Liberals Flunk Econ 101

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
-- Milton Friedman

The worldwide collapse of welfare states and government ponzi schemes prove Friedman's point.  A simple glance at Michigan or California should sway liberals off of their stubborn belief in free stuff for everybody, but it doesn't...

Our capitalist economy came crashing down as well.  No surprise.  Government-sanctioned cronyism fails everywhere it is tried.  It encourages corruption and distorts markets, chasing away honest money.  The upside is that capitalism, being a coherent and self-sustaining system, contains the seeds of its own renewal; liberal welfare states do not.

Life it tough, but it's tougher when you're stupid  -- John Wayne



Daniel B. Klein explains why liberals stubbornly wallow in such irrational beliefs.  They are economically ignorant:

According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch [...],  The left flunks Econ 101.

Liberals believe such fallacies as:

$ Rent control makes apartments more plentiful and restrictions on housing development make home buying more affordable (It's just the opposite.  Scarcity drives up prices.  My kids knew that in grade school.)

$ Our standard of living is lower than it was 30 years ago.  (why are liberals so eager to think ill of our country and our people?)

$ Minimum wage and other employment laws do not increase unemployment (Yes they do.  Look at France)

White House Rejects Friedman for Marx
The economic ignorance extends to the White House.  Senior White House communists like Valerie Jarrett can't understand why the oil companies won't just sit there and suck up a half-million dollars per rig per day cost during the six month moratorium.  They're going to haul their equipment somewhere else where they can make money!

These rigs cost about $500,000 a day for oil companies. [...] the oil companies are going to move them, while they have them under contract, to foreign leases they own in order to seek oil.

The American Petroleum Institute (API) estimates that the moratorium will cost us 130,000 barrels of oil a day by 2011 and up to 500,000 a day by 2013. And it could put up to 46,200 jobs at risk short-term and as many as 120,000 over the long term.

Cover the Incompetence with Lies

Even Senior White House Communist Carol Browner couldn't spin this one:  That panel of experts selected by the National Academy of Engineering DID NOT endorse the six month moratorium:

The seven experts who advised President Obama on how to deal with offshore drilling safety after the Deepwater Horizon explosion are accusing his administration of misrepresenting their views to make it appear that they supported a six-month drilling moratorium -- something they actually oppose.

Elect a klatch of leftist pseudo-intellectuals and this is what you get...

Five Myths of Green Energy

While government watchdogs did drugs and surfed porn, BP was busy wrecking the Gulf Coast.  Talk is turning again to "Green Energy."

I love the environment (it's where the tasty creatures are) and I am cheering for the good scientists struggling to advance "green energy." 

Despite what scientifically-ignorant charlatans like Al Gore and Van Jones say, "green energy" is simply too inefficient to compete with fossil fuels.  The science is advancing, but it's just not there yet.

Robert Bryce performs a public service by publishing Five Myths of Green Energy in The Washington Post.

Here are the Five Myths

1. Solar and wind power are the greenest of them all.
Wrong!  They are land hogs that actually destroy the environment by displacing natural habitat.

2. Going green will reduce our dependence on imports from unsavory regimes.
"China controls between 95 and 100 percent of the global market in" rare elements needed to construct batteries.

3. A green American economy will create green American jobs.

In a global market, American wind turbine manufacturers face the same problem as American shoe manufacturers: high domestic labor costs.

Meanwhile, the very concept of a green job is not well defined. Is a job still green if it's created not by the market, but by subsidy or mandate? 

Growth Energy, an industry lobby group, says increasing the percentage of ethanol blended into the U.S. gasoline supply would create 136,000 jobs. But an analysis by the Environmental Working Group found that no more than 27,000 jobs would be created, and each one could cost taxpayers as much as $446,000 per year. Sure, the government can create more green jobs. But at what cost?

Not to mention, Ethanol is Immoral.  Starving people to feed cars should give all human beings pause.  If that's not enough, the "Bio-fuels" industry destroys the biosphere, and there is not enough biosphere on the planet to support this government-sponsored corporate welfare travesty.

4. Electric cars will substantially reduce demand for oil.

Electric cars haven't been sidelined by a cabal to sell internal combustion engines or a lack of political will, but by physics and math. Gasoline contains about 80 times as much energy, by weight, as the best lithium-ion battery.

And in the absence of nuclear power, these cars that are plugged into the power grid are coal-powered.  How environmentally friendly is that?

5. The United States lags behind other rich countries in going green.

Over the past three decades, the United States has improved its energy efficiency as much as or more than other developed countries.

According to data from the Energy Information Administration, average per capita energy consumption in the United States fell by 2.5 percent from 1980 through 2006. That reduction was greater than in any other developed country except Switzerland and Denmark, and the United States achieved it without participating in the Kyoto Protocol or creating an emissions trading system like the one employed in Europe.

EIA data also show that the United States has been among the best at reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per $1 of GDP and the amount of energy consumed per $1 of GDP.

This was just a sample.  Go read the whole thing here.

Plug The Damn Hole!

It's The Big Government, Stupid!

The Crash of 1929 kicked off the great depression and moved the country left.  Now, there appears to be a movement of similar magnitude to the right.  But is it political?

It may be that the movement being seen now is less an ideological statement by Americans and more a reflection of a broad loss of confidence in big institutions, including the government.

To the extent that Democrats are the ones who have offered up government programs as the solution to the nation's recession-induced woes, then they are the ones being hurt more now, because the public simply lacks any deep faith in government's competence to solve those problems.  (Gerald Seib - WSJ)

It's The Big Government, Stupid!

Excellent summation.  Many of us are not so much anti-Democrat as anti-big government, which explains why we aren't letting big government Republicans off the hook either.

FEMA formaldahyde trailers, Wall Street Watchdogs turned porn-surfing horndogs, and now Obama's staged outrage, fecklessly commanding his hapless staff to "Plug the damn hole!"

America, We Have a Problem

It gets worse...

WASHINGTON – Staff members at an agency that oversees offshore drilling accepted tickets to sports events, lunches and other gifts from oil and gas companies and used government computers to view pornography, according to an Interior Department report alleging a culture of cronyism between regulators and the industry. (Yahoo News)  See also WSJ - Regulators Accept Gifts

Yeah, some of it happened on Bush's watch.  So what!  It's the Big Demican-Republicrat, Statist Government, Stupid!  They had no plans to deal with such a catastrophe, no prepositioned assets...  They were literally partying and playing with themselves on our dime, and now this happens.

Plug The Damn Hole?

Yeah!  Plug the damn hole in the US Treasury!

Plug the damn hole that the toxic political lies and BS are spewing out of!

Plug your damn hole and do your damn job!

Liberalism: Your Brain on Drugs

MSNBC, and most of the liberal press is the equivalent of a drug-addled crack head.  They are so disappointed the Times Square bomber wasn't an angry, white, rightwing teabagger:

"There was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country..." (BreitbartTV)

Try reporting from Saudi Arabia dressed like that, cupcake. 



This woman is stupid. Or she's on drugs. I can find no other plausible solution for such idiotic statements.  And yes, I called her a cupcake.  She's a twinkie; sickly sweet cream filling on the inside and a brain pan full of sponge cake, mostly air, fluffy and completely superfluous.

Questions, the Anti-Drug 

Why can't Big Government stop an oil spill?
Why Can't Big Government stop terrorists from entering our country, even with the aid of a no fly list?

More importantly, why is Big Government NATURALIZING TERRORISTS?

Sahibi Wazoozi or whatthehellever his name is was A US CITIZEN!!! (I refuse to call him an American)  If that doesn't make you sick to your stomach there's no help for you.

If we had a real press, one that doesn't laugh at the president's comedy routine while an environmental disaster is in progress, they would ask these questions.  Instead, we have the US version of Pravda. 

At least Pravda, to their credit, openly admitted they were owned by the regime...

Halliburton Caused the Oil Spill!

The charge has been emanating from Left Blogistan for days now, and I just chalked it up to the usual leftwing wackadoo kookery.

Well, as Papa Silverfiddle would say, even an old blind mare finds an apple every once in awhile...

From The Wall Street Journal:

An oil-drilling procedure called cementing is coming under scrutiny as a possible cause of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico that has led to one of the biggest oil spills in U.S. history, drilling experts said Thursday.
 
The scrutiny on cementing will focus attention on Halliburton Co., the oilfield-services firm that was handling the cementing process on the rig, which burned and sank last week. The disaster, which killed 11, has left a gusher of oil streaming into the Gulf from a mile under the surface.

The WSJ left unconfirmed the lefty nutbag claims that Dick Cheney himself ordered the sabotage, or even performed the deed himself by diving miles below the the ocean's surface in his top secret undisclosed submarine that also doubles as a jihadi torture chamber...

Reality Spill

Another Disaster, Another Chance for Some Liberal Scolding!



The libs are walking tall again. Nothing like a horrible disaster to pick up ones spirits!  Now they can sanctimoniously and endlessly caw "See!  We told you so!"






"Oil is bad!" (as they get into their automobiles)

"Greedy Republicans killed the coal miners!" (As they flip on the light switch)

They rightly shout about the working poor's inability to make a "living wage," but fail to see how illegal immigration takes jobs and drives down wages.

It's a comfy, insular world of fantasy over in left Blogistan, which probably explains their anger at the incursions of truth-bearing conservatives and libertarians.  We are not delusional.  We know our politicians and our businesses are flawed and untrustworthy.  It's human nature.

Particularly delicious is when their fantasy bubble is popped not by some ranting racist hater like Rush Limbaugh, but by their own New York Times, liberal toilet paper of record.

Obama acted too slowly and didn't do his regulatory job.

The federal government also had opportunities to move more quickly, but did not do so while it waited for a resolution to the spreading spill from BP

Some oil industry critics questioned whether the federal government is too reliant on oil companies to manage the response to major spills, leaving the government unable to evaluate if the response is robust enough.

Liberal Response?  Blame Bush and Cheney, Of Course!
The Bu$hitler-Cheney-Halliburton regime has been out of power for over a year and a half now.  How long does it take for an enlightened administration to wipe out those plutocratic, oil-spill loving rules and replace them with kind, gentle, liberal rules that prevent this kind of thing? 

The Senile Old Lady also highlights some Unanswered Questions:

The timetable is damning. The blowout occurred on April 20. In short order, fire broke out on the rig, taking 11 lives, the rig collapsed and oil began leaking at a rate of 40,000 gallons a day. 

BP tried but failed to plug the well. Even so, BP appears to have remained confident that it could handle the situation with private resources (as did the administration) until Wednesday night, when, at a hastily called news conference, the Coast Guard quintupled its estimate of the leak to 5,000 barrels, or more than 200,000 gallons a day.

 Only then did the administration move into high gear.

 Another president, another disaster visited upon New Orleans...

Louisiana Oil Slick Covering Obama Affair?

Rumors are flying that Barack Obama cheated with a nice-looking young gal named Vera Baker. I guess Michelle is none too happy.  Right Blogistan is alight with excited chatter at the unverified rumors.  Feed Your ADHD has a great photo Montage.

Here is a typical comment:

The Wise Latina Said...

Interesting.  I always thought the guy was gay.  Look at how other gay men like Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, David Brooks and Rachel Maddow gush over him.

I tend to agree with Wise Latina, kinda...  We may be jumping the gun.

On the other hand, if we apply a little liberal logic...  

Clinton bombed Serbia to try to cover his molestation of a barely-legal girl in the Oval Office...

George Bush invaded Iraq to cover his serial bumblings and to whip up patriotic fervor so he could get reelected...

Now, a major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico causes an environmental catastrophe that grips the nation's attention.

Hmmm...

Drill Baby Drill! is Dead Baby Dead!

The oil spill off of Louisiana has killed any hope of "drill baby drill!"  And rightly so.  If we can't do this without causing an environmental catastrophe, we have no business doing it.

There should be a complete investigation and the guilty parties made to pay.  Nobody despoils America's beautiful shores and gets away with it.

We also should not discount the possibility eco-terrorism, although I've heard Eric Holder is busy chasing down leads concerning eye-witness reports of Bush and Cheney in a Batboat-type vessel being spotted in the area right before the calamity.

Rumor has it Federal Obama Cop Grung_e_Gene has abandoned his post at the airport porn scanner and is now on the scene.  He and his chorus of liberal screamers are claiming this is all Bush and the conservatives fault, since everyone knows liberals do not use any consumer goods derived from petroleum, like gasoline or vasoline...

They also never use electricity, so only conservatives have the blood on their hands of all the coal miners ever killed in the history of the United States.

Here in the real world, we use the cheapest, most efficient resources at hand.  Everything in life has consequences and costs.  Not using oil and coal would impose a gigantic, job-killing cost on our economy.  Unfortunately, Louisiana will bear the brunt of this one, and Uncle Sam better make sure BP picks up the complete tab.

Liberals.  They produce nothing, so they are responsible for nothing
-- Kurt Silverfiddle

 * - Picture from Sodahead.com