Feb 27 2010
Liberal Ideology Is Creating Economic Madness
Incoherent madness.
That is what keeps running through my mind as I watch the last gasps of liberalism on display this year in DC. The far left has always tried to whittle away at the free market economy of America – which is based on the individual – and replace it with socialistic approaches where government takes control of most aspects of human life. Socialists like to hold back the individual and force everyone to the lowest common denominator. Free market capitalism unleashes the individual, and allows the dynamics of the human experiment to run more open loop, allowing it to flow naturally.
The left like to play God and the right like to watch God’s creations surprise and impress. This year Americans will pick one path and forever reject the other.
We do need to have rules and laws so that greed (or power-hunger) do not enslave the masses for the benefit of the few. For decades after the turn of the last century humanity was driven by a righteous concern about greedy business running amok – and hence support for many century old liberal concepts like unions and work rules and the end of child labor.
This led to boundaries on businesses and prioritized protecting the individual worker, ensuring they too participated in the success of exploiting resources, inventing new technologies, finding the next medical break through. It was the golden age for liberalism as women were finally allowed to vote and the laws of the land were to be applied equally to all, great and small. It was the right answer to the real problems of the day.
But that social adjustment has run its course now, a century later. Those changes are now embodied in our culture and psyche – never to be removed. Our concern now has turned into dealing with the modern center of human corruption and abuse -Â ideological government run amok:
Fifty-six percent of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Friday say they think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Forty-four percent of those polled disagree.
The survey indicates a partisan divide on the question: only 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Independents and nearly 7 in 10 Republicans say the federal government poses a threat to the rights of Americans.
There are patterns starting to show up in lots of politically important numbers. In NJ, VA and MA we saw independents siding with small government GOP candidates by the same numbers as we see here – 60 to 40 percent away from Democrats. The repulsion with the liberal ideology being shoved through DC have made it so toxic anyone with a “D” is seen as the problem.
Not surprising when it is well established that D=Big Government Solution and R=Free Market Solution. President Obama’s politically stupid media stunt last week just cemented the stereotypes into place. He said we have our differences and we will take it to the voters. We now chose our path.
There is a role for government and there is respect for government. But those respectful roles (teachers, emergency workers, police, military, space explorers) are not the problem. These government roles protect or help or educate the people (teachers are on the verge of overstepping their mandate, but so far they have avoided creating a huge backlash).
The health care debate is now centered around this same basic question – the individual verses the power mad fools in DC. A recent Rasmussen poll exposes the basic fallacy of the liberal democrat approach to life:
If a company dropped its private coverage and their workers were enrolled in a government-run plan, 61% of GOP voters and a plurality (48%) of unaffiliated voters say that would be bad for the employees.
Democrats by a 46% to 29% margin say it would be good for the workers.
Democrats think it will be GOOD for the government to trash your current health plan and send you to a government doctor. Are they kidding? And which workers are they talking about?
The GOP scored huge points in the Health Care show by asking why some states got special treatment over others. Why do hundreds of thousands of Floridians get to keep Medicare Advantage and most other states will lose money for it? What makes them special Americans? Why are unions exempt from taxes on insurance premiums the rest of us have to pay?
What the Democrats in DC are doing is destroying lives. They failed miserably with their idiotic and impotent economic stimulus bill, where over 80% of the job creating money passed OVER Â A YEAR AGO has yet to be spent creating (or saving) jobs. It was an old myth of liberal dogma that government spending can bolster an economy in a downturn, as well or better than tax and spending cuts (the tried and true method of Kennedy, Reagan and Bush). We now know this liberal fairy tale is false. We have a year of suffering and wasted opportunities to prove it.
Incoherent madness. The unfair playing field coming out of the liberal madness is unethical and illegal, but they swear it will be great for us all.
The stimulus bill was supposed to create or save millions of ‘shovel ready jobs’. That was the stated plan. So why is the administration planning on destroying tens of thousands of high tech jobs and the communities surrounding them?
Revised projections now show that about 23,000 workers at and around Kennedy Space Center will lose their jobs because of the shuttles’ retirement and the new proposal to cancel the development of new rockets and spacecraft.
There is not much around KSC but KSC. The communities, schools, fire departments and police will all suffer. And this is just one location that will see massive jobs lost due to President Obama’s short sighted plan to stop President Bush’s Constellation Program to take man back to the Moon. There are tens of thousands more jobs that will be lost around the nation because of this.
Jobs are at risk near Houston, TX (Johnson Space Center), Cleveland, OH (Glenn Research Center) and Pasaden, CA (Jet Propulsion Laboratory). Â Peversely, there will large gains in Greenbelt, MD (Goddard Space Flight Center) outside DC, where the unemployment rate is incredibly low given the size of the federal bureaucracy here.
That is because Obama wants more satellites looking for global warming (which doesn’t exist so far this past decade). But we have so many up now it is hard to believe we need more. We have 19 operating and 6 in development, with many more under study. Why more? If more are needed, why kill all the manned space flight jobs? All this human carnage just to poke President Bush in the eye?
Here we have tens of thousands of jobs on  the line and Obama decides on a whim to just wipe them out. No one put this to a vote. No one tells you this is a fraction of the stimulus bill, which at 800+ billion is about 50 times larger than what is required to fund Constellation for ten years (assuming $4 billion a year, which is high). NASA’s entire annual budget is around $15 billion. That is less than 2% of the stimulus bill. If Obama wanted some more satellites why not buy them! They are only around $300 million per medium sized mission.
Incoherent madness.
How about those green jobs? Well, if you only calculate the jobs created and not the jobs lost it looks pretty good. But when you calculate the full impact of the green myth you find workers lose out in the end:
Let’s consider just one clean-energy sector, the smart grid, for its job-creation potential.
…
It typically takes a team of two certified electricians half an hour to replace the old, spinning meter. In one day, two people can install about 15 new meters, or about 5,000 in a year. Were a million smart meters to be installed in a year, 400 installation jobs would be created. It follows that the planned U.S. deployment of 20 million smart meters over five years, or 4 million per year, should create 1,600 installation jobs. Unless more meters are added to the annual deployment schedule, this workforce of 1,600 should cover installation needs for the next five years.
…
Now let’s consider job losses. It takes one worker today roughly 15 minutes to read a single meter. So in a day, a meter reader can scan about 30 meters, or about 700 meters a month. Meters are typically read once a month, making it the base period to calculate meter-reading jobs. Reading a million meters every month engages about 1,400 personnel. In five years, 20 million manually read meters are expected to disappear, taking with them some 28,000 meter-reading jobs.
Here’s the hard real math: jobs gained (1600) minus jobs lost (28,000) = net 25,400 jobs lost. Just like at Kennedy Space Center! It is a fact that US manufacturing jobs and labor based jobs have not really moved overseas, they have been taken over by robotic automation. The green foot print of a robot is much lower than that of a human being. Every green job in this example destroys around 15 existing none green jobs.
Incoherent madness.
And is ‘green’ really cleaning the Earth or scarring it? For example, wind farms are the biggest con ever perpetuated on America. They litter the landscape as bird killing eye sores, and yet many would be surprised to know many of those windmills are not doing a damn thing except (literally) spinning their wheels:
Some say that Ka Le is haunted — and it is. But it’s haunted not by Hawaii’s legendary night marchers. The mysterious sounds are “Na leo o Kamaoa”– the disembodied voices of 37 skeletal wind turbines abandoned to rust on the hundred-acre site of the former Kamaoa Wind Farm.
…
Cannibalizing parts from the original 37 turbines, Apollo personnel kept the declining facility going with outdated equipment. But even in a place where wind-shaped trees grow sideways, maintenance issues were overwhelming. By 2004 Kamaoa accounts began to show up on a Hawaii State Department of Finance list of unclaimed properties. In 2006, transmission was finally cut off by Hawaii Electric Company.
…
The turbines installed in the first wind rush were not very reliable. Some never worked at all. As the years passed and the elements took their toll, downtime climbed ever closer to 100% and production dwindled to negligible amounts. Developers often set malfunctioning turbines to “virtual” mode — blades spinning without generating electricity — in order to keep oil circulating inside the turbine drive. Of course this habit also gives passing drivers an illusion of productivity.
…
“At that point the whole pyramid collapsed. They are firing thousands of people. BP closed down the two largest solar production plants in Europe. They are firing between 25,000 and 40,000 people….”
It is a long but important history lesson about how foolish and destructive the simpleton ideology of the left is. The vaunted wind and solar energy sectors are collapsing due to exaggerated claims and impossible promises.
Liberal ideology is now demonstrating why the founding fathers of this nation architected limited government. They did so in order to protect against the madness of a few destroying the lives of many others.
The protections needed against big business running amok on greed in the last century were a critical step in our ascension to the pinnacle of human history. But the rot has set in on the offspring of those historic times, which exposed again the vanity and crassness of humanity when given too much power over others.
Right now, today, the American people understand that the federal government is a huge threat to their livelihoods and individual pursuit of happiness. They will not totally decimate government and throw out the respected roles we all admire and rely on. But it is time to shred the rest down to the bare bone. Cut the regulations and limitations and bored, watching bureaucrats. Time to remove the real impediment to America. Time to cut the federal government way back and return power to the states and communities.
It is time to pick the path. Will it be D=Big Government or R=Individual Initiative?
Actually, I think the choice is between D=Poverty&terrorism or R=Security&prosperity
And I concur about the porkulus. The concept is wrong, of course, but you would think that a Democrat would follow FDR’s example and spend the money on science, real energy, and national security.
AJ,
Why do you think the Federal Government too incompetent to run health care, student loans, mortgages and the energy business, yet you think that the Federal Government is the only competent entity to launch cargo & people into LEO?
If you truly believe in small federal government, then the federal government should get out of all of those businesses and stop artificially skewing the marketplace.
You can’t have it both ways.
Alan
ajh,
How do you think NASA gets cargo and people into LEO? Do you have any clue where the engineering, factory and expertise lies to do this?
Your question belies a lot of ignorance.
Do you think NASA is the only entity that flies satellites? The government?
the government FUNDS science, defense, intelligence and weather missions. Only one of these has the potential to be taken over by industry (weather), but due to its ties to national defense it remains FUNDED by government.
Satellites for global communications are NOT funded by governments, but the private sector.
You have confused funding with expertise to perform the job. Government has almost no in house expertise left, it has mostly been moved into commercial companies.
A question from ignorance is not convincing.
> The concept is wrong, of course, but you would think that a Democrat would follow FDR’s example and spend the money on science, real energy, and national security.
That would require a classical liberal mindset, and not a postmodern liberal mindset.
AJ — a revised version of a comment I made over at neo-neocon:
You may find a guest piece I wrote for NoOilForPacifists about 10 months back about Solar of interest, if you did not read it then:
Solar Power: Flat Out Wrong For All Time
I detail in rough calculations why solar is a flat out stupid pipe dream from those who fail to grasp basic physics, and show how the areal requirement to replace the US power grid with solar would ABSOLUTELY NECESSARILY require covering a land surface area with solar cells (or mirrors, for solar thermal) of not less than 4/5ths the land surface area of the State of Delaware.
What’s that? “Only 20% solarâ€? So one-fifth of an entire state is A-ok with you…? LOL. Heads would explode. The brownouts might be worth the entertainment: “Popâ€. “Popâ€. “Popâ€.
AJ, as far as the defunding of NASA’s space programs, I am “sort of” in favor of it solely because I don’t believe NASA to be even vaguely competent any more as a whole.
When I say “defund”, mind you, I’m not talking about the money being taken away from NASA and spend on some useless BS program, but put into a nice fat slush fund used to provide a set of ‘X-prizes‘ with man-in-space as the central goal — one of them should be ‘x billion dollars’ to any organization that takes 10 men and/or women, places them on the moon for 180 days, and brings them back safely, in a repeatable and (careful with this word — you know what I really mean) “sustainable” manner, and licenses all the patents developed to accomplish this task.
That is, of course, not what The Big O has done at all.
My argument for such is something I expressed over on Dr. Sanity recently when she commented on the death of the Constellation program:
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I gave up on NASA in 1992 as having any possible relevance to the future of Man in Space. And here’s why:
On Labor Day weekend in 1992 the World Science Fiction Convention was held in Orlando. NASA usually has a few token reps there to be on panels and stuff, but there was more than the usual number of them due to Orlando’s proximity to the Cape, only 40 miles away.
There was a panel on the future of man in space, which had several mid-level people from NASA on it. At some point during the panel, the NASA people made the rather startling claim that, if the USA wanted to, they could not make it back to the moon within 10 years.
This caught attention: “What, you mean you don’t believe there’s the will to do so?”
“No, we couldn’t do it even if there was the will *and* the money”.
Now, think about that.
They were saying that they could not accomplish, in 10 years time, with 1990s technology, what was clearly achieved, in the same amount of time, with 1960s technology!!!
They had some bullshit excuse for this — “The designers who created those large-scale booster rocket engines died, and their art died with them” (sorry, not buying it. We have all manner of capabilities they did not have back then, and we particularly don’t need, and probably don’t want, to do it with the same brute-force means that was all they had available to them).
THAT is post-Challenger NASA.
Jerry Pournelle spoke, after the Challenger disaster, of the fact that NASA’s Apollo Era “Can Do” attitude had been replaced with an arrogant “Can’t Fail” attitude.
It was clear by the 1990s that even that attitude had been replaced by the far less lofty one of “Can’t Imagine“.
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Defund the bastards. Put the money into X-Prizes.
Bill Whittle has done some good vids on private space enterprise.
LunaPalooza Part 1: The Future of Space Exploration Is In Your Hands
LunaPalooza Part 2: Private Enterprise Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before
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Not wanting to interupt your pro and con argument about NASA but the latest headline on WND says Soros is behind the troubles with the Euro. Soros has brought down the economies of several countries while getting richer by undermining and destroy their currencies. Soros came from a Communist country where the state owned everything. Where did he get the money to begin his curency speculation? Was he a tool of the Soviet government and did the USSR finance his operations to undermine vulnerable governments so Communist insurgents could take them over? Keep in mind that Soros finances the ultra left organizations that got Obama elected and our currency is now facing the same instability that occurred in other countries just before the fall.To do what he has done requires a person to have almost as much cash on hand as the countries under attach. So where did Soros’ seed money come from?
The USSR also funneled money to the Senators AL Gore, Sr. and JR thru Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum. Everyone thought Hammer was a millionaire but when he died it was revealed that Occidental Petroleum had practically no assets, so he had to be getting the money he funneled to the Gores from somewhere else.Al Gore is now promoting Soros’ Global warming hoax big time. How many other underhanded deals have the Soviets and their boy, Soros, had a hand in? You be the judge.
ajh1492, a question for you:
Why do you think the Federal Government is competent to run health care, student loans, mortgages and the energy business?
Give me an example of any programs that they run well.
While I think they do a good job with Military services, NASA, and maybe a couple more things, they do a terrible job of managing COSTS of EVERYTHING they are involved with.
With a total monopoly on mail service, that operation loses money every year. No project they take on ever gets smaller, it’s all bureaucracy and it only get’s larger and more expensive.
I saw a news blurb that with the Shuttle shutting down, 23,000 will lose their jobs. I’ll bet that’s about 100% private industry. I’ll bet government jobs remain the same. (AJ, don’t tell me I’m speaking out of ignorance on this, I’ll admit that, I’m just speaking from what is the norm)
look at conditions in the UK in their NHS, that’s what will become the standard in the US if we get Obamacare. Why are Dimocrats so hell bent on having poor health care. To get the power that goes with having control.
I’ll admit to supporting a strong private space launch capability. And prizes.
On the other hand, NASA should be doing basic research into the technology to build more advanced vehicles. Scramjets. Single-Stage-To-Orbit. Nuclear-electric propulsion. And yes, spend the $100K or so on seed money for exotic technologies.
And I don’t see Obama spending money on that.
AJ, great post, as usual. You remark, “Democrats think it will be GOOD for the government to trash your current health plan and send you to a government doctor. Are they kidding? And which workers are they talking about?”
They are not kidding. These people live in a world where “somebody else will do it.”
I keep running into Progressive Democrats who take it as a given that any Democrat-run government is a super-smart, wonderfully indulgent, supernaturally capable Sugar Daddy with deep pockets filled by “the rich” (never them). Only a Republican-run government could actually do them harm–and in their minds it will, by definition.
Incredibly, seemingly as an act of faith, they believe that any inconveniences offered by the private system will be obliterated by a Dem gov’t system. They remind me of the Obama voter who expected Obama to pay her mortgage and fill her gas tank. (I wonder what ever happened to her?) For example, I’ve had people tell me that they can’t wait until the government runs health care so that they won’t have to fill out that once-a-year insurance company form that asks whether they have dropped or added any dependents. In other words, the gov’t will get rid of their pain-in-the-neck paperwork!
Somehow, it never works that way for me.
Gotta love this article from CBS Moneywatch:
Is Maxine Waters Really As Dumb As She Seems?
I generally agree with your posts and I agree that government forced green jobs will end up with everyone being poorer. That being said, the example you show is wrong…in the example (assuming the numbers are correct) you show meter readers being displaced by smart meters…with an overall loss of jobs but with an increase in efficiency. Increases in efficiency (productivity) are good for the economy and make us all richer. That is not how government forced green jobs kill jobs and make us all poorer. It is the government forcing of inefficient jobs that destroys other jobs. One explanation of this can be found at
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a2PHwqAs7BS0
If inefficiency is the answer to job creation, all we have to do is ban bulldozers and use people with hand operated shovels on any and all earth moving projects.
AJ,
How do you think NASA gets cargo and people into LEO? Do you have any clue where the engineering, factory and expertise lies to do this?
Your question belies a lot of ignorance.
You have no clue what I do, let’s just say that I have 20 years of Systems Engineering experience in the field.
You bemoan the fact that the current “plan of record”, i.e. Constellation is canceled. I say that that’s good, because it was a dead-end, ego-driven misdirection of the VSE. Listen to Dr Aldrin and get NASA out of the launch-to-LEO business.
NASA needs to reinvent itself. It’s goal need to be exploration, not constantly reinventing the wheel trying to get to LEO.
Do you think NASA is the only entity that flies satellites? The government?
Did I talk about satellites, I talked about launch access to LEO.
There is a world of difference between satellites and launchers.
Government has almost no in house expertise left, it has mostly been moved into commercial companies.
It’s quite noticeable since Ares couldn’t even pass a PDR without having to seriously change the defined entrance and exit criteria for the review.
You never did answer my question. If you agree with me that the federal government is incapable of running the energy, mortgage, health-care, and student loan business, why do you persist in thinking that only NASA can launch cargo & people to LEO?
Alan
Readteam,
Why do you think the Federal Government is competent to run health care, student loans, mortgages and the energy business?
My question was to AJ. Still waiting for an answer, not a redirection. My opinion? The federal government should get out/stay out of the health-care, student loan, mortgage, energy AND launch-to-LEO business.
Give me an example of any programs that they run well.
While I think they do a good job with Military services, NASA, and maybe a couple more things, they do a terrible job of managing COSTS of EVERYTHING they are involved with.
Defense is a constitutionally mandated requirement for the federal government. Have you seen or spent any time dealing with the DoD Procurement process? It’s not the most efficient system. I don’t have any qualms about the Astronaut Corps or the scientists, but Procurement and Requirements Management are questionable. Have you looked at MSL’s massive requirements creep? Houw about that National Launch System in the early 90’s? How about NASA asking Nixon for a 100 man space station as a follow-up to Apollo in the early 70’s?
NASA tends to dream up grandiose plans that are completely unaffordable. They also never have a backup plan when the grand plan is shot down for being too expensive. Why can’t they put together a plan of exploration with realistic steps that help keep the public’s attention. Massive displays are unaffordable.
I applaud the Millennium Challenges, the COTS program and the other incentive programs. THAT IS WHAT NASA SHOULD BE DOING. They should be encouraging the development of space just like the development of the West was encouraged by building the Transcontinental Railroad.
Alan
If Bolden and the administration push in a similar vigorous and sustained manner for their NASA plan, they will also win. As I’ve noted before, President Obama would no doubt love to battle Congressional members who want to force him to spend tens of billions of dollars on a failed Moon program, especially when most of that opposition consists of supposedly small-government, pro-business, anti-deficit Republicans. (Could just see him in a public forum saying that continuing the Moon program would be “an inexcusable waste of money”.) The NASA supporters better start working with the administration on a compromise or when the rest of Congress weighs in, it’s quite possible that not only will Constellation be canceled but NASA’s budget will be cut rather than increased.
I suggest you go read this article on HobbySpace
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=19013
The reason the government can’t run health care is because it has already created more executive level positions than there are people with the inteligence to fill them. Where is it going to find people with the intelligence to comptently run health care? I thought it was an exceptional case when it took Social Security 3 months to answer a letter but I just heard it took the Justice Dept 3 months to answer an inquery from some Congressmen. If they have a 3 month log jam on their corespondence now just think of the mess we will be in if they have to keep up with medical records. We already have 3rd world type pay offs to govt agents and agencies. Just look at all those ambulance chasers who are advertising for people to join in on their class action lawsuits over dangerous drugs that have been approved. I thought drugs went thru years of testing to make sure there weren’t any bad side effects before they were approved. It sure looks like all it takes to rush approval thru is a few dollars greasing a few palms. Could it be that those who can and are willing to pay a little up front will get better and quicker medical treatment? Remember…Corruption cannot exist unless someone has control over the allocation of goods and services.The more control, the bigger the chance of corruption.
So how did the Health Care Summit go? Obama’s approval rating 47.3%, Congress is at 18.8%. I guess it didn’t go so well!
ajh1492, I misunderstood your position, I read it as if you thought the government was doing many things well. Yes, I know the Military services are mandated and I also know that the money part is severely wasteful.
Redteam,
No problem. Glad that we’re in violent agreement 🙂
AJ,
Still waiting for the answer to my question, Why should NASA be wasting OUR money designing/building a launch vehicle to get to LEO [ARES] for Cargo & People.
If SpaceX is just doing “what was done 50 years ago”, then what do you call the current Orion?
NASA should focus on building a multi-use/reusable spacecraft that can efficiently travel from LEO to any Lagrange point or planetary orbit (Venus, Mars/Phobos, the Moon, etc.).
The main thing NASA should so is research/build a prototype of an effective propulsion system to explore the solar system. Oh wait! because of all the R&D money in NASA being sucked into the Constellation there was no money to do this development work! Chang-Diaz has to leave NASA and form his own company and voila! We have a working prototype VASMIR!
NASA also needs more efficient inflatable modules instead of spam-in-the-can modules? That NASA research got axed to feed the Constellation, but luckily Bigelow had a vision and voila! We have two prototype modules in orbit for the last few years.
What about heatshielding for Aerocapture & Reentry? NASA scientist did good research, but again the $$ got sucked into the Constellation, but at least Musk saw the benefit of the research and his team improved PICA-X and later this year we should see the first RV using the material!
Have some very good things come out of Constellation? Yes.
Orbital Sciences has built a good escape launch system that could be used by other companies. There is no reason why LM couldn’t license the Orion design and finish building it themselves like Boeing is doing with their original 2004-2005 design response to VSE.
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/cevoeing.htm
Oh, and in 2004-2005 the private contractors recommended an EML-1 rendezvous instead of Lunar Orbit rendezvous. NASA leadership at that time chose to ignore all the advise and do “Apollo on Steroids”.
Alan
ajh,
You better get a clue that I am not here to respond to commenters and their niave questions.
NASA has been using commercial launch vehicles for years, how did you miss that? Ares was an R&D effort to look at reusing technology (and people) from the Shuttle system. It did not work – BFD. There are lots of ideas, yours are no better or surprising than most. They still need to be vetted and selected, again no surprise.
Without NASA funding they all go nowhere, because their is no viable commercial incentive for human space flight. If there was they would not need NASA funding – doh!
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