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central planning Archive

Saturday

5

January 2013

4

COMMENTS

Cash For Clunkers – As Bad For The Environment As It Was The Economy

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Economics & the Economy

The economic failure of the Cash for Clunkers program are well understood, despite the administrations insistence it would function as economic stimulus. But the administration also trumpeted environmental concerns as a reason for instituting the subsidy program. So how did it do on that front? Miserably:

According to E Magazine, the “Clunkers” program, which is officially known as the Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), produced tons of unnecessary waste while doing little to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The program’s first mistake seems to have been its focus on car shredding, instead of car recycling. With 690,000 vehicles traded in, that’s a pretty big mistake.

According to the Automotive Recyclers Association (ARA), automobiles are almost completely recyclable, down to their engine oil and brake fluid. But many of the “Cash for Clunkers” cars were never sent to recycling facilities. The agency reports that the cars’ engines were instead destroyed by federal mandate, in order to prevent dealers from illicitly reselling the vehicles later.

The remaining parts of each car could then be put up for auction, but program guidelines also required that after 180 days, no matter how much of the car was left, the parts would be sent to a junkyard and shredded.

Shredding vehicles results in its own environmental nightmare. For each ton of metal produced by a shredding facility, roughly 500 pounds of “shredding residue” is also produced, which includes polyurethane foams, metal oxides, glass and dirt. All totaled, about 4.5 million tons of that residue is already produced on average every year. Where does it go? Right into a landfill.

Another terrific showing by central planners.

Thursday

16

June 2011

0

COMMENTS

Obama’s Fatal Conceit

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Economics & the Economy

I, like many others, made light of the President’s recent shocking display of economic ignorance.  In an interview on NBC’s TODAY, the President claimed that productivity, the source of our prosperity, is really a “structural issue” holding back the job creating benefits of his policies. Hogwash, obviously. But what came later in the interview was perhaps even more disturbing (the transcript at the link wasn’t completely accurate so I cleaned it up):

[T]here are some structural issues with our economy, where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM; You don’t go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate. So all these things have created changes in the economy and what we have to do now, and that’s what this job counsel is all about, is identifying where the jobs of the future are going to be, how do we make sure that there’s a match between what people are getting trained for and the jobs that exist, how do we make sure that capital is flowing into those places with the greatest opportunity.

Obama’s fundamental problem – his fatal conceit, if you will – is that he thinks we need him and his jobs counsel to figure out what the jobs of the future are going to be. We no more need this today than it was necessary for past leaders to identify the jobs of today. This is a task for the private sector, and one which only its vast network of dispersed information and decentralized decision-making is capable of determining.

What does Barack Obama know about the technologies of today, much less the future? Why does he imagine he can direct capital and resources to the right place better than investors? When has history ever shown politicians capable of doing so?

As F.A. Hayek wrote in The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Barack Obama is clearly too enamored with his own intelligence to recognize how little he knows – or that any one individual or group of individuals could possibly know – about where the next economic breakthroughs will emerge, or where future resources will need to be deployed. Who even 20 years ago possibly could have imagined the range of technological innovation from which we benefit today, and the subsequent new jobs and roles it has created in the economy? There is no such person, which proves the impossibility of Obama’s desired model of central planning.

Tuesday

7

July 2009

1

COMMENTS

Pope Calls For Global Tyranny

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy, Free Markets

The pope has the answer to our global recession.   Taking heed the overwhelming historical evidence that shows the failure of central planning in every nation it has been tried, the pope has solved the economic problem. No, it isn’t to reduce taxes and trade barriers, or otherwise remove government burdens on economic production. What we really need is a globally planned economy!

Pope Benedict called on Tuesday for a “world political authority” to manage the global economy and for more government regulation of national economies to pull the world out of the current crisis and avoid a repeat.

…The pope said every economic decision had a moral consequence and called for “forms of redistribution” of wealth overseen by governments to help those most affected by crises.

Benedict said “there is an urgent need of a true world political authority” whose task would be “to manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result.”

We can now count the pope among freedom’s many enemies.  He should stick to religion.