"All of the Above" Obamas done oil production no favors

The Tesoro Refinery at Anacortes, Washington. By Walter Siegmund, license C.C. a.s.a 3.0 unported

Before I continue, I must admit a certain amount of shock in having to write this. Then again, perhaps I shouldn't be shocked. Democrat presidents have a long and proud history of taking credit for things they didn't actually do: Clinton gets credit for balancing the budget, something Newt Gingrich achieved and earned himself "resignation in disgrace" at the hands of the House Ethics committee for doing, perhaps why it hasn't been done since. FDR gets credit for New Deal projects that had already begun under Hoover - the most famous of which is the Hoover Dam. LBJ gets credit for desegregation, which was really an achievement of Eisenhower that continued through the time of LBJ. All throughout this century, Democrats have earned credit for doing things they didn't actually do (to be fair, this also includes bailing out "Government Motors" and the big banks.) I really shouldn't have been shocked to see it happen once more, this time with Obama and oil.

But there's a difference: all those other things that Democrats earned credit for, they either only slightly opposed, or even slightly supported. Never has something been so vehemently and destructively harmed directly by a president, not even through Congress with him only behind it, only to end up to his credit when it works against his plans. "Obamacare" was far more the product of Reid and Pelosi then Obama directly, but Obamas conduct with the Bureau of Land Management, and the abusive EPA that Obama himself presides over, comes from him directly. No one but the Chief Executive of the United States Federal Government is responsible for them before the American people, or should be.

Noting that, lets look over the track record of precisely what he's actually done, pertaining to oil production, as Chief Executive:

• Cancelled oil leases in the largest shale deposit of them all, at the excuse of "we don't understand how much water and energy it would use." The result of such policies is that oil and gas production on BLM lands is down 40%. In most western states, BLM lands make up 30-90% of the states land area.
  
• Purposefully delayed the decision on the Keystone Pipeline for years without any attempt to gather information to make a decision, or any clear rationale for why a decision could not be made in a reasonable time frame.
  
• Issued a moratorium on offshore drilling without any real effort to fix the underlying problems (namely, the lack of proper response networks on the Gulf.)
• Since the moratorium ended, Obama's Department of the Interior has only permitted one offshore lease sale. In other words, the moratorium never truly ended - Obama just made it look like it is over.

In North Dakota, 1574 miles from the Oval Office, oil production doubled from 2008 to 2010. North Dakota is one of only three states west of the Mississippi river to not have any BLM lands, the other two being Texas and Washington state. The section of the same oil shale formation in Montana has not been similarly developed, and the BLM owns that land.

Although North Dakotas unemployment is a boom time 3.3%, Montana remains average for the country, despite containing the western third of the Bakken formation. In Texas, the other non-BLM oil containing state, a much smaller shale deposit has been massively developed, helping to stabilize unemployment there to a reasonable five. Lastly, the largest of all the shale deposits, equivalent to seven Middle Easts, contained in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and Nevada (all heavily BLM states, with around 40-90% of land area owned by Federal Government as BLM lands) is totally off limits, and even permits issued under Bush are cancelled and replaced with "research leases."

North Dakota, with no BLM lands, would never be directly affected by the Presidents pen, although the pipeline that leads from North Dakota to the Gulf refineries would, and has. In states near North Dakota, especially Wyoming, Iowa, South Dakota and Missouri, manufacturing jobs making the equipment for oil fracking are reasonably abundant, but the amount of equipment coming out of the facilities cannot keep up with demand. Investment to build new fracking equipment factories has been scarce, since with a Federal Government that seems out to get them, and Obama testing the limits of how much a President can do to hurt it, the future of such technology seems uncertain. Just what will Mister President manage to do next? The reality is that the growth of Americas oil industry in spite of Obama proves nothing except that the Presidents powers are, thankfully, limited.

Yet Mr. President has the supreme audacity to claim credit for the doubling in oil in a state he has less authority in, while reducing production by 40% on what he does have authority over and harming the infrastructure. Not directly of course, that would be too obvious, instead he quotes the oil output nationwide, where the progress in North Dakota and Texas outpaces everything else. Than he tells us he wants "all of the above."

A quick note to readers: If you want to know my sources, click on the gray text.

Pipelines and Spoiled Brats

Obamas decision to reject the Keystone Pipeline was very disturbing in two ways: first, because it was precisely what was not needed right now here in America, and second because it shows our President to have no understanding what he is doing or why. At a time when the number one issue should be jobs, and the Keystone would not only provide these jobs in terms of construction and further development of the new oil shale fields that are Americas fastest growing industry right now, but also provide demand for manufactured goods like steel and foundry items from the suffering East and Midwest, our President, already facing a potentially difficult reelection, has decided that he will give up the last chance he has to make his reelection a cakewalk. If the economy booms, then none of the assorted clowns currently running for GOP candidate will even have a chance against him, but alas for Obama, this is one boat he has missed. His reason for this dismal choice for both himself and his country: the claims of some environmentalists.

Now the ball is in Canadas court. An alternate pipeline could run from the same locations in Alberta westward to a small, undeveloped port on an inlet 70 miles long called Kitimat in British Columbia. Not only would it carry oil to China, but it would also carry oil along the well developed Inside Passage seaway to the Puget Sound for refining at Anacortes, WA and the American market. But here, again, the Greens are not satisfied.

So why, precisely, are they not satisfied? The biggest reason they are not satisfied, though it is not the only reason, is because it will "delay the development of non-carbon energy sources." Now for environmentalists in America today, this means wind and solar. Wind is extremely unreliable, and solar is astronomically expensive. What's more, the fact that solar can operate off-grid gives it a natural niche market outside of the regular electric grid, so if it can't be successful with substantial government subsidies plus a niche market, then you know it really stinks. Wind, of course, is unreliable, and a smart grid that would make it more reliable by sharing power from different geographic points would also be so susceptible to electromagnetic storms from space as to naturally be completely destroyed and take months to rebuild every 8-10 years. The alternative proposition of battery farms would be outlandishly expensive and require constant maintenance. How precisely something that requires constant input of material resources can be "sustainable" is quite beyond me.

Another reason they're not satisfied is because extracting tar sands is energy intensive. This charge is true. However, extracting oil from shale by current methods is not energy intensive, and as shale drilling becomes more and more common (tar sands is slightly older technology) the less expensive energy cost will be a deciding factor in terms of switching away from tar sands production to shale production. Right now, the massive expansion of shale drilling, especially in North Dakota where unemployment is only 3.5% (and lower near Williston) as a result, has driven up the cost of purchasing equipment for shale drilling. This is a good thing in the long run as it means more capacity will be available in the future, but in the short run means that shale is unlikely to replace any existing production until this bottleneck is widened. In the long run, this capital cost will be gone and shale will replace tar sands, especially since just the (much smaller far southern tail) of the Bakken Formation in North Dakota contains at least 3.65 billion barrels of oil, and I suspect that this analysis by the USGS was understated partially by pressure from the Obama administration and paritally by laziness, or as the report puts it: "They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates." The first rule of engineering is if you want to be lazy, always understate your result so that nobody cares.

Then there is simply the old environmentalist hatred of economic development. This is somewhat connected to the very last concern of environmentalists to be listed here, but this really is where I begin doubting the character of environmentalists as people. The reality is that, far from being some Garden of Eden, the third world is a place where illegal loggers destroy rainforests, poachers with machine guns kill off endangered species, massive sprawling cities come up over night and coal plants put mercury and radiation in to the air by the bucket full. It is also a place where in Monrovia, Liberia, the people poop on the beach, allowing untreated human sewage to go straight in to an aquifer while also stinking up the air and despoiling a beautiful 5-mile strip of pristine sand. The problem with environmentalists is they expect the full regulatory ability of a first-world country without the society or, frankly, resources, that made it possible. In short, they are spoiled brats.

And that brings us to our final environmentalist objection: locality. I shall begin by discussing the Canadian pipeline, as it is simply their most egregious abuse. All throughout the internet and journalism, we find various environmentalists and journalists, who know nothing about how development takes place, put up pictures of this pristine, perfect wilderness of tremendous natural beauty (that is, for the record, almost completely contained in an archipelago of Canadian National Parks and Provincial Parks) that supposedly will be completely destroyed by the pipeline and economic development.

To put it bluntly, no it won't. People only think it will because they don't live there. If they did live there, they would know that mountains rise straight out of the sea on both sides of the Kitimat Inlet, making any kind of construction enormously expensive, and that Kitimat is at the eastern end of that inlet and the beginning of a long, and nowhere near as pristine or beautiful, flat typical river valley. It also is located SEVENTY MILES EAST of where most of the wilderness is. In fact, this is why the pipeline is sent so far north instead of simply going to Vancouver - to avoid those eternally annoying in the sense that only an engineer can understand mountains. They would also know that if there's one thing the coastline of British Columbia has an overabundance of, its beautiful, pristine, undeveloped coastline. There are no roads on the coast of British Columbia and Alaska running North-South from the Vancouver Suburbs to Anchorage, Alaska, a distance of 800 miles, the reason why the most common accidental death in Alaska is plane crashes. It also won't because these areas are already protected as parks, both at the provincial and Canadian federal level, and there are far too many flatter, more valuable, riverside pieces of real estate nearer to Kitimat and the pipeline for lobbying by the businesses to even be profitable to them. It is also true that with a tidal range near 20 feet, any oil spill would not last very long but be swept out to sea pretty fast. But environmentalists think their asinine, immature, irrational fears justify the shutting down of an entire part of the world in economic activity, when everything that even can be done to protect that wilderness already is.

The original locality makes somewhat more sense, but only somewhat, to protest. That of course is the lands through the plains that the original Keystone XL would've run through. Of course, unlike BC, there are plenty of roads in the Plains, and even more in Texas. Lots of 2-lane or 4-lane roads going passed corn fields, unused infrastructure, tiny cities and all. This is true. It is also true that the Great Plains aquifer is pretty big, though one could counter that being so big its really not that easy to substantially impurify, and what oil would do is certainly no worse then what farmlands already do with fertilizers and pesticides. Oil also has the advantage over farmlands with their pesticides and fertilizers that it is not generally to the advantage of oil companies for their pipelines to be constantly leaking. It has yet another advantage that increasing land prices may drive the farms with their pesticides and fertilizers out of business. Further, there is the little matter of refining at Wood River, Illinois and Steele, Nebraska, right over the aquifer and the Mississippi River, where oil leaks and all manner of chemical spills are much more likely to happen then at the pipeline, and where the final expansion to Houston and Port Arthur could've eventually replaced those refineries by economies of scale, in the middle of a swamp where bacteria and a chemical-recycling ecosystem already can handle most water purity issues.

Yet even here, the same picture of the environmentalist as a spoiled brat emerges - unshaking, unwilling to compromise, loud, sort of like a toddler. Instead of seeing that some development, even if not constrained by the great mountains of the Kitimat Inlet, is neccesary to finance and safeguard environmental protection, they would rather shout and scream and yell and let everything go to some third world country where no chance exists for proper controls or procedures to prevent what they want to prevent. The result is that for every ton of smog they prevent in Southern California, two tons come across the pacific blown by winds from China, and the prairie starves, and no one even really pays close attention to what they are saying or any way of making a reasonable solution to the problem. There answer is to criticize China, a country doing its best to get out of poverty, who has no special interest in listening to much of anyone who lives on this side of the Pacific. The result also is that eventually, as people become poorer and poorer, the toddler who cried wolf may really get eaten after all.

We'll all be sad that day, just like any parent would be, but it doesn't change the fact that it happened, and that the child is gone forever and not coming back. When you yourself feed on irrationality, don't be too surprised if you eventually get fed to it. Environmentalists with no respect for reason will not be given reasonable attention, and this will be a collective judgement, not an individual one, applied to all environmentalists everywhere, whether they were part of the problem or not. They will not be heard, nor will anyone else about our very real environmental problems.

Rivers & Navigation

The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Public domain work of Army Corps of Engineers.

Very early in Americas history, before railroads and airplanes and highways successively made America more reachable, there were only two alternatives for transit: the covered wagon/horse and the ship. Even in the 1600's, shipping was surprisingly well-developed at sea, and a trip across the Atlantic often took far less time then a similarly distanced trip across land, while the ship itself could carry far more cargo far more affordably then a similar number of covered wagons. The result was that coastal areas with ports became highly developed centers of wealth, while Appalachia and those areas away from ports became the distinctive "redneck" culture of charming economic ne'er-do-wells we all know and love.

In between theses two extremes were the lands along improvable seaways, and these would prove critical to the further development of America away from the East Coast. The most famous of these is the Erie Canal, built in 1825, from Albany to Buffalo through New York State. Combined with the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal, built 10 years later, linking the Chicago River to Lake Michigan, you had for the first time a true continuous seaway from New York City to the Mississippi River and the vast new lands beyond. The immediate result was a massive outflow of westward settlers, filling out the areas we now popularly know as the Midwest, and creating a market for mail-order goods that would be essential for the further development of the West. In addition, the vast cattle and grain lands of the West supplied the Chicago Stockyards, Chicagos first great manufacturing industry. Lastly and still importantly, the economy of all the great centers of upstate New York was built by cargo passing through the Erie canal.

In more recent years, the Chicago Canal and the Erie canal have both become largely irrelevant due to the increasing draft of freighters, but before they did, the intense increase in interest and investment in Great Lakes Shipping built the iron boat fleets. The iron boats now criss cross all 5 Great Lakes and the rivers that feed in to them carrying Iron Ore from Ontario, Minnesota, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to steel mills in Pennsylvania (through Erie, PA) and Indiana (through the Port of Gary). Stepping in to their place, the brand new Saint Lawrence seaway, easily deep enough for all but the biggest ocean-going freighters, has replaced the Erie Canal running from Lake Ontario to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence along the Saint Lawrence River, and a new steel mill has opened up in Montreal to harness the iron fleets, while grain boats now dock at Duluth, Minnesota and Lake Winnebago (connected through the Winnebago river) to use the Saint Lawrence Seaway to reach Europe. Unfortunately, the Chicago canal has not been replaced, and the Chicago river is too shallow for a canal improvement to be sensible, so it is primarily used by local barges, often carrying iron ore from Tennessee and Alabama to Gary.

In the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, land still largely undeveloped except for the least of uses, even less then agriculture, the Osage river was once targeted for improvement. Many attempts were made to allow ships from the Missouri to access the resource-rich and mountainous regions of the center of the state. The constant turns and rapids of the Osage made it difficult, and finally, the building of a dam at what is now the Lake of the Ozarks without locks ruined the dream of Ozarkian navigation forever. A few wealthy people and vacation homes exist on the Lake of the Ozarks, and very little significant economic activity.

A similar but somehow more lucrative Upper Missouri received major improvements throughout the 1800's and 1900's. Originally ending at Kansas City, where it meets up with the Kansas River, the navigable stretch of the Missouri was extended first to Omaha, and finally to Sioux Falls, Iowa. The region is now a hive of industry and transportation, and used to be even more so. Even with competition from the railroads, the barges were still more useful for many needs, and remain so to this day.

Yet another story of gradually expanding navigation is the Columbia. The navigation head on the Columbia was Portland, Oregon, and indeed for this it was named, from the late 1700's until the late 1870's, where thereafter an intense rapid prevented most further transportation. It was only one unnavigable site, however, and otherwise the river remained well navigable to what is now the Tri-Cities of Washington where the Columbia meets the Snake, and so even in the relatively undeveloped West it made sense to add a couple locks bypassing it. Shortly thereafter, a railroad, one of the oldest in the state, was built from Wallula to Walla Walla, Washingtons' oldest settlement, carrying fresh farm goods and resoures to port to be loaded on to ships and taken downstream, and in some cases even continue north to Alaska where they were needed absolutely and supported the gold rush. Ice also was transported, due to the divergent weather patterns of Eastern Washington (which freezes readily) and Western Washington (which stays fairly warm all year) on opposite sides of the rapids. Finally, in the 1930's, a couple hydroelectric dams were built on the Snake River, and it was realized that with one additional dam navigation could continue to Lewiston, ID; Lewiston, Idaho today is a center of the paper industry due to its location as a transportation center, in the desert halfway between two great timberlands.

Just because a river was unnavigable, however, did not mean it could not be useful for transit. Wagons too benefited form the relatively flat land and easy trails and abundant fresh water and game that even a tiny river provided. Five different wagon trails, to points in Oregon, California, Montana and Utah, all continued along the Platt River through Nebraska, a river known for being too shallow and unsteady even for canoe traffic. Likewise, sometimes navigability is in the eyes of the beholder - many of the rivers Lewis and Clark used are, even today, considered largely unnavigable, while many rivers in Texas, a state usually regarded as being all but without navigable rivers, such as the Trinity were once frequented by steamboats. Starting in the 1830's, short navigable sections of the Chattahoochee, mostly unnavigable that far north, near Atlanta were used for wagon ferries - the ferries have long since been replaced with roads that still bear their names, and they are still many of the most major roads in the city.

Fast flowing rivers, of the sort that are seldom navigable, are also often power sources for industry, and any river navigable or not can be used as a source of water and silt. Silt makes good farmland, and carries downstream minerals like the Gold that was famously panned along the various rivers of Alaska, and also the Diamonds found on the banks of the Ganges that introduced Europe to the Diamond in the 1700's. As a meeting place of navigable deep and broad and unnavigable fast moving rivers, fall line cities such as Hartford, CT, Augusta, GA, Pittsburgh, PA, Trenton, NJ, Baltimore, MD, and the great Industrial center of the confederacy Richmond, VA, where rivers come off a major incline, have been a valuable location for industry. Sometimes though, you can eat your cake and have it too: modern hydroelectric dams provide the same electric power that the old watermill provided mechanically, and can have a concurrent lock for shipping, such as the various dams on the Snake River that bring shipping in to Idaho, often times even making an unnavigable reach navigable.

Georgia has gone the opposite of the Missouri and the Columbia - once home to three navigable rivers, two of them, the Oconee and the Savannah, have been largely cannibalized for irrigation and drinking water. Former ports such as Augusta are no longer reachable to even the most basic of traffic. A movement now exists to do similarly to Georgias last remaining navigable river, the Chatahoochee, which is navigable from Columbus, Georgia to the Gulf of Mexico, despite many dams and improvements made over the years to make river navigation possible, all in the interest of Atlantas (which is not served by the river) literal thirst and growth. In addition, environmentalists in California are trying to bust CA's hydroelectric dams - those don't support shipping, but they do support electric power.

There are also the stories of navigation never completed. A canal project from Washington DC to Ohio was going to create a westward route for shipping traffic from the Chesapeake bay, but was canceled largely because of the availability of the railroad and the Great Lakes system providing too little remaining demand. The Nicaragua Canal was a viable alternative to the Panama Canal that could have potentially served far more local traffic. The latter may still be built simply because the Panama Canal is beyond capacity, the former however will largely not be built because the Potomac River, like the Chicago, is too shallow for modern oceangoing craft.

In general, though, riverine navigation is no longer a priority for modern government infrastructure, and Georgia is frankly a sign of things to come, a world that has largely lost faith in progress and edges more and more to mediocrity and an assumption of good results nearly every day. Less and less are people interested in expanding outside of existing centers and ways, preferring instead to blindly favor what already exists. This combined with radical environmentalism seems to indicate that America, and most of the worlds, days of canal building and extending the great seas to where they are needed are over. It is no wonder that Americas middle class and business base does not grow, as America itself does not grow, favoring only what already exists to the obvious benefit of the current wealthy.

Current Marine Highways of the United States, 2010, public domain work of US-DOT

The Great Confusion - a critique of "socially-conscious" enterprise

Wind farm in the Techape Mountains, CA, by Stan Shebs, license c.c. a.s.a 3.0 unported

Whether its renewable energy, microlending in Asia, or low-income housing, we end up hearing "socially-conscious" or "social entrepreneurship" frequently enough to nauseate. As I look through the news, at "socially minded entrepreneurs," I cannot help but notice just how insignificant they really are. For all of their "changing the world," only microlending appears to have changed much, and microlending was not started as "social entrepreneurship" but rather adopted by the figurative guild of "social entrepreneurs" later.

One of the great dangers of social entrepreneurship is the tendency to treat profit as a hurdle instead of an objective. Whereas standard business aims to sell enough at a good enough price to justify its existence, expand and attract others to compete, social entrepreneurship does just barely well enough to exist. Worse, sometimes it doesn't even do that, but rather siphons off funds from the taxpayers through government edict that could be put to better use. In the end, this destabilizes governments and entire economies, as America is only now finding out.

Sometimes people claim that social entrepreneurship can fulfill aspects of true progress that standard entrepreneurship could not. This, simply, is a lie. Take green energy for example. The claim is that we cannot create carbon-free/pollution-free energy without some kind of government investment, but the reality is that we already have such things. We have at least two extremely profitable carbon-free power sources: hydroelectric and uranium-based fission nuclear. We also have a moderately profitable one called Geothermal. Detractors will argue that uranium creates nuclear waste, hydroelectric floods land and threatens biodiveristy, and geothermal takes land in natural areas like the Valles Caldera. And yet they advance wind, which takes up far more land in natural areas then geothermal ever would, and hydro would in some cases, and harms biodiversity by destroying migratory birds, and solar, which, like all semiconductors, requires dangerous chemicals and chemical wastes in the production of solar panels, or else, in the form of solar-thermal, takes up vast land and destroys entire habitats like wind, while taking astronomical costs to build and in the end not being sustainable for the simple and basic reason that nothing built can last forever.

Another claim is bringing third-world countries out of poverty, but alas, every first-world nation was once a third-world nation, and every one of them was brought out of this condition by the expansion of private business. And today, in India, Brazil, Russia, Rwanda, Uganda and China, private business is bringing a few more home. Does this mean there is no role for government or charity? Hardly, this is all collectivist we have not even looked at taking care of individuals yet, but it does mean that your "social entrepreneuers" are wrong about precisely what that role is.

And then there's the matter of precisely what profit is. When most people here the word, they think of some fat guy in a suit who already has too much money (in this day and age, that more accurately describes politicians.) Most business today is done by a combination of ma and pa business and joint stock ventures, depending upon the sector. Indeed, "fat suit guy sole proprietor" has not been the dominant model since the late 1800's.

Joint stock ventures are made up of 1,000's of investors of every social status, both wealthy seeking more wealth and workers seeking a retirement through 401K's, putting money towards a limited liability venture that they are not in control of but still suffer the gains and losses of through stock price and dividend. When you create profit for your joint stock venture, that's a larger 401K for a soon to be old man as well as a larger portfolio for a serious investor (who is not always, but usually is, rich.)

But that's not all profit does! Profit also means that a large enough number of people will contribute a large enough sum to your product to make it more then worthwhile to produce. It also creates new investor groups, both ma and pa and joint stock, to create more production of the desired thing. This virtuous cycle puts out WHAT PEOPLE WANT IN THE GREATEST SENSE, instead of what is desired by a small "ecologically friendly" elite. Indeed, it is far more democratic then democracy, as democracy only considers yes or no and not the degree to which something is desired. Democracy is like a net of thick rope with 4 inch gaps and the free market is like the finest of satins - its holes nearly invisible.

Profit too prevents the waste of resources - if building space, workers and raw materials are demanded by a more profitable enterprise, the price will increase until finally the less profitable either go out of business or rearrange their assets, freeing up the building space, workers and raw materials. As our society decided "getting off of foreign oil" was the highest of all goals, E85 drove up the price of food to cause many of our poor to starve by taking tons of corn and turning it in to small quantities of motor oil. Meanwhile, oil prices continue to rise astronomically, and a few foolish legislators suggested increasing Ethanol content beyond what engines can take without corrosion.

The reality is that profit is a very lofty and socially honorable thing, that very much does empower all of society, and create the best world the given conditions can create for the common man. Treating it as a problem, instead of a solution, will lead to hubris and a small elite dictating things as "the right thing to do" instead of allowing nature and the common man to decide amongst themselves. There is no one so ignorant as one who thinks he knows what's good for his neighbor, and so much of the 20th century has been ruled and ruined by such men.

Full Extent of the Pacific Electric Railway, circa 1920. Public domain work of US Federal Gov't.

What Congress Knew

From the document. Public domain work of the US Congress, "THE SIZE AND FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT AND
ECONOMIC GROWTH", 1998

With all this talk of Keynes, and stimulus, and this supposed "great debate," I wanted to take a moment to look at what Congress actually does know.

"The Size and Functions of Government and Economic Growth" was written by three economists, James Gwartney, Randall Holcombe, and Robert Lawson, all closely tied to Florida State, and presented before the Joint Economic Committee April 1998. Using a great survey of all OECD countries and their trends with regards to time in terms of the size of government and the rate of economic growth, they observed a major decline in the ability of economies to grow quickly as the size of government increased, and a major decline in private reinvestment in the economy.

At the time they also accredited government size with helping prevent major slowdowns and bring stability, though recent economic events put serious doubt on that hypothesis. More though, they also observed that America has not seen any truly great gains in prosperity since the early 60's, with the economy gradually edging down to a mediocre level of growth that can barely keep pace with population and really only improves the well-being of the top 10%. Poverty rates have remained unaltered since 1978.

As part of their introduction, they also propose several mechanisms by which economic growth slows in the face of government: "First, the higher taxes and/or additional borrowing required to finance government expenditures exert a negative effect on the economy. As government takes more and more of the earnings of workers, their incentive to invest, to take risks, and to undertake productivity-enhancing activities, decreases."If people, who aren't business owners, don't purchase cars, how can they go vast distances to work at better jobs that make better use of their time to produce for the economy (and in the end, as a result, are able and willing to pay them more.) If farmers don't purchase tractors, you end up with not enough food.

"Second, as government grows relative to the market sector, diminishing returns will be
confronted." Hoover Dam, good. Solar panels on your roof so you can genertate 3 lightbulbs worth of electricity, not so good.

"Finally, the political process is much less dynamic than the market process." Indeed. Our system was specifically designed by the Founding Fathers to NOT be dynamic. Why? Because something that's dynamic can tear away at your rights and freedoms, whereas something thats not dynamic can at best gnaw at them. A quickly changing society is a society where no one knows precisely where they stand, where people are imprisoned without good cause, and where nothing is sacred. That's why we've set up two houses of congress, a presidency that can block congress and a constitution that limits congress.

But first, they point out that their assessment of the actual size of government expenditures is likely over generous: "If government expenditures were measured in constant purchasing power units or on a per capita basis, the increases in the size of government would be substantially greater than those presented in Exhibit 1." In other words, relative to what the money actually buys, its much higher.

Jim Saxton, chair of the Joint Economics Committee and the one who called for the report, is a blue state Republican from New Jersey. The Northeastern United States have not been characterized by their extreme Republicans, and Jim Saxton was elected from a district of suburban Philadelphia, New Jerseys 3rd, including Cherry Hill, a major "edge city," and Willingboro, one of the original Levittown-style suburbs.

Dr. James Gwartney, Professor of Economics and Policy Studies at Florida State University, "holds the Gus A. Stavros Eminent Scholar Chair at Florida State University, where he directs the Stavros Center for the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Economic Education. He is the coauthor of Economics: Private and Public Choice, (South-Western Press, 2008), a widely used principles of economics text that is now in its 12th edition. He is also the co-author of Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity (St. Martin's Press, 2005), a primer on economics and personal finance designed for the interested lay person."Glancing briefly at Amazon.com reviews for both books, I noticed that even his most ardent detractors seemed to admit he had a good grasp of the economics. It is also worth noting that getting 13 editions of a textbook published (and professors do shop around for textbooks even if students do not) is not easy in a world where textbooks are often the main moneymaker for professors.

Dr. Randall Holcombe has written extremely prolifickingly, with twelve books and 100 articles to his name. "His primary areas of research are public finance and the economic analysis of public policy issues."He still teaches at Florida State University, where he is the "DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics."

Dr. Robert Lawson, at Capital University Columbus, Ohio, was also a student of Florida State before coming to teach at Capital. A quick glance at his Curriculum Vitae reveals a man driven by data and studies of what actually happens in real states and nations, and also an open-minded creative thinker who will more then readily drag comic strips in to the classroom.

All three of these professors work together on a regular basis, and you can often find their names on the authorship of the same texts. Although tied together well, their success has been borne out in publications, empirical evidence, and the simple fact that a moderate Republican from New Jersey would be interested in hearing them. In addition, the sheer wealth of information the draw on to reach their conclusions is a credit to them, as any scientific man must admit.

The Vain Hubris of Sustainability

Whenever anyone talks about sustainability, there are three basic facts that need to be understood:

1 - Nothing you build will last forever.

2 - There's no such thing as something for nothing.

3 - Throughout history, industrial economies have changed from one resource to another, usually without so much as a headline in the newspaper.

Since number three is the fact that is most surprising to many, I will begin with it. 200 years ago, houses and buildings were constructed almost exclusively from wood and brick. In those days, efficient methods for making both were common, but steel took days to manufacture, and had to be made from already well processed pure iron. Both the fuel and time needs were tremendous to conduct two separate chemical processes each taking days. Further, the quantities made were whatever you could fit in a single crucible.

Bessemer discovered a fast process for making steel in 1855, so fast in fact that it only took 10-20 minutes. The result was the first steel buildings and ships. With Steel, the size of structures increased tremendously, and the skyscraper, along with its steel elevator, became not only a possibility but something neccesary to provide commercial space for the fast growing cities. It also allowed for the internal combustion engine, whose fine moving parts cannot be made effectively from other materials, and with it the car and the airplane.

The Bessemer process could remove many impurities from the original iron ore, and together with the Blast Furnace, silion and silicates, manganese and permanganates, carbon, and sulfur could all be effectively removed. The one thing it could not effectively remove, however, was phosphate, so for the process to work, low-phosphate ores had to be used.

Unfortunately the world began running out of low-phosphate ores in the 1950's, so what did the invisible hand "do"? It introduced two new processes. The first was the Basic Oxygen Process, which took slightly longer (30-40 minutes) but could remove phosphate from the molten steel and had tighter control over the chemistry, allowing new alloys such as Boron Steel to be produced for the first time, and Stainless Steel (also known as Chromium Steel) to be produced inexpensively, and the exact carbon content to be dictated to a hundredth of a percent. The cost is a little higher, but you get higher quality with it. The second was the Electric Arc Process, which for inexpensive steel needs would recycle scrap metal effectively. Between these two, quality improved, new resources were used, and the world did not end, while the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur would set a record for the tallest building in the world a few decades later.

This is not the only example. When strikes and labor politics made the price of coal more expensive, Americans switched to heating with oil and natural gas. Before this, Europeans had switched from firewood to coal as the great forests of Europe were gradually axed away during the Middle Ages, but those castles, those great Cathedrals, and all the splendor of medieval art and music was made with fireplaces burning wood, and those were still around when the wood went away, and before then, it was far easier to go outside to axe a tree then to go underground and risk your neck mining for coal.

No power plant or road we build today is going to last 60 years, so why are we thinking in terms of 600? We should only consider what power sources will still be available 60 years from now when building that plant, and the free market has a device for that too, it's called a futures market. Investors buy up resources now to sell them later at a higher prices, creating a clean and smooth and flat distribution of resources when the market is sufficiently large and well informed, and they do try to be both for their own self-interest. And if people really will benefit from more expense now to avoid expense later (e.g. flourescents), they will buy them, but they probably don't, as they are already in debt and one dollar not repaid now will be a dollar repaid with interest later.

Lastly, and addressing number two, whenever something is used, something is lost, and that includes the materials to build solar panels, and the materials used to make the materials to make solar panels, as plastics and long complex molecules are almost always involved. There is always chemistry involved, and always wasteage, and the free market is a far better evaluator of what the true costs of that wastage is then some government bureaucrat whose never had a job outside of bureaucracy, or scientist specifically trained to only see from the perspective of his field. There is more to cost then electricity and fuel - even things like transportation, labor, land, and the space and finances lost from holding inventory are significant. The reality is that sustainability is not sustainable, as nothing is and we will see when the climate changes and the wind no longer blows where it did, or we run out of some chemical required in the manufacture of solar panels, or even great dust and ash from a supervolcano eruption block the sun. Everything must shift with its right and proper season, and this includes all sources of energy. Sustainability is a vain and impossible notion.

Transportation and Time

Public domain, courtesy of Jorge Barrios

At a certain time during the Dark Ages, there were no cities in most of Europe, but just thousands of farms, spread across the clearings and meadows of Europe, and old Roman roads built long ago, crisscrossing between them. At the junctions of these roads, there might be ruins, that would go unnoticed as would whatever tiny, insignificant traffic crossed through them. The ports didn't operate in Europe, even as far away as Italy and Turkey, because of Viking raids, except in a few areas like Ireland, Danegild, and Normandy where the Norse set up there own, and the regions became wealthy as a consequence. In those days, all was done out of the manor house, and trade was very limited. Manors were extremely, bitterly poor, and highly self-sufficient, and noble lords had extreme authority and martial responsibility.

But then technology, bit by bit, began to improve. Castles allowed for the defense of harbors, opening the ports and the seas. Modern quarying developed, and with it a supply of marble. Trade with the Islamic empire brought spices and coffee to the new ports, while increases in population and the size and number of manor houses brought about an ecological disaster, the destruction of Europes forests, and with it the need to travel ever further for lumber and its replacements, clay brick and coal.

At the intersections of roads, you have the fastest route on average to anywhere. While going down the road your travel time to one particular place would decrease, for a few limited industrial enterprises that is indeed good enough, your travel time to all the other places those roads go to will increase so much more. Further, more customers and workers and material will cross through the intersection then anywhere else. Lodges, markets and taverns would set themselves up first, and then manufacturers and stables and warehouses would set up near the market, and with all of these little brick houses would sprout along every alleyway and available road as workers too chose the fastest transportation for their life.

Eventually, highly specialized businesses, utilizing the economic base of the city, would set up as well. These would include law offices, accountants, computers (in that day meaning people who would crunch numbers for you), moneylenders, and craftspeople like blacksmiths serving both sword and plowshare. Church and Government too would notice the city, and the workers and citizens serveable through it, setting up bureaucracy and courthouses, which in the dark ages didn't exist, along with fortresses, great cathedrals, universities and libraries, and comissioning artists and clockmakers to celebrate their authority in great squares and plazas. Criminals too would benefit from the economic base of the city, utilizing its many highways, services and people, as would entertainers.

The reality is that cities are a giant device for the conservation of time, by quickening transportation from one place to another, and the conservation of energy, by decreasing the distance that freight and people must travel to get to its customers and clients. Cities, in the end, are the product of their transportation, and the customers, employers, industry and resources they afford within a reasonable distance. If a city loses this, it has nothing, and is only an overpriced piece of land, but it is because of the ability to save people time, and as a result, allow them to live more, and do more, that people will pay 300 times as much as the same quanity of land in the country to own it. In the words of Ali from Burlesque, when talking about why she left Iowa, "I looked around and realized that I didn't see anyone I wanted to be." You can be more and do more in a city because where you go to do what you want to do is reachable in reasonable time.

Now in the recent past, people would live sixty miles out of the city and commute to wherever it was they worked. When people lived and worked in one place their entire lives, that made sense, but in a world where people change jobs on average every 2 years, it makes sense to be as close to as many employers as possible, and since industrial employers will opt for cheaper land along whatever railroad line leads to their suppliers, while extremely common businesses (e.g. drugstores) will opt for more minor, inexpensive junctions that they have the capacity to serve, not all of them will be in the big city. As we go in to the future, we find the employees act more like businesspeople, and the need for speed (and with it, the city) becomes greater then ever.

Some cities, like Seattle, are still stuck in the past imagining that transportation is just a quality of life issue, something we can tinker around with in social engineering and throw immesaurable costs on to, but across the lake from Seattle, Bellevue, on I-405, the eastern bypass of I-5, and the third city eastward on I-90, has expanded and improved its interstates, with its own money. The result has been a building boom, dozens of new towers, 40 stories tall, going up and new businesses moving in. Meanwhile, Seattle has lost its largest bank, Washington Mutual, to the financial slowdown, and no one seems quite set to replace it. But they still continue to toy with forcing people on to trains that zig zag at 35 mph instead of heading straight where they go. Voters constantly complain about transportation expense, but what they don't realize is that transportation is the heart and soul of their city life, is what allows them the opportunities they have.

Bring in the Creditors!

Photobucket

One of the greatest problems with government worker unions is the lack of a check on power. In private business, unions can never extort too much out of customers, shareholders, and owners because the company must at least break even to continue paying them, but in government, as just happened with the 66% increase in income tax in Illinois, the ability to tax and extort the people allows union power to grow unchecked. That's why Hailing from Georgia is giving the following proposal of Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich two thumbs up:

First, as with municipal bankruptcy, it would have to be completely voluntary. This means that neither the federal government nor state creditors could push an unwilling state into bankruptcy, no matter how catastrophic the state's finances may be, as this would violate the U.S. Constitution's protection for a state's sovereign immunity.

Second, as with municipal bankruptcy, a new bankruptcy law would allow states in default or in danger of default to reorganize their finances free from their union contractual obligations. In such a reorganization, a state could propose to terminate some, all or none of its government employee union contracts and establish new compensation rates, work rules, etc. The new law could also allow states an opportunity to reform their bloated, broken and underfunded pension systems for current and future workers. The lucrative pay and benefits packages that government employee unions have received from obliging politicians over the years are perhaps the most significant hurdles for many states trying to restore fiscal health.

Third, the new law should allow for the restructuring of a state's debt and other contractual obligations. In a voluntary bankruptcy scenario, states, like municipalities, will have every incentive to file a reorganization plan that protects state bondholder claims and their ultimate recovery. States will evaluate their future access to bond markets and their prospective borrowing rates as they formulate the optimal restructuring plan. (LA Times)

Now states, like private industry, will have a genuine check on union power - the ability to eradicate their arrangements if negotiations bring them to the point of bankruptcy! And just like in private bankruptcy, it can be challenged in court if states are abusing the system. Not state courts though...

This is probably not going to work for the Federal Government, which has no singular higher authority to turn to for such dispute resolution, and so we recommend that this motion be accompanied by a BAN on federal unionization.

This conclusion is from the facts. The facts show two things: 1) unions in government work every bit as bad in practice as they do in economic theory, as the recent affairs of California and Greece attest to, and 2) municipal bankruptcy, which has been an option for cities, counties, and towns since the 1930's, has helped many a municipality, from NYC in 1975* to Orange County in 1994, to fix their affairs. In fact, in Orange county, the restructuring was so successful that they were able to repay 100% of the principal without raising taxes a dime, while instituting useful reforms to prevent a rehash of the events (ERisk):

The new Orange County investment policy statement establishes safety of principal, and liquidity, as the primary objectives of the fund, with yield as a secondary objective. More specifically it prohibits borrowing for investment purposes (ie, leverage), reverse repurchase agreements, most kinds of structured notes (such as inverse floaters) and derivatives such as options. The same document bans the treasury oversight committee and other designated employees from receiving gifts, and obliges them to disclose economic interests and conflicts of interest. The county treasurer now has to submit monthly reports to the investors and other key county officers that contain sufficient information to permit an informed outside reader to evaluate the performance of the investment programme.

Now it is true that for munie investors, who will now see their risk in investment substantially increased, this isn't 100% a good deal. However, this too in the end is probably a good thing, as it makes selling government debt much more difficult, requiring higher interest, and will thus discourage state governments from running their bills so high to begin with in the future. Sorry munies, but we have bigger responsibilities then investors who, whether they knew it or not, volunteered to take a chance. It's time to bring in the creditors, and with them, bankruptcy court!

*Note: NYC did not actually declare bankruptcy. Rather, mayor Abraham Beame, used the threat of it to coaxe a overextended teachers union to invest 150 million of its pension funds in municipal bonds. He then acquire a large loan from the federal government. Not long after, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani began confronting NYC's debt problems, and largely solved them, and the days of over extension by NYC municipal unions were largely over for decades. (NY Times)

Taxes & Manufacturing

Launching Liberty Ship SS George Washington Carver. E.F. Joseph of US War Information, Public Domain

Due to the exams I have been studying for, I have not been posting here much. However, as I was studying for my Engineering Economy exam today (all the wonderful accounting rules that Industrial Engineers have to know), I stumbled upon something that was simply beyond the pale in what it means for manufacturers.

Very well known is the role labor costs play in driving manufacturers out of the United States. Less well known is the role government policy and bureaucratic red tape that in no way, shape or form benefits our quality of life overall effects manufacturing, and drives still more manufacturers away from our country. Previously, we have discussed the effect of railbanking regulation, excessive accounting standards and nuclear energy moratoriums (see number 4), but today, I want to talk about the way that our tax system favors an America of pizza delivery boys.

Land, with time, generally increases in value, but the property used in manufacturing and transportation deteoriates. We've all experienced this when we sell a car. When your property deteoriates, but you still sell it for more then the government expected, you are taxed at the rate of corporate or personal income (depending upon how your company files.) But when your property increases in value beyond what you purchased it for, as happens with land, you are taxed at a lower rate, called Capital Gains. Literally, when manufacturers do a good job maintaining their factories, they get taxed more then a pizza shop does when they maintain their land. The only exception is when a manufacturer is finally shutting down, then the land is worth more (manufacturing jobs attract people) and they finally get a capital gains tax.

So we see that the government favors manufacturers only when they've finally decided to close shop. In life, they get taxed more then others for their property, period.

This is not the only example. Property taxes allow manufacturers to die when the community they cultivated becomes too good, as their two or three acres of communally important land becomes too expensive for the amount of revenue they generate a year, and the potential of land fluctuations to drive manufacturers out of business massively increases the risk of them and other businesses that rely on borrowed money. Just like the homeowners in Detroit, their loans breathe down their neck, and the potential of things they have no control over to drive them out of town makes it breathe harder.

Think about that, millions of dollars of borrowed money in jeopardy because you might do too well for the community you are in. Beyond the economics, contemplate the morality of that.

Policies like this hurt upstart and cutting edge manufacturers the most, as they must take the biggest, highest interest, and longest-term borrowed capital in order to even begin to produce, as they have no starting capital to begin with. Their entrepreneurs also face the worst consequences should they fail, as no one may well trust them again since they have no good yet on their record to balance it. In developed countries like America, it will be manufacturers like these that create the fastest and most reliable growth, as they need the support services, development capital, and personal connections that a developed, industrialized country like America has to offer.

Further, the establishment too depends on serving the mavericks in order to have reason to remain here, as otherwise, their costs may well be cheaper in Asia, but they too benefit from industrial buccaneering for the innovation, quality workforce, markets, and new activity it creates. It may not show up every year, but it does show up from time to time, and business people have always been gambling men. Friends, let us compete in what we are good at, and take home our first-world wages while we're at it.

Open Clip Art Library. Public Domain

Food for Thought

How has your state done at creating a good environment for business? This manufacturing oriented business magazine has ranked all 50 states and the district of columbia based on their business environments. Check it out.

Hold Your Nose and Vote for the Stabenow Bill

Cartoon by Peter Welleman. Public Domain.

Though in general I am adamantly opposed to any senator who supports the Fairness Doctrine, or any other attempt by the government to control the media, or believes in the Green Jobs Myth (I will reserve a response to that for another time,) this time, she does seem to have a bill that would fill a dangerous void in existing unemployment policy.

The Americans Want to Work Act has been introduced in congress and is being passed around the Committe on Finance right now. You can track its progress here. The full text of the bill, in its' present form, can be found at THOMAS.

So what exactly does this bill do? It extends unemployment benefits by up to 20 weeks. In addition, it allows for a "fourth-tier" benefit to kick in when bureaucratic delays relating to the application of this bill are reached. Considering the length of our current recession, this is an absolutely necessary act. One can debate for hours the practicality of unemployment insurance to begin with, but it is not sensible to go changing the world on families already hurting from a bust economy. Such debate is better reserved for the summer of economic growth, when private charity and families can take care of their own during the changeover period, rather then this horrid blizzard, where we would be ripping the coat off of their backs to face the bitter gales.

It also does something much less desirable. It extends the rather poorly thought out temporary subsidy for hiring. This will encourage businesses to act irrationally and hire workers they don't need, creating production that will likely go away when the subsidy does, assuming if it is ever created at all, and wasting tremendous resources that could be instead invested in the economy of our nations future. Even worst, it increases the size of the subsidizing for workers thus hired retained, increasing the effectiveness of this economic laser guided bomb. So why should the senate vote for this bill?

Because right now, the families of those 99ers are on the economic edge of oblivion. Private charity has dried up, the budget (and with it government jobs) are drying up, unemployment is at the point where they may not have relatives or a community that can support them, competition for jobs is fierce, and the government is, for better or worse, the last place they have to turn. It costs relatively little money, and it keeps these people going for 20 more weeks. Like it or not, we signed up to cover them. Sound economic policy, in this one rare case, will just have to wait, as we have to consider the culture of our country and how actual human beings will interact with the system, in this case, by not saving money as a result of the unemployment insurance that our democratically elected (by you and me) government created.

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea." (Matthew 18: 6, New King James Version)

Further, it's a very well-written bill. It covers the technicalities and exceptions even ones (example: Railroad Retirement Taxes) that most people have never heard of. It's clearly written by someone who understands bureaucracy. And yet, it's relatively short. I read it in under 30 minutes. And it doesn't create a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy. Good job Stabenow. It's the exact kind of bill we should encourage, on principle, to keep the elected leaders accountable to people like you and me. In conclusion, good tidings, but of the slightly smelly variety.

A brief, relatively undefended argument

I don't have a world of time today, but just wanted to briefly, as a skeptical economic conservative, pose a question to my readers, along with a couple arguments (informal, without full defense of sources, statistics et cetera) to go with it: what is the effect of unemployment insurance on the economy.

The first argument is actually not mine, but comes from the Wall Street Journal. In The Folly of Subsidizing Unemployment, Richard Barro presents and defends logically the case that "subsidizing" unemployment for longer leads to insufficient job search and job acceptance. He also argues that such an action, even in a recession, continues Obamas onward march towards a socialist welfare state.

My response is a "yes, but." I'm certainly an economic conservative, but I'm also a realist, and I know that the acceptance of ANY degree of welfare distorts the perspectives and behavior of the entire population. While I do believe an argument against unemployment insurance to any degree (and it would have to be a "remove all" to evoke the necessary change in behavior) would have made sense in 1911, the year is 2010, we're in a recession, and the large bank accounts, investments, community and family support, and austere spending behavior that accompany a libertarian society are not in place and will not be in place for quite some time to come. Such changes would be better implemented in good times economically, so that private charity and the community can handle the burden of the transition well, caring for their poor (in a reasonable, authoritative manner of course) at a time when they can. So what is my argument?

My argument is that you don't want an excessive amount of job acceptance, or job search. I'll explain my case with an example: you have a pHD level Mathematician who has been trained for years in the development of algorithms and their implementation in computers, both at the hardware and software level, and the instruction of students. He loses his job at the university, due to a cut in funding, a common effect of recessions and political disagreements about the allocation of research funds. Facing a deadline on his unemployment benefits, he takes a job as a waiter at a fancy restaurant, earning about 40 grand a year, using his academic manners and knowledge as the requisite refinement.

In result, America has lost a mathematician, something we always have too little of, along with all the research and its improvements to industry that would've come through the completion of his life, and the availability of a well-paid, family-wage job for a less educated member of society, most likely leading to that members children being raised in poverty and a toxic environment where they themselves are unable to grow to full economic potential. While Barro is most likely correct in decreasing the rate of unemployment, it is the damage to the economy inflicted by the unemployment, and not its actual amount, that must be considered. Unemployment might be only 7%, but the damage to the human capital of society, both in terms of lost educated labor and advancement potential of the poorer classes, and the resulting devaluation of assets, efficiency and industrial production, could equal more then that under normal conditions.

Exactly how much more? I don't know, but it is a question that would need to be answered before the nation proceeds with such logic. We must act in foresight.

Furthermore, in a severe recession where current indicators (including government debt) seem to be indicating only a further downward spiral, the situation outlined above with the pHD level mathematician is actually very realisitic under any number of weeks less than what Obama has extended unemployment to. Still, it needs to be understood, and possibly bankrolled against with government bonds to hold congress to contract, that this is a wholly temporary condition and, in good times, unemployment benefits will be completely nixed to begin a positive transformation in behavior at a time when it can happen.

Unemployment benefits cannot be seen as a long-term solution, as Barro also states correctly that the tax burden of increasing unemployment payout WILL magnify a recession, leading to more ending up unemployed. We need to go back to savings and community, but we can't do it now any more then a man being dragged under by water moccasins can fight them off his back. We will have to wait, and pray, and curse FDR's name, but action, it will and must wait.

The Road of a Million Forks - the unsung benefits of cancer research

In a time when people are increasingly questioning the good of spending money on healthcare, I think it is useful to remind ourselves that cures and safety are not the only gain. Science, like any discipline worth pursuing, creates new avenues for exploration with every discovery made. Today I'd like to tell you about the potential benefits of cancer research that you probably would not have thought of immediately.

Follow this for a while, for you will not see its relevance at first, but it is there I assure you. All organisms have a death clock, a preprogramming for death that ticks on every second of your life, and of the life of every other thing currently alive, waiting for the time when life shall terminate. This clock is in your DNA, a huge molecule. See, all of your chromosomes have a long tale of unnecesary DNA called the telosome that every time one of your cells divides, loses just a few pieces of that DNA off the end. For most of your life, what it loses is not neccesary, is not used in the encoding of any of the stuff that makes you up, but eventually, it runs out of excess rope, and then it starts cutting what you need. This starts with the cells with the highest rates of replication, the blood, the skin and the hair. As the materials that make up your body and the chemicals required for your bodies processes are miscoded, and made improperly, your bodies reactions spin out of control, resources are wasted, cells die quickly, and finally, the whole organism (you) dies.

Recent studies however, and I will get citations soon from my professor, have shown that cancerous cells actually relengthen their telosomes, reversing this clock. It has long been known that aging partially exists as a defense against Cancer - the wasteful and excessive multiplication of cells eventually starving the body of resources - but now we have far better knowledge as to where structurally in the body, the connection lies. Through cancer research, we may find a way to cure aging as well as cancer.

Cancer by its nature is actually very regenerative, organs like the brain that do not normally produce new cells will mass produce them in a tumor, and not only do such ability hold promise for aging, but when properly tamed, cancer may also help to alleviate the suffering of stroke victims, paralysis victims, liver disease, sever ulcers and ulceration, flesh eating bacteria and many other ailments where the body either never produces new cells after birth, or cannot produce them quickly enough. The very thing that makes cancer so dangerous also makes it potentially a valuable tool for ALL healthcare needs, if the ways to handle it properly could be understood and mastered by science. We could even regenerate limbs and eyes, if only the cells could find again their function and cease multiplication when appropriate. This is exactly what we're trying to do with Stem Cells, and with a modified and controlled cancer, this could be done using a patients existing cells as they already are in the body. I know that's a big "if," but it is a good example.

But beyond the healthcare business itself is the nanotech industry, the industry of building things at the molecular level, of creating out of a chain of carbons the strongest material on earth or an engine that can power a tiny robot. Such machines exist in cells, and have forever, and are among the very things a sequence of DNA encodes for. Your body produces such things automatically, without a hand being laid to it, chemically, wasting hardly any chemicals at all, producing its own energy from the sun or from sugars produce by those that use the sun, and multiplying in great number to create a being, out of these tiny machines, weighing between 90 and 250 pounds and standing 4" 10' to 7" 8' with infinite comlexity and abilities. Cancer creates the highest rate of replication, and thus for industrial purpose, producing vast chains of carbon, superfuels, tiny engines and robots, the optimal process for this manner of manufacturing.

Cancer research may also involve radioactive materials, chemicals of every kind, viruses, machinery, imaging, and all manner of things useful outside of cancer and outside of medicine entirely. Through the research, we understand not only the cancer better, but also the machine, as in the case of CAT Scans and medical x-rays adapted for scanning bags at the airport, and also can learn better production methods for existing technologies with the investment put in for treating a deadly disease and improving the lives of millions.

For the ecology and ecosystem, humankind has much to learn about recycling its own resources and conserving for its own needs from the greatest recycler of all, the mother Earth. From mother nature, through medical research, we can find the ways to live on less, and master much more fully on resources, producing strange new materials out of familiar ingredients, not needing mines or finite quantities of fossil fuels, themselves the product of nature now past, and even, in some limited circumstances, reducing or reversing entropy.

"You have much to learn from your friends, and even more to learn from your enemies." (Chinese folk saying) In our fight with cancer, we may win battles we did not realize were part of the same war.

I wanted to get this article out quickly, but revisions will be made over the next few days. If you find it unclear now, come back in a week and if this message is gone you know its better.

Ghost Towns

A burial vault on the abandoned island of Stroma. By J M Briscoe, license here

I would like to apologize in advance for the lack of sources in the following article. It's covering a very wide bredth of information and my own personal thoughts picked up in a disorderly manner over a long period of time and a train of thoughts that would probably require dozens of sources to properly verify. This article is a romp. If you would like to debate any part of this article, feel free to do so in the comments section and I will do my best to defend my writing. There's a chance it may even be indefensible - there is some wisdom in checking with sources - if so, I will concede.

With so much talk about development, growth and the consumption of resources, every now and then I think it's helpful to return to the flip side - what happens when growth, in fact, goes in reverse. Stroma was at one time well populated, and the source of a feud between the Earls of Orkney and Caithness. The burial vault depicted is the mausoleum of a family that owned the island in the 17th century. In 1901, the population was about 375. The very last family left the island in 1962.

Stroma is not unique. The main Scottish side of my family, the MacRaes, are sometimes referred to as "Children of Kentail." Kentail is now part of the National Trust of Scotland, which is another way of saying that, by 1944, it was so underdeveloped that there was less interest in keeping it inhabited by human beings then in turning it in to a wildlife preserve. This is not unique to Scotland.

In the Mojave desert of Southern California, the desert of Nevada, and the mountains and timberland of Washington state are dozens upon dozens of ghost towns, that, in some cases, once had thousands of people, but are now only buildings rotting away, or already too far gone to be recognizable. The town of Redtown on the slope of Cougar Mountain is sometimes accredited with being the birthplace of Seattle, and had the greatest coal mines on the West Coast. They began mining there not long after the city of Seattle, about a thirty minute drive away, was settled in 1852. By 1918, the mines were totally abandoned, and the town found no further use until the Cold War, when it was briefly sealed off and used as a Nike missile launch site before finding its current use as a wilderness park. The buildings can no longer be seen, with the exception of a few sealed or grated mineshafts and a couple large cement foundations, now covered with moss, for steam hoists. Railroads were built there, but the tracks have been torn out, and the right of way used for biking paths.

You might complain it was a mining town, and the minerals ran out. That's not true - there is still coal in the ground. The demand, however, did run out. By the turn of the twentieth century, railroads to Colorado and Minnesota were carrying higher quality coal that burns cleaner and brighter inexpensively, and the cheap but almost worthless lignite at Cougar Mountain was no longer used for anything but steam boilers in ships. By 1918, there were no longer enough of these steamships on the sound to keep the mines open, and a series of smaller but higher quality mines to the Southeast in Black Diamond (a rural railhead still in use by local farmers) remained open until the 1980's for the small number of steam naval ships docked at Bremerton.

Kentail and Stroma were not mining communities. Stroma is a sheepfarm and harbor - a new port was built to service some commercial traffic shortly before the last families left, and both the harbor and the sheepfarm see some limited use still, but no one lives on the island full time, not even its owners. Kentail was partially farmland, and partially a meeting ground for Clan MacRae - the war cry of the MacRaes is a variation on the name of the mountain Squrr Fhagran (Squrr Uaran) that borders Kentail and can be seen from far away. Both of them, however, succombed to essentially the same fate as Redtown.

Although most farming communities in the US have suffered poverty and a population exodus over the last 100 years as modern farms brought lower prices and less need for labor, the US still has a reasonably strong agricultural economy that has retained SOME local population. The Highlands have not. The difference may be that in the US, our extensive system of railways and intermodal ports have centralized and strengthened the transportation of American produce, so that America is the agricultural exporter of choice for many nations that cannot produce enough to feed themselves. The American railroad may have saved the American farmer.

Great Northern train depot, Fargo, ND, 1939, Public Domain, work of Farm Security Administration

The Gospel of Joseph Stalin, Episode 3: Parable of the Talented Manipulators

Secretary General and Loving Father Stalin, who only sends those who really need it to Siberia to be worked to death. Photo taken by CCCP, public domain for all good comrades. Here

"The federal system is like a slightly violent and paranoid man who travelled to a far away arab nation in need of asskicking, leaving all his various powers to take your money to three servants, assigning it based upon their ability, with the instruction to generate more.

"To Obama he left 10 special interest groups,

"To Reidosi he left 5 special interest groups,

"To Bush, he left only one, the Christian Right.

"Obama came up with 10 more special interest groups, Pelosi used her 5 to get 5 more, but Bush took his and refused to look in to television cameras.

"When the federal system came back, he saw that Obama had generated so much special interest and said, 'Well done my faithful servant, I'm giving you the White House.'

"When he saw how much Reidosi had interested, he said, 'Well done my faithful servant, I'm giving you the Congress.'

"But Bush came to him and said, 'I was afraid, for I knew you were a hard man who reap where other people sow, thus I buried my speical interest group in the ground. Here, take what is yours!'

"But he said, "So you knew I was a hard man who reaps where other people sow! Therefore, you should've used the IRS to pay for other peoples earmarks!"

"'But I did do that!'

"'No you didn't damn it! Everyone loves earmarks!'

"'I honestly did do that! Haven't you talked the budget office lately? Look at how high the debt is! Aren't you proud of me?'

"'NO! I'm never proud of failures! And besides, what kind of idiot uses OTHER PEOPLES interest groups to advance himself?'

"And then they took the worthless servant, and cut him in two, and there was much rejoicing.

"Assuredly, I say unto you, whoever has much in this year will have much in the election to come, and to him who has little, even what he has will be taken away!"

The Gospel of Joseph Stalin, Episode 2: Parable of the fruits and the nuts

Secretary General and Loving Father Stalin, who only sends those who really need it to Siberia to be worked to death. Photo taken by CCCP, public domain for all good comrades. Here

"And when the Republican Candidate for Governor of California comes, on the second of November, carried on the backs of lobbyists and wearing a tacky turtleneck sweater, she will divide the Californians, and in her bowl will be the fruits, and in her mouth will be the nuts.

"And she shall sayeth to the fruits as they look on in their simply fabulous sunglasses while their gay partner holds their hand and massages their left shoulder, "curse you oh fruits, for I was hungry, and you cancelled my welfare checks, I was naked, and you let me escape prison for streaking, I was in the hospital, and you cut my Medicaid, I was in prison, and you caused the prison library to be sold to Half Price Books."

"But Meg Whitman, when did we do any of these things to you?"

"Assuredly I say to you, when you overspent at the ballot box, you did it to me."

"Then she shall sayeth to the nuts as they hold their combined King James Bible and AK-47 maintenance manual, "curse you oh nuts, for I was trying to break the strikes, and you stopped me, I was trying to lower taxes, and you increased them, I was trying to build a fence on the border, and you turned the ground in to quicksand."

"But Meg Whitman, when did we do any of these things to you?"

"Assuredly I say to you, when you made yourselves look ridiculous, you made me look ridiculous."

"And then everyone, including Meg Whitman, shall inherit a hell called modern day California. There shall be 20% unemployment rates and a considerable number of ruined political careers, and even the wild animals shall consider them an abhorrence and a disgrace."

A Conservative Plan to Help the Poor

For about 50 years now, liberals have held dominance over the issue of helping Americas least fortunate and reducing poverty. With this dominance, they have done little, poverty has declined minimally, and perhaps, when adjusted for the level of economic growth, even gone backwards, and the states they have dominated the most (like California) have seen their middle classes shrink from some of the largest in America, to some of the smallest.

There is an inherent assumption that economic conservatives, being somewhat less directly interested, cannot help the poor, as if unintended effects of decisions never happen, and yet, it seems to me some of the most vital reforms required to break the ceiling for our poor are, in fact, economically conservative things to do:

1) Eliminate Property Taxes - it is very difficult to help the poor at the neighborhood or small town level when the minute the neighborhood improves, the poor can no longer afford to live there. Not only do current home owners face the potential of eviction if their property values go up, or their income goes down, but the change in rental prices is magnified, leading to those who rent apartments or houses being driven out much more quickly then they need be.

2) Simplify zoning - Simpler zoning laws lead to more walkable communities, by allowing nearly any business to open anywhere that is logical, that can support small, family owned business, and allow the natural expansion of industrial development in poorer areas. Not only does such industry provide jobs for the poor, but it stabilizes land prices by creating small nuisances to couple with gains in more meaningful areas, like education, and provides a tax base for communities that otherwise will receive little taxation.

3) Improve railbanking regulation - Currently, to reopen a closed rail line you must perform an entirely new environmental study and face major injunctions by the local community. Allowing any former line (it was there before, and the world didn't explode) to be reopened at any time, we can improve American freight handling, lowering distribution costs for consumer goods and freight, and increasing the profitability of American industry and the kind of jobs that CAN pay well: an assemblyline worker can easily produce a hundred grand a year of revenue for his business. In addition, the rail construction itself will also increase employment for underskilled workers, as it is largely manual labor.

4) Nuclear energy - Nuclear energy will lower electric bills nationwide, lowering the cost of American made goods, both for our people, and for export. Washington State built an entire industrial economy off of cheap electricity, one that is still growing today.

5) Eliminate ethanol and other subsidies, and pharmaceutical tariffs - These subsidies lower the availability of food and other economic goods that the poor need to survive, while tariffs against foreign drug manufacturers increase the price of health insurance and perscriptions for the people who can already barely afford them.

6) Simplify accounting standards - If you hire an accountant at $20 an hour to oversee the work of five productive workers, for your business to be as profitable, you must effectively take $4 an hour off of those five workers paychecks, as the accountant contributes nothing to the businesses profitability. This also, by lowering the maximum profitable wage, causes layoffs at a lower wage level.

7) Free trade - You have a choice, make the poor buy more expensive goods from ineffective producers who hold a relative monopoly over the market, and retain jobs that produce less, lowering the wage ceiling for the entire country by causing layoffs when the wage gets too high, or allow a few ineffective businesses to go away, and allow those workers to be hired by the companies that are willing to pay a higher wage as the workers here in the US will actually produce at that level, while lowering the price of goods, and thus the effective wage, for all.

There are likely many other examples, but these come to mind.

By focusing on the individual factors that actually hurt the poor and make them in need of help to begin with, we may find that their interests lie in liberty rather then theft that, in the end, finds itself stealing from them as well.