government intervention — VOICES for REASON

In my last post, I commented on how government central planning, being subject to shifting political agendas, makes long-range economic decision-making impossible. It’s worth looking at other examples of the chaos and market distortions that government intervention causes.

Consider the government’s support for alternative fuel vehicles, which—like the solar power plants in the Mojave desert—is driven purely by green ideology. It currently doesn’t make any technological or economic sense to try to replace the petroleum-powered internal combustion engine with currently existing alternative fuel technologies. (Just as it currently doesn’t make any sense to try to replace fossil-fueled or nuclear-powered electricity with solar or wind.) Nevertheless, the government is determined to do so.

In 2003, the Bush administration launched a 1.5 billion dollar initiative to subsidize the development of hydrogen cars—cars that use hydrogen instead of gasoline as their source of energy, producing water as their only emission.

Now, there are all kinds of reasons why hydrogen cars would never make it today on a free market. Critics cite legitimate safety concerns, the high cost of hydrogen fuel cell technologies, and the need for a huge, nationwide build-out of hydrogen refueling stations. Read the rest of this entry »

What follows are three examples of a common fallacy:

1. The FTC brings an antitrust suit against Intel on the grounds that, among other accusations, the company coerced its customers into buying only its CPUs and GPUs.
2. Congress passes legislation preventing broadcasters from forcing TV viewers to listen to “excessively loud” commercials.
3. The government passes laws to stop health insurance companies from forcing high-risk customers to pay higher insurance premiums.

Each of these is an actual example of the fallacy of equivocating between economic power and political power–of treating as identical the power of private individuals or businesses to engage in trade and the power of the government to use physical force. Understanding this fallacy is a crucial step in untangling these and many other issues. Read the rest of this entry »

In October, I posted on the opposition by environmentalists to solar energy projects in California’s Mojave Desert. I mentioned that California Senator Dianne Feinstein was planning to bolster that opposition with legislation.

Well, just before Christmas the New York Times reported that Feinstein introduced a bill “to protect a million acres of the Mojave Desert in California by scuttling some 13 big solar plants and wind farms planned for the region.”

What I found most striking in the article was this (emphasis added):

But before the bill to create two new Mojave national monuments has even had its first hearing, the California Democrat has largely achieved her aim. Regardless of the legislation’s fate, her opposition means that few if any power plants are likely to be built in the monument area, a complication in California’s effort to achieve its aggressive goals for renewable energy.

Developers of the projects have already postponed several proposals or abandoned them entirely. The California agency charged with planning a renewable energy transmission grid has rerouted proposed power lines to avoid the monument.

“The very existence of the monument proposal has certainly chilled development within its boundaries,” said Karen Douglas, chairwoman of the California Energy Commission.

So even if the bill fails in Congress, the environmentalist anti-development agenda wins.

The irony is that these scuttled energy projects are creatures of green government intervention in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

Suppose you heard of someone who, in spite of its bloody and impoverished history, advocated socialism. Suppose that person thought the key to moving America toward socialism was using government power to ensure the media pushed an anti-capitalist message. Suppose that, in order to achieve this goal, he wrote a book arguing that the Federal Communications Commission should curtail the private media with a crippling array of restrictions and taxes, and then pour tens of billions of dollars into the creation of a government-funded “public” media. Suppose he also advocated subjecting Americans to mandatory “media training” so they would know how to “properly” interpret the media.

What would you say of such a person? Well, if you were the Obama Administration, you would say, “This person deserves a job at the FCC.”

I’ve written before about Mark Lloyd, chosen by the Obama Administration to be the FCC’s Chief Diversity Officer. But I was shocked to find that in Lloyd’s 2006 book Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America, he lays out the very proposals I noted above. I will have more to say about the book in the future. If we want to understand the anti-freedom path the FCC is heading down, we need to start by paying attention to the openly declared goals of its officers. As an agency which exists precisely in order to control the media, it should be especially alarming when one of its representatives is committed to radically expanding that control.

Image: flickr

Now that a federal court has found the U.S. liable for post-Katrina flooding in New Orleans, the federal government will be pouring tax money down yet another drain hole in the name of disaster relief. The court found that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was grossly negligent in maintaining a vast network of levees and flood control structures that were supposed to protect New Orleans. The court-ordered damages must be paid from tax funds along with the costs of rebuilding. Said a Los Angeles Times article: “The federal government has promised tens of billions of dollars in post-storm rebuilding aid to Louisiana. The Justice Department has estimated that the total outstanding civil claims could amount to billions more.”

This is not a shocking development. Once Uncle Sam took on the job of flood protection for a city situated in a below-sea-level bowl, it was readily foreseeable that any negligence would increase the population’s exposure to the kind of disaster that Katrina brought. Yet despite the obvious hazards, government policy continues to be formulated as if New Orleans has an unquestionable right to continue defying nature at taxpayer expense.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the 1972 case, U.S. v. 12 200-Ft. Reels of Super 8mm Film, then Chief Justice Warren Burger noted:

The seductive plausibility of single steps in a chain of evolutionary development of a legal rule is often not perceived until a third, fourth, or fifth ‘logical’ extension occurs. Each step, when taken, appeared a reasonable step in relation to that which preceded it, although the aggregate or end result is one that would never have been seriously considered in the first instance.

The phenomenon Chief Justice Burger was observing is wider than the development of legal rules. If people were confronted with a stark choice between freedom and dictatorship, few would choose dictatorship. But that is not what they are confronted with. While it’s true that to compromise the principle of freedom puts one on a path that ultimately leads to total enslavement, it is a long path, and each step of increasing government control can seem necessary in relation to the step that preceded it.

A few recent examples: Read the rest of this entry »

For months, Republicans’ singular strategy in the health-care debate has been to attack Democrat plans as “a government takeover of health care.” There are at least three major problems with this strategy. 1) It fails to acknowledge that we already have a government takeover of health care, thanks to government policies dating back to the 1940s. 2) It fails to acknowledge the major, systemic problems caused by our current, government-controlled system, such as skyrocketing prices across the board. (For more on this, see Jeff Scialabba’s posts here, here, and here.) 3) It fails to offer a positive, truly free-market alternative.

In recent weeks, finally, the Republicans offered a positive health care proposal of their own. Read the rest of this entry »

In my previous post I described how controls breed controls: when politicians intervene in the economy, they create distortions and problems which, unless corrected by rescinding the controls, necessitate further controls–a process ultimately resulting in total control by the government over the economy. We can see this process at work in the two domestic issues that have dominated headlines over the last year: the debate over health care and the financial crisis.

In both cases, the conventional wisdom has been that the free market created problems only government intervention can solve. In both cases, the conventional wisdom is wrong: it was government controls that created the problems. Read the rest of this entry »

Ayn Rand was an uncompromising defender of laissez-faire capitalism, which, she held, means “the abolition of any and all forms of government intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State.” In her essay “Doesn’t Life Require Compromise?”, she noted:

There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls; to accept “just a few controls” is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of the government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.

This view would shock most people today. They take it as self-evident that we must have some combination of freedom and government control of the economy. The idea that “just a few controls” would lead to “gradual enslavement” strikes them as dubious, to say the least. But the evidence for this proposition is all around us. A free country doesn’t dissolve into authoritarian rule over night, but by steps–some small and innocuous, others vast and brazen. Today, we’re seeing examples of both.

Here’s a recent example of the former: Read the rest of this entry »

A reader of this blog was kind enough to send me a photocopy of a New York Times article on health care reform . . . published on May 10, 1962. It was reporting on a controversy surrounding the precursor to Medicare, the King-Anderson bill, then being debated in Congress.

The proposed law had sparked what the Times called a “revolt” among more than two hundred New Jersey doctors who signed a resolution opposing the bill. Observers noted a “movement that is spreading among New Jersey doctors in threatening to refuse to treat medical patients under the provisions of the King-Anderson bill.” The movement’s leader, Dr. J. Bruce Henriksen, was quoted as saying: “As far as I’m concerned as an individual, of course, I won’t practice under socialized medicine. I’ll quit. I’ll refuse to see all patients. Maybe they’ll put me in jail.”

Someone then asked former President Harry Truman what he thought about the New Jersey doctors’ revolt. Replied Truman: “I think they ought to be hit over the head with a club.”

Read the rest of this entry »