Friday, February 21, 2014

A Cheer for Congressional Paralysis

It's too bad that politicians do not have their version of the Hippocratic Oath governing Medical Doctors where the first rule is to do no harm. Political ideas take a long time to gestate. At the Federal level they are bargained over to the lowest common denominator by lobbyist favoring rent seekers. The final result is usually more harmful than the ailment to be cured. There was a lot of self serving patting on each others political backs recently because Congress was able to pass the Farm Bill in a bipartisan effort. What a hideous compromise that was of giving millions to rich farm interests and crumbs to the poor folk. With such result let's cheer paralysis instead of bemoaning it.

Yes global warming is a reality, but let's not put the innumerates in charge of developing solutions. Europe's green energy policy subsidized solar and wind projects that make no economic sense. Energy costs in Germany are roughly ten times higher then they need be and most damming is that carbon emissions are high as well because coal power is needed to cover during green power's down time! Surely we understand that we must sacrifice for the common good, but let's not make it a pointless sacrifice. The enumerates refuse to understand just how the low density of green energy scales, which is terribly, to the point of having to wind farm the entire Atlantic Ocean and solar panel up the North American continent to replace our total carbon burn. (I haven't done the math on this claim so go ahead and call me the innumerate, but I bet I am within the right factor.) European legislators have done great harm to their constituents with their activism and thanks to our paralysis we are fracking our way to a cleaner more independent energy environment without any help from our misguided Departments of Energy, Environment and Agriculture.

One particular activist solution here in the U. S. was the mandating of ethanol to supplement gasoline for auto transport. Unfortunately it is an innumerate's solution that just can not be discarded now that it has a following in Washington among those lobbying for Agribusiness. That this mandate grossly wastes power with its many energy conversions and contributes to world hunger by dedicating farm land to feed our cars and not our bodies means nothing to the rent seekers it benefits and the public whose attention is focused elsewhere.


As a believer in open source computer programming my Libertarian inclination is toward a crowd sourced wiki form of governance that is more like the techie petri dish that is Silicon Valley and it's many other hot beds of our economic progress. The paralysis we see today is a rejection of sweeping dumbed down mandates from Washington because with today's networks there is power for the people to act intelligently and at a more granular level.

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