Why Do Good People Hope Obama Fails?
(caption: Hoping The People succeed often means hoping a specific politician's agenda will fail.)
There was a recent hue and cry about Rush Limbaugh saying he hoped that Obama would fail.
But he has plenty of people on his side…from all over the political spectrum. Why?
Look not at the words a politician uses to adorn his proposals, but at the things it will actually produce.
There is a huge gulf between the pretty things Obama promises, and the poverty and tyranny he, like his predecessor Bush, would deliver if successful.
Progressive “Universal health care”, anywhere in the world, produces universally short supply and slow progress of medical technology.
“Renewable energy” has been the promise of government for forty years, but all that it’s ever produced is renewable economic malaise.
“Comprehensive immigration reform” means bundling bad ideas with good ones, for an overall worsening of conditions.
Our economic depression was caused, in part, by high energy prices (because of Bush’s insane foreign policies driving the price of oil up 700%). Now Obama promises to drive up energy prices even higher, on purpose, in the name of “global warming” that ignores the past two years of global cooling…and we should wish him to succeed?
Canadians illegally sneak to the US to get health care, when suffering or even in danger of death, because it can be months, or even years, before their own system rations out treatment to them. Britain actually bans life-saving treatments it deems “too expensive”. You’re not even allowed to buy them for yourself, much less get them “free”. The whole problem with US health care, in the first place, is that government has been increasing the “universal” and “free” parts for over forty years, stripping consumer control from our hands, causing prices to go up and service to plummet…would we really hope Obama manages to make that rationing universal?
There are debates, in America, over:
* Whether jobs should be protected from new immigrants, or they will increase wealth and demand enough to be a net plus
* Whether people who have broken existing laws in order to sneak into the country, by tens of millions, should be given blanket amnesty, or have to go back home and start over legally, or simply be thrown in prisons or exiled permanently.
* Whether tax-paying, productive people should be forced not only to subsidize poverty and failure among formerly tax-paying Americans, but even for foreigners who show up illegally just to get the free handouts, as is helping bankrupt California right now. Should their children suffer for their wrongs, or just the children of people who pay taxes?
All of those debates should be settled, separately. Lumping separate issues together to force people to take the bad ones in order to have the essential good ones is one of the great crimes of modern government.
But we must hope he succeeds in this?
That’s not the kind of “hope” people voted for in 2008.
We hope THE PEOPLE succeed…which often means hoping a specific politician’s agendas fail, completely.
Thank Liberalism for the SUV…again
(caption: You can't ban powerful vehicles, any more realistically than you can ban stupidity.)
Years ago, busybodies decided to violate the limits to the powers of the Federal government, by setting gas mileage standards (and many other harmful regulations) on automobiles.
As is always the case with the Law of Unintended Consequences, this actually produced the opposite of the intended results.
It created the green-hated SUV boom.
This is because there are legitimate uses for large engines, and large vehicles. You can’t just declare that everything has to get X miles per gallon. Obviously, trash trucks cannot. The tractor-trailer rigs that deliver most of our goods cannot. Vehicles that actually are needed to drive somewhere on the road and then go off-road to do work cannot.
There are, in fact, many sporting or work activities that require the power or weight that make high gas mileage impossible.
So the bureaucrats were forced to create special exceptions…for example, a Sports-Utility Vehicle class.
But arrogant, ivory-tower civil rulers cannot anticipate all needs. OK, let’s face it, they are actually incompetent at anticipating the needs of real people.
So it didn’t occur to them that regular families need large vehicles, for many reasons. Nor that the regulations on minivans would make them too underpowered and, well, ugly, for most people to find tolerable.
So, in fact, the typical family was faced with an artificial division between the “efficient” vehicles, and those even more powerful than they need.
They were, therefore, actually driven (no pun intended) to buying from the latter class. Stuck between feeble, dangerous, ugly cars with good mileage, and inefficient, powerful, good-looking ones, they chose the latter. As they should.
It’s the environmentalists’ own fault.
And now they’re at it again:
The Obama/Pelosi administration have announced a McCain-like plan to FORCE Americans to drive even weaker, uglier, more fuel-efficient cars. This will not only increase poverty, by hugely raising the price of cars and therefore pricing people out of transportation, but will surely have many other unintended consequences, in the long run. More automaker bankruptcy, as they’re forced to make cars we won’t buy? Even crazier automotive trends, as we try to find a way to get what we actually need, instead of what they want us to have?
Have fun finding out what they’ll be.
Stop Blaming Capitalism: for Socialism’s Failures
New, Permanent Home!
This article has garnered such overwhelming response, that it has been given a permanent place, here.
The page below is now only a quick summary, with the details and citations moved to the real page.
HMOs, the health care crisis, strip mining, robber barons, deforestation, SUVs, “global warming”, world hunger, unemployment, inflation, periodic recession/depression…what all have in common is that Big Government is the cause, but your economic freedom is blamed.
Politicians tend to force bad government programs on us, which then have destructive side-effects, usually the opposite of what’s intended, and then saying the effects were caused by whatever freedom of choice is left over, and trying to take that away.
Included in the list of such failures:
- HMOs
- The Housing Market / Sub-prime Mortgage Bubble:
- SUVs
- The Savings and Loan Bailout
- Bailouts
- Robber barons, Strip Mining, Deforestation
- Corporations
- Monopolies and oligopolies
- Oil / Gas Prices
- Energy Prices
- Hunger
- Automaker Bankrupcy
- Alternative Energy
An entire group founded around this topic, including extensive discussion of it, can be found at Stop Blaming Capitalism, for Socialism’s Failures
(It's amazing how many things government forces on us, which are then blamed on our freedom)
Going Green is Bad for the Environment
Many of the wild claims made by Green lifestyle advocates are actually worse than doing nothing at all. They increase your carbon footprint, increase trash, and are generally bad for the planet, as well as harmful to people.
You may think you’re helping save the planet, or at least being a responsible member of society, if you recycle, avoid styrofoam, drive a hybrid, use electricity instead of fossil fuel, et cetera…
But, unfortunately, taking the advice of the “green living” trendies may actually do more harm than good.
“Green” environmentalism is chock-full of urban legends, inductive reasoning, and pseudoscience that end up harming the environment, as well as being directly bad for the people pushed to conform.
Here are some facts on the subject, gleaned from the Facebook group of the same name. JOIN Going Green is Bad for the Environment, if you want more info on the topic.
_______________________________
Government-mandated Recycling Pollutes
… (not the for-profit kind) is usually so inefficient that it produces more pollution than making new paper, glass, and plastic! 13 of the top Superfund hazardous waste sites were once recycling centers!
[1] New York Times: Recycling is Garbage
[2] http://Pen & Teller on Recycling
Biofuels Have Huge Carbon Footprint
…actually have a bigger carbon footprint than simply using fossil fuel, because they require the clearing of land for agriculture, AND the farmers use fossil fuels to run their farm equipment.
[5] New Scientist Magazone: Forget Biofuels, Burn Fossil Fuels and Plant Forests
[6] How Big is the Biofuel Carbon Footprint
[7] Carbon Footprint of Biofuels: Can We Shrink it Down to Size in Time?
[8] London Times: Biofuels Produce More Greenhouse Gas than Fossil Fuels
Hybrid Cars are Worse than Normal Cars
…have batteries are so bad for the environment that you probably can’t drive one long enough to make up for the damage, before the battery goes bad and you need a new one, causing the problem all over again
[9] Prius Outdoes Humvee in Environmental Damage
Environmentalism Causes Forest Fires
Laws preventing the clearing of wood from “wild” areas, combined with efforts to prevent small forest fires, set up “tinderbox” situations, and are the reason the gigantic wildfires end up engulfing large areas
Continue reading
Why Oil and Gas Prices Are Falling
We all know that high gas/energy prices, driven by high oil prices, are a large part of what has crippled the US economy.
But what has caused that?
Oil prices are not set by oil companies, but by futures and commodities speculators, who bid on the oil at auctions. The companies have no more control over the price than someone selling with a regular auction on EBay.
The speculators decide what they are willing to pay, based on what they believe the future of oil to be.
How Prices Rose
In 1999, the monopolistic oil cartel OPEC started cutting production, specifically to help themselves and their allies get rich by driving up the price of oil. Speculators, naturally, started bidding more for oil, expecting there to be a shortage. It went from well under $20 per barrel to over $30.
Then George W Bush got elected.
People assumed, because wealthy oil barons in Texas and Saudi Arabia were largely responsible for financing him, that plentiful oil was in their future. This ignored history, of course, because plentiful oil is cheap, and cheap oil is bad for oil barons. The more expensive oil is, the better. It would have made more sense to expect Bush to do things that would drive up the price of oil.
Bush holds hands with a member of the Saudi tyranny, top state sponsor of terrorism, and leader of the push to keep oil prices high
But they assumed it’d be plentiful, so they bid lower on it, and the price fell. It got almost back down to its natural, under-$20 price range.
But that was bad for Bush’s financiers.
In fact, there was a lot of loud public worry, among oil barons, about how the price of oil was returning to normal.
Then came September 11th, 2001.
Afghanistan
After 9-11, there were many ways America could go.
The way Bush chose to lead, was to first attack Afghanistan. He said this was because they were harboring bin Laden. He promised, though, that he was going to exhaust all diplomatic means, and only attack them as a last resort.
But before he attacked, the government of Afghanistan, a long-time US ally whom Bush had just recently sent, openly and on record, a great deal of grant money for their help, offered to turn over bin Laden for war crimes trial.
Bush ignored the offer, refusing even to discuss it with them. When they offered a second time, the US attacked the very next day.
Speculators saw this as a very bad sign for oil, because Afghanistan was closely aligned with many oil-producing countries, and they bid more for it, driving the price into the high $20 range, fifty percent higher than its natural price.
Iraq
Then Bush began threatening to attack Iraq. Now Afghanistan had at least some association with Al Qaeda…but Iraq, of course, was ruled by Al Qaeda’s #2 enemy after the US: Saddam Hussein.
Oil speculators found this pretty scary, and confusing. The price of oil rose to close to $40, more than twice its natural range.
Gradually, it declined, on the promise of cheap oil from Iraq, even though every government projection of conquering Iraq anticipated years of quagmire and turmoil, jeopardizing oil supplies for a long time to come. This is why his father had not done it.
(more after this K-rad graphic)
Oil Prices, Real and Adjusted, from 1990 to mid 2008
Sure enough, as time war on, the war got worse, and the speculators responded by bidding ever-higher for oil.
General Belligerence
What’s more, whenever the price was finally stabilizing a bit, the Bush administration would do something else that threatened the oil supply, like picking fights with Hugo Chavez, or threatening to attack Iran. Each time, investors were frightened, and the oil price climbed.
Eventually, this kind of belligerent foreign policy pattern pushed it up to $140 per barrel, over 700% above its natural price of just a few years earlier.
Sane Foreign Policy?
Then, in early 2008, it began to grow increasingly likely that Barak Obama would be the Democratic nominee. Unlike Hillary, he had always opposed this kind of foreign policy. Speculators began to weigh the possibility of a different foreign policy into their price bids.
As Obama's election grew more likely, oil buyers became reassured that oil supplies might be secure, and bid less, driving down prices.
As he clinched the nomination, and then began to dominate the polls versus McCain, the amount speculators were willing to pay steadily declined.
By the time he was elected, which had been seen as a probable for some time, they had built a peaceful foreign policy into the price, so that it was half its peak.
The day after he was elected, the price fell dramatically.
Now it remains in a holding pattern, a fraction of its peak just a year ago…waiting to see if Barak Obama is going to keep his promise of sane foreign policy. If he does, we could see oil falling down to its natural price, which by now is probably little more than $30 a barrel.
Ironically, sane foreign policy has an even greater impact on what the investors in oil are willing to pay, than Obama’s own position as a Liberal enemy of the energy needs of Americans.
About
This site has its origins before the word “Blog” existed. Back then its owner, Kaz, was simply thought of as having a website that published socio-political articles with regularity…But the only real difference was that the RSS/XML protocals were not yet used this way.
The website was known as Site of the Sentient, a reference to the famous Words of the Sentient, that Kaz had been editing for years previously.
When some random portal site hijacked the domain siteofthesentient.com, it was a dark time for the human knowledge quest. Fortunately, But Now You Know is striving to take up the slack, and even has some revamped versions of the original articles, for example Conscription, is it Slavery, and How to Get Out of Jury Duty, and be a hero instead of a bad citizen.
Kaz is a writer, graphic artist, and supplements his income by being a hardcore senior web developer.
Along with this blog, you can track his efforts with the dedicated facebook page here.
Speaking of tracking:
You can follow But Now You Know here, on Twitter
And you can follow But Now You Know, via our Facebook Page, here.
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