May 2012

Barack Obama says he would keep in place the 47-year old Cuban trade embargo if elected President. CNN says Obama views the trade restrictions as “leverage to push for democratic change on the island.”

Yes, those sanctions have been so effective. Just look at how much freer Cuba has become since the embargo began. (Pardon the sarcasm.)

What can you say about a health care system that treats animals more quickly than humans?  Reports Macleans:

Dr. Danny Joffe is only half joking when he says that if he’d fallen asleep on the last day of vet school in Saskatoon and woken up some two decades later in his current workplace, he would not have believed it was an animal hospital. Joffe is one of 11 specialists at the C.A.R.E. Centre, a 28,000-sq.-foot palace of veterinary medicine built two years ago in Calgary by a consortium that owns 23 vet clinics and animal hospitals across British Columbia and Alberta. It has four operating theatres, a $100,000 CT machine, two ultrasound machines, a digital X-ray unit, an endoscopy centre, a lab and 16 examination rooms. Its intensive care unit boasts 20 cages and eight dog runs, staffed 24/7. “It’s just like an emergency centre at a tertiary care human hospital,” Joffe says.

There is almost no pet illness that can’t be treated here. For eye problems, C.A.R.E. provides ophthalmologists who perform cataract surgery. Orthopaedic surgeons do hip replacements or arthroscopy — minimally invasive surgery on joints. To treat cancer, a surprisingly common disease in dogs and cats, says Joffe, “Our oncologist can offer intricate chemotherapy protocols and our surgeons can do very extreme and elaborate surgeries, including mass removals, amputations and bone transplants from cadaver dogs.” As for MRIs, C.A.R.E. has a standing two appointments a week booked at a private human facility in the city. “For you or I it might be a several-month process,” says Joffe of getting an MRI. “We get it done in a week or less.”

The Washington Examiner has an editorial today titled “Environmentalism is not about the Environment.”  Indeed.  The title says it all.  When most Americans say they are environmentalists, they express the simple desire for clean air, clean water, and an appreciation for wildlife.  But today’s environmental movement is much more focused on expanding government controls and bureaucracy than anything else.  Much of what they advocate unnecessary and needlessly expensive.  The impact on freedom and the economy is far greater than most people realize.  If you doubt that, check out CEI’s research here and here on the topic.  We have also shown that markets are better than the government in providing environmental amenities.  If environmentalists are serious about protecting the environment, they’d begin to advocate free-market environmentalism rather than more government and bureaucracy.

The Washington Examiner has an interesting editorial today called “Environmentalism Isn’t About the Environment.”  It describes how environmental measures expand and metastasize government power in ways that have little to do with protecting the environment.  It points to a wetlands bill pending in Congress that would define every “prairie pothole,” ”sandflat,” or ”isolated basin” in America as a federally-regulated wetland that that cannot be developed or used without approval from federal bureaucrats under the Clean Water Act.

Very often, environmental measures backfire, harming the environment and causing tragedy, as CEI’s Iain Murray explains in detail in his best-seller, “The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About–Because They Helped Cause Them.”  

Even when environmentalists recognize rather than ignore the perverse consequences of government meddling in the name of the environment, it’s often too late to do anything about them.  Environmental groups now recognize that ethanol subsidies are causing devastating harm to the environment, and that past support for such subsidies by politicians aligned with environment groups, like Al Gore, was a huge mistake.  But those subsidies are now so-well entrenched, thanks to a legion of lobbyists, that they continue, despite mounting evidence that they are driving up food prices and thus contributing to worldwide hunger, starvation, riots, and political unrest, and rising criticism from poor countries.

In the Washington Examiner, Daniel Ballon and Lawrence McQuillan criticize a bill pending in Congress that would lead to credit card companies reducing their rebates to credit card holders.  It would restrict the fees the companies can contractually charge retailers to process payments from their cardholders, leaving them with less margin to pass on to consumers.  Right now, I receive up to 5 percent in rebates from my credit cards for the purchases I make, but if this bill passes, those rebates will surely fall, costing me more for gas and groceries.  Ballon and McQuillan point out that if the bill passes, it “will result in fewer cards, higher annual fees, rising interest rates and the end of rewards programs.”  CEI’s Ryan Radia discussed this bill earlier.

The federal government massively subsidizes corn-based ethanol production, even though it consumes as much energy as it generates, thus doing nothing to cut greenhouse gas emissions.  Yet the federal government imposes a tariff on imported ethanol that prevents costly ethanol mandates from being satisfied by less wasteful forms of ethanol production overseas.  In today’s Washington Post, Paul O’Connell criticizes the “U.S. tariff of 54 cents a gallon” that keeps imported sugar ethanol, which has a better “energy savings ratio” than corn ethanol, out of the U.S.   Environmental advocates like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have long made the same point, noting that ”corn ethanol does not yield more energy than it takes to produce, transport and use it,” unlike ethanol from some other sources, and that turning an essential food product like corn into fuel “will cause in increase in global food prices and lead to starvation deaths worldwide.”  Indeed, ethanol subsidies have already caused hunger, starvation, riots, and political unrest around the world, as well as considerable damage to the environment, such as soil erosion and deforestation.