[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmzVgg0tpmo 285 234]
January 2012
The auto bailouts keep expanding. Billions more are going to be spent on wealthy auto-dealers, cash-for-clunkers, politically-correct cars few people will buy, and excessive benefits for autoworkers who are richer than the average American.
The Administration’s cash-for-clunkers program has already run out of money, burning through the $1 billion it was supposed to cost. The program rewards people who bought ancient gas-guzzlers, giving them, and not more environmentally-responsible people, federal tax credits for trading them in to buy new cars. The new cars purchased can be almost as gas-guzzling as the ones being traded in, getting as little as 2 miles a gallon more than their old gas-guzzler. The new purchases are supposed to boost the Detroit automakers that the Administration recently bailed out at a cost of $70 billion.
Although the money has run out, the Obama Administration says that it will keep running this wasteful program anyway, at taxpayers’ expense. During the Bush Administration, lawmakers of both parties said the government cannot spend money unless it has been legislatively appropriated, and that such limits are the “tap root of Anglo-American liberty.” But now, with a Democrat in the White House, liberal Congressional leaders are happy to see Obama spending money he doesn’t have, so that the cash-for-clunkers program can continue until Congress gets around to passing a bill that will authorize more spending.
House Democrats hope to vote today on a measure to authorize $2 billion more in spending on the program. But Senate approval isn’t expected soon. So there’s talk of using federal “stimulus money” to pay for cash-for-clunkers. (The $800 billion stimulus package is already full of welfare and waste. It is expected to cut the size of the economy “in the long run.” Although it was supposed to give the economy a short-run “jolt”, it actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and increased unemployment. It also ended welfare reform.)
Taxpayers and businesses are expected to pay billions as a result of the Obama Administration’s decision to make a federal pension-insurer take over the massive pension liabilities of an auto-parts maker once owned by General Motors, so that General Motors, which was responsible for them, will have more money left over to maintain the extraordinarily generous pension benefits of the United Auto Workers, whose pay is much higher than that of the average American.
Meanwhile, in a move expected to cost General Motors around $2.5 billion annually, “the House has passed a bill reversing GM’s decision to shutter 2,000 auto dealers. Taking advantage of bankruptcy protection, GM undertook the cost-saving measure because state franchise laws had crippled its ability to reduce its bloated, 7,000-dealer network. By contrast, Toyota — with the same market share as GM — has fewer than 1,500 dealers.”
Henry Payne lists some of the many ways that the Detroit automakers have been mismanaged by the federal government “in just the last 90 days” of the bailouts: “At the request of the UAW, the President’s Auto Task Force forced GM to build its new “small-B segment” compact car in the United States instead of in the Far East. This despite the fact that not one manufacturer — not even the Asian companies — builds a small-B in the U.S., due to lack of market demand and high labor costs. GM likely would not build a small-B at all (since companies just emerging from bankruptcy usually try to build profitable products) were it not for the president’s personal distaste for GM’s lineup of ‘bigger, faster’ cars. To correct this, Obama has mandated the cars Detroit automakers “still refuse to make” — that is, a fleet of vehicles that average 35 mpg by 2016. After a one-on-one meeting with Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), GM chief executive Fritz Henderson will delay the closing of a parts-distribution center in Norton, Mass.”
Payne also notes that the cash-for-clunkers program harms the economy by containing provisions that make “used-car and parts businesses suffer.”
The auto bailouts were funded primarily through money contained in the $700 billion bank bailout law passed last year. Diverting money from the bank bailout to auto bailouts was illegal or unconstitutional, agree many commentators, like the Heritage Foundation, Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and liberal journalist Andrew Sullivan. The bailouts ripped off taxpayers, pension funds for public employees, banks, and non-union retirees, in order to enrich the United Auto Workers Union, whose excessive pay helped bankrupt the Detroit automakers. But the courts have avoided dealing with those serious legal issues by claiming (erroneously in my opinion) that the bailout’s critics were not the correct people to bring legal challenges.
The stimulus package may not be stimulating the economy, but maybe it’s not the economy it was designed to stimulate: “The National Endowment for the Arts may be spending some of the money it received from the [stimulus] to fund nude simulated-sex dances, Saturday night ‘pervert’ revues and the airing of pornographic horror films at art houses in San Francisco.” Meanwhile, unemployed blue-collar workers in construction and transportation were largely excluded from the stimulus package because helping them was viewed as politically-incorrect.
Here’s a letter I sent recently to the Financial Times:
July 29, 2009
Editor, Financial Times
1330 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10019
From Mr Ryan Young.
Sir, Mario Monti’s call for harmonized and reinvigorated EU and U.S. antitrust policies (“Watchdogs of the world, unite!”, July 29) is misguided. Consumers are best served when competing firms concentrate on bettering themselves, rather than hobbling their rivals. Antitrust policy discourages the former, and encourages the latter. Why bother with the ongoing challenge of competing in the marketplace if one can merely go to Brussels or Washington?
The great irony of antitrust policy is that it reduces market competition whenever and wherever it is applied. Such is its very nature.
Ryan Young
Fellow in Regulatory Studies,
Competitive Enterprise Institute,
Washington, DC, US
CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy, Myron Ebell, has been ranked number three on Business Insider’s “The 10 Most Respected Global Warming Skeptics.” See an excerpt below.
Myron Ebell may be enemy #1 to the current climate change community. Ebell works for the free-market thinktank Competitive Enterprise Institute and, according to his own bio, has been called a climate “criminal” and a leading pusher of misleading ideas.
It is illegal for a portable metal ladder to have steps narrower than 12 inches.
Not sure why that merits a regulation; ladders so narrow aren’t particularly useful. Doubt they’d sell very well.
The irreverent and hilarious comedians Penn and Teller have produced another episode of their television show Bullshit about organic foods. Friends of CEI, Ron Bailey and Alex Avery, make appearances. The episode, titled “The Organicsons” blows the proverbial whistle on the alleged “local-ness” or organics:
“Some people eat organic foods because they want to support small local farms – but eating organically might mean you’re getting your food from giant corporations or China.”
Penn and Teller note that they have nothing against giant corporations – indeed, they have some good things to say about big businesses. But they do skewer yet another free range sacred cow, and that always makes their show fun to watch.
The episode first aired last night on the Showtime pay-cable network, but you can watch the trailer and get scheduling information here.
Is global warming making hurricanes more destructive? Did global warming contribute to the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina? Would Kyoto-style energy rationing help avert future weather-related catastrophes?
Well, just ask Al Gore! In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claims there’s a “strong new emerging consensus” that global warming is increasing the duration and intensity of hurricanes (AIT, p. 81), he depicts New Orleans as a global warming victim (pp. 94-95), and the threat of increasingly powerful storms is a major part of the alleged “climate crisis” that Gore proposes to solve by restricting our access to carbon-based energy. [click to continue…]
One of the most popular logical fallacies I’ve encountered has been a heavy reliance on what I’ve come to call argumentum ad governmentum.
Relying on government to fight our ideological battles for us is a shaky means of convincing others to see things our way by arguing for majority standards and controls over minority beliefs. At its worst, argumentum ad governmentum is a way of getting others to act and think the way we would like them to by using a collective force of will to persuade local and central governments to exercise force against others on our behalf.
Unfortunately, utilizing government and legislative force as a value-laden battering ram will never win over hearts and minds to a cause, no matter how noble or praiseworthy we may think it is. Valid arguments are rational, logical, coherent, and do not rely on the use of force to prove a point. When you have won an opponent over by the weight of your argument and the prowess of your deductive reasoning, you have made an ally. When you merely force them to unwillingly bend to a system that claims their best interest in your name, you have made a slave.
As the philosophy of liberty says, this technique is sophomoric, and lacks any kind of deep thinking, rhetorical ingenuity, or honest discussion. From the video: “Using governmental force to impose a vision on others is intellectual sloth and usually results in unintended, perverse consequences…achieving a free society requires courage to think, to talk, and to act.”
In Michelle Minton’s recent post recapping the events of last weekend’s D.C. Tea Party, she cites a conversation with a protester who was reluctant to allow limits on government interference in the lives of those who may not hold the same set of principles that she did. Michelle writes:
“Then I tried explaining that if she truly wanted government to stay out of her life and protect her liberty, she would have to extend the same principle to her neighbors—even if she didn’t like what they chose to do with their own lives. She wasn’t listening to me anymore though, she wasn’t interested.”
The problem is, of course, that we have to be interested when government takes liberties with others’ inviolable rights, even if we don’t agree with their values. H. L. Mencken, who was a journalist, editor, and critic of 20th century American life, once remarked that “The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
Judging from some of the signage regarding several of the Obama administration’s policies I saw at the Tea Party last Saturday, conservatives are learning rather painfully that argumentum ad governmentum is a two-way street: If one side of the social debate capitulates and stoops to asking the government to initiate force on their behalf, you’d better believe the other side will follow suit when they have the opportunity to do so.
The long-awaited collaboration of Microsoft and Yahoo on search has the tech business community abuzz. CEI analysts Wayne Crews and Ryan Young made their original statements here. Media outlets immediately took note, as seen in this Investor’s Business Daily story (posted, fitting enough, at Yahoo Finance) from yesterday:
Ryan Young, a fellow of regulatory studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says the deal should be approved.
“It will make Google stay on its toes,” he said. “Bing and Yahoo should improve from the proposed partnership. This is how a competitive, contestable market works.”
We also got some love from Erika Morphy at E-commerce Times in her story today:
The Obama Administration is taking a harder line on antitrust issues than in the past, which could prove to be a wild card, noted Ryan Radia, information policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, although he’s also convinced that the deal will go through.
“Antitrust administrators are looking to make headlines now,” Radia told the E-Commerce Times, pointing to investigations he dubbed “dubious,” such as the probe into the Google book deal or the inquiry into Silicon Valley employment practices.
“The latest line of attack is that lack of regulation and enforcement is behind the recession,” he said.
[...]
Microsoft has been battling EU antitrust charges for years, CEI’s Radia noted, with the most recent involving accusations that it violated EU antitrust law by bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system.
“It is going to be more of a problem over there than with U.S. regulatory authorities,” he predicted.
National Journal’s Tech Daily Dose also noted our advice to regulators to keep their snouts out of the deal:
“Our subcommittee is concerned about competition issues in these markets because of the potentially far-reaching consequences for consumers and advertisers, and our concern about dampening the innovation we have come to expect from a competitive high-tech industry,” [Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman Herb] Kohl said in a statement. Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee ranking member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said he did not see “any immediate yellow flags” from an antitrust front. Competitive Enterprise Institute argued regulators “can best serve consumer interests by leaving well enough alone.”
Who knows where we’ll pop up next!
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