or a business. Capital is a form of property, and it can, if the owner of that capital chooses, be used to invest. I emphasize that word because investment is the backbone of production, which is the backbone of job creation.

Without wealth, humans are impoverished. Thus, for humans the production of wealth is survival.

Ultimately nothing more fundamental than labor is required for the production of wealth.

Production = life.

Money merely symbolizes wealth. Money is not wealth in and of itself but only a representative.

When money is debased, as it is when, for example, it’s printed without real wealth (i.e. production) backing it, it loses its value. In this way, government has the power to indirectly divest the value of the savings that people have spent their lives accumulating: by printing money that can’t be backed by real wealth, government thereby strips money of its worth. When too much money is printed, the money inflates, and a dollar is no longer worth a dollar.

The left-winger’s big, big problem, which the right-winger has to his detriment also accepted (albeit tacitly), is rooted in the misbegotten belief that if government doesn’t provide it, humans interacting freely will not get it done. That is the source of the insoluble flaw in all leftist thought, which in turn has a deeper source: the belief that human survival should be assured.


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Steve Wynn — Wynn Resort CEO — Goes On Epic Anti-Obama Rant

And he unloads with good reason.

Steve Wynn, by the way, is no consistent capitalist, as he himself as much as says when he announces his support for that dingy quack Harry Reid. And yet Steve Wynn is on the money here:

I believe in Las Vegas. I think its best days are ahead of it. But I’m afraid to do anything in the current political environment in the United States. You watch television and see what’s going on on this debt ceiling issue. And what I consider to be a total lack of leadership from the President and nothing’s going to get fixed until the President himself steps up and wrangles both parties in Congress. But everybody is so political, so focused on holding their job for the next year that the discussion in Washington is nauseating.

And I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.

You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, God, don’t be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama’s deal and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth. And that’s true of Democratic businessman and Republican businessman, and I am a Democratic businessman and I support Harry Reid. I support Democrats and Republicans. And I’m telling you that the business community in this company is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.

(Link)


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Obama Versus Technology: ATM’s Responsible For Unemployment

It is, to say the least of it, a very horrifying thing indeed that someone in this position of power actually believes an economic canard of this caliber — a canard that’s been bunked a billion times, and which, in fact, is so easily debunked — and yet it’s even more horrifying to realize that so much of this country’s economic fate is in the hands of one whose economic knowledge is this puerile.

I, for one, was absolutely appalled when I saw the following:

Russell Roberts, professor of economics at George Mason University and a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, recently rebutted and demolished Obama’s absurd notions, by pointing out the obvious:

The story goes that Milton Friedman was once taken to see a massive government project somewhere in Asia. Thousands of workers using shovels were building a canal. Friedman was puzzled. Why weren’t there any excavators or any mechanized earth-moving equipment? A government official explained that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman’s response: “Then why not use spoons instead of shovels?”

… Or look at eggs. Today, a couple of workers can manage an egg-laying operation of almost a million chickens laying 240,000,000 eggs a year. How can two people pick up those eggs or feed those chickens or keep them healthy with medication? They can’t. The hen house does the work—it’s really smart. The two workers keep an eye on a highly mechanized, computerized process that would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.

The savings from higher productivity don’t just go to the owners of the textile factory or the mega hen house who now have lower costs of doing business. Lower costs don’t always mean higher profits. Or not for long. Those lower costs lead to lower prices as businesses compete with each other to appeal to consumers.

… Despite losing millions of jobs to technology and to trade, even in a recession we have more total jobs than we did when the steel and auto and telephone and food industries had a lot more workers and a lot fewer machines.

Why do new jobs get created? When it gets cheaper to make food and clothing, there are more resources and people available to create new products that didn’t exist before. Fifty years ago, the computer industry was tiny. It was able to expand because we no longer had to have so many workers connecting telephone calls. So many job descriptions exist today that didn’t even exist 15 or 20 years ago. That’s only possible when technology makes workers more productive (boldface mine).

(Read the full article here.)

This, incidentally, is another manifestation of Bastiat’s economic law: “What is seen and what is not seen.”




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Calling The Obama Bluff

Just recently, Barack Obama said, for the five or sixth hundredth time in the last year and a half: “The worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place.”

He was referring of course to the profligate policies instituted under George W. Bush — about whom I’ve written here — and yet the question remains: why then has Barack Obama, from the beginning of his term, “gone back to the very same policies” instituted by his favorite scapegoat, without whom he’d be lost?

Unfortunately, I have no good answer for that question, but here’s something everyone, including Barack Obama, should know:

The President of the United States can’t create budget deficits or budget surpluses.

All spending bills, without exception, are born in the House of Representatives, and all taxes are voted into law by Congress.

Quoting Thomas Sowell:

Democrats controlled both houses of Congress before Barack Obama became president. The deficit he inherited was created by the Congressional Democrats, including Senator Barack Obama, who did absolutely nothing to oppose the runaway spending. He was one of the biggest of the big spenders.

The last time the federal government had a budget surplus, Bill Clinton was president, so it was called “the Clinton surplus.” But Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, where all spending bills originate, for the first time in 40 years. It was also the first budget surplus in more than a quarter of a century.

The only direct power that any president has that can affect deficits and surpluses is the power to veto spending bills. President Bush did not veto enough spending bills but Senator Obama and his fellow Democrats in control of Congress were the ones who passed the spending bills.

Today, with Barack Obama in the White House, allied with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in charge in Congress, the national debt is a bigger share of the national output than it has been in more than half a century. And its share is projected to continue going up for years to come, becoming larger than national output in 2012.

Having created this scary situation, President Obama now says, “Don’t give in to fear. Let’s reach for hope.” The voters reached for hope when they elected Obama. The fear comes from what he has done since taking office.

“The worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place,” he said recently. “In November, you’re going to have that choice.”

Another political fable is that the current economic downturn is due to not enough government regulation of the housing and financial markets. But it was precisely the government regulators, under pressure from politicians, who forced banks and other lending institutions to lower their standards for making mortgage loans.

These risky loans, and the defaults that followed, were what set off a chain reaction of massive financial losses that brought down the whole economy.

Was this due to George W. Bush and the Republicans? Only partly. Most of those who pushed the lowering of mortgage lending standards were Democrats– notably Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Christopher Dodd, though too many Republicans went along.

At the heart of these policies were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who bought huge amounts of risky mortgages, passing the risk on from the banks that lent the money (and made the profits) to the taxpayers who were not even aware that they would end up paying in the end.

When President Bush said in 2004 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be reined in, 76 members of the House of Representatives issued a statement to the contrary. These included Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel.

If we are going to talk about “the policies that created this mess in the first place,” let’s at least get the facts straight and the names right.

The current policies of the Obama administration are a continuation of the same reckless policies that brought on the current economic problems– all in the name of “change.” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still sacred cows in Washington, even though they have already required the biggest bailouts of all.

Why? Because they allow politicians to direct vast sums of money where it will do politicians the most good, either personally or in terms of buying votes in the next election.

(Link)

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Fisherman Gathered At Martha’s Vineyard Are Outraged Over Obama’s Job-Destroying Policies

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:

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A Brief History of Economic Thought — By Jim Cox

Professor Jim Cox

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)

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The Multiplier Theory


In the Concise Guide To Economics, author and economist Jim Cox correctly explains that the Multiplier is one of the major components of Keynesian policy.

For those who still don’t know it, Keynesian economics — named after John Maynard Keynes — are the economics that Barack Obama, as well as George W. Bush (et al), espouse in full.

The following explanation of the Multiplier Theory, though exceptionally clear and cogent, gets a bit technical, but please read through it. It is short, and it is also crucial that everyone understands the degree to which economic illiteracy grips the political leaders who have power over us.

The multiplier effect can be defined as the greater resulting income generated from an initial increase in spending. (For example, an increase in spending of $100 will generate a total increase in income received of $500 as the initial income is respent by each succeeding recipient–these figures are based on an assumption that each income receiver spends 80% of his additional income and saves 20%, the formula being Multiplier = 1 / % Change in Saving.)

Fundamentally, the multiplier is theory run amok, as Henry Hazlitt has explained in The Failure of the New Economics:

If a community’s income, by definition, is equal to what it consumes plus what it invests, and if that community spends nine-tenths of its income on consumption and invests one-tenth, then its income must be ten times as great as its investment. If it spends nineteen-twentieths on consumption and invests one-twentieth, then its income must be twenty times as great as its investment….And so ad infinitum. These things are true simply because they are different ways of saying the same thing. The ordinary man in the street would understand this. But suppose you have a subtle man, trained in mathematics. He will then see that, given the fraction of the community’s income that goes into investment, the income itself can mathematically be called a “function” of that fraction. If investment is one-tenth of income, income will be ten times investment, etc. Then, by some wild leap, this “functional” and purely formal or terminological relationship is confused with a causal relationship. Next the causal relationship is stood on its head and the amazing conclusion emerges that the greater the proportion of income spent, and the smaller the fraction that represents investment, the more this investment must “multiply” itself to create the total income! p. 139

A bizarre but necessary implication of this theory is that a community which spends 100% of its income (and thus saves 0%) will have an infinite increase in its income–sure beats working!

A further reductio ad absurdum is provided by Hazlitt:

Let Y equal the income of the whole community. Let R equal your (the reader’s) income. Let V equal the income of everybody else. Then we find that V is a completely stable function of Y; whereas your income is the active, volatile, uncertain element in social income. Let us say the income arrived at is:

V = .99999 Y

Then, Y = .99999 Y + R

.00001 Y = R

Y = 100,000 R

Thus we see that your own personal multiplier is far more powerful than the investment multiplier, it is only necessary for the government to print a certain number of dollars and give them to you. Your spending will prime the pump for an increase in the national income 100,000 times as great as the amount of your spending itself. pp. 150 -151

The multiplier is based on a faulty theory of causation and is therefore in actuality nonexistent. Keynesians today will often admit to this but cling to their multiplier by citing the fact that it has a regional effect. Without them saying so explicitly, what this means is that if income is taken from citizens of Georgia and spent in Massachusetts it will benefit the Massachusetts economy(!).

The multiplier is an elaborate attempt to obfuscate the issues to excuse government spending. It and Keynesian theory are nothing more than an elaborate version of any monetary crank’s call for inflation; Keynes managed to dredge up the fallacies of the 17th century’s mercantilist views only to relabel them as the “new economics”!

(Link)

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The Green Jobs Racket Exposed (Again)

Here’s an economic axiom which we’ve discussed here before, but which in this day and age is always worth repeating:

If something is economically tenable, it never ever needs to be subsidized.

The latest concretization of this fact comes from none other than the state-run Associated Press:

After a year of crippling delays, President Barack Obama’s $5 billion program to install weather-tight windows and doors has retrofitted a fraction of homes and created far fewer construction jobs than expected.

In Indiana, state-trained workers flubbed insulation jobs. In Alaska, Wyoming and the District of Columbia, the program has yet to produce a single job or retrofit one home. And in California, a state with nearly 37 million residents, the program at last count had created 84 jobs…

…”This is the beginning of the next industrial revolution with the explosion of clean energy investments,” said assistant U.S. Energy Secretary Cathy Zoi. “These are good jobs that are here to stay.”

But after a year, the stimulus program has retrofitted 30,250 homes — about 5 percent of the overall goal — and fallen well short of the 87,000 jobs that the department planned, according to the latest available figures.

As the Obama administration promotes a second home energy-savings program — a $6 billion rebate plan — some experts are asking whether that will pay off for homeowners or for the planet.

(Link)

For more on the inherently toxic nature of environmentalism, please read this.