Heat Wave Musings

While driving through Kentucky on Friday I saw the exterior temperature soar to 103 degrees.  I hadn't been in that kind of heat since leaving Texas in 1994.  So, I cranked up the a/c another notch and comfortably stepped on the gas.  This is what a good dose of relative wealth will buy you--the ability to sidestep problems that are so destructive to those people and societies that are unable to purchase their way out of it.

The media have been alarmed for some time about what to do with climate change.  Their deity, Al Gore, has helpfully suggested a return to the stone age, not literally mind you, but by advocating economic strategies that can lead to no other station.  We must include within these musings the shutting down of integral portions of our power grid, mandated cost increases that force consumers to choose smaller and less effective electric and gas powered machines, huge amounts of borrowed and taxpayer monies redistributed to crony agricultural capitalists who dine greedily at the public trough (see the latest agriculture bill), and mass transit initiatives designed to entice Grandma out of her Beemer and into a money losing and heavily subsidized bus sitting next to a guy with no deodorant.

You'd think that the whole world has reached a boiling point.

Yet, while the US suffers this year from triple digit heat, Europe is struggling with the flip side of that coin.  Many European watchers are concerned with the unseasonably cold and wet weather that might prove near ruin to the London Olympics starting up later this month.  

Power failures have plagued the Midwest and East during this latest heat.  Storms last week knocked many electric customers offline while huge demands on the still operating portions of the power grid have industry analysts concerned.    Several dozen people have died in the US as a result of this blasted heat and with only moderate relief coming in the next day or two the number of deaths is likely to grow. 

Many Americans, including Mr. Gore, yearn for a more European like style of control over its citizenry.  While many good Americans are willing to voluntarily cut back on loathsome energy using devices, too many of the rest of us demand a car bigger than a refrigerator, a refrigerator bigger than a microwave, and a microwave bigger than a cellphone. All of which causes the former VP to gnash his well worn teeth inside his 15,000 square foot Tennessee home, that is, at least while he isn't gnashing them while jetting off to a climate change conference in the belly of a private jet. 

Heat waves come and go.  In the mid 90s those Europeans to whom our elitists are so enamored suffered through a little heat spell of their own.  When the dust had finally settled an estimated 60,000 people had succumbed to the blistering thermometer with an estimated 20,000 dying in French nursing homes alone.  (Hey America--does that make you quiver in anticipation of government controlled healthcare?) Air conditioning, it would seem, was not such a priority to those on our idol continent who, to this day, strain themselves attempting to control the temperature on the outside while they deny themselves the comfort of setting the thermostat just a little bit lower in the living room.

Wealth is what makes America more easily able to sidestep widespread disaster. I can say this because I drive a wonderfully new 1998 Buick that possesses a kick-butt a/c unit. 

America's elites want to destroy the wealth producing capabilities of our free market economy in order to combat climate change.  I would rather we allow the wealth generated by the free market to purchase more effective and market driven solutions to our energy needs that will in turn generate more wealth and the benefits it can unlock. 

This would be a tough pill to swallow for self-proclaimed geniuses like Al Gore and Barack Obama.
They believe they have all the answers, and they believe the market driven solutions arrived at by billions of producers and consumers are a huge portion of the problem and not a solution to it. 

Sixty thousand dead Europeans could not be reached for comment.

Walking to Greece

Barack Obama has singlehandedly created well over 4,000,000 jobs since he took office amid the worst economic maelstrom in the history of the solar system.  Granted, most of them are czars with the few left over being on Michelle's personal staff, but we shouldn't pick at every little thing especially when there is a people to enslave.

Four million is a big number.  Seriously, multiply it by a thousand and you get the much larger (though mysteriously less important) number of dollars that the US borrows each and every day to spend above and beyond what it can afford.  Our country wastes more money on needless shit than the GDP of most nations on Earth. 

But needless is in the eye of the beholder.  We absolutely need the green energy sector because sooner or later the wind turbines in mid-Michigan will begin to spin. Yesterday they were sadly lazy in the middle of a heat advisory.  Meanwhile, coal plants, the low cost and guaranteed round-the-clock alternative to those stone still wind blades are being necessarily bankrupted by an administration and EPA who believes a once exceptional country should get used to its new station in the world==one less affluent and a bit more sweaty staying at the Howard Johnsons. 

Obama sits atop a federal government complex dedicated to regulation and the curtailment of wealth in the hands of a few and this can only result in the stifling of an economyfully otherwise capable of lifing all boats on a rising tide if it is left to grow sans hobbles.  But that is not the aim of this administration. 

After some five trillion dollars in additional assumed debt steered to the pet projects of bureaucrats, the latest jobs report released this week showed an additional 80,000 jobs having been created for the month of June. Incidentally, it takes in the neighborhood of 300,000 jobs every month just to break even given population growth, and it takes a heck of a lot more than that to have tax revenues increase sufficiently to compensate for the flooding tide of baby boomers hoping to cash in on Social Security before that albatross goes belly up too. 

However undaunted by that rather sour report, Barack Obama has hailed the June jobs numbers as another step in the right direction--another step in a long line of unwavering steps that has helped the US economy remain exactly stagnant with substandard GDP growth, substandard job expansion, substandard manufacturing and housing activity, and substandard consumer confidence. 

Barack Obama has been in office for 41 months.  Measuring optimistically this economy has created on average about 120,000 jobs per month since he has been in office.  In all fairness to our dear leader, Barack Obama jumped aboard the con with our ship greatly off course.  In all fairness to our dear leader's detractors, Barack Obama agreed with every policy that sent the vessel toward the rocks and has been spouting disastrous orders from the helm ever since. 

While I would not blame Obama for everything that got us into this mess, after a while his assumed innocence has to become less important than his incompetence in trying to turn things around.  Sooner or later we will have earned some positive results, right?  After all, this is being financed by our grandchildren.

With an election coming up we are left in a very precarious situation.  Those on the left point to Obama's innocence in the matter while complicit extablishment Republicans seem to be intent on getting back the reins of power in order to unleash the true effectiveness of an ever larger bureaucracy run by their own bevy of life long bureaucrats.  Conservatives shudder at the implications of continued ignorance of economics in Washington regardless of who is left in charge.

We know that Obama has no interest in severely curtailing the size of government and I have my doubts that Romney has much interest in cutting much--I mean, here is a guy who advocates climate change initiatives, is critical of Reagan's economic beliefs, envisioned the foundation of Obamacare (admittedly on the state level) and embraces destructive overlord dictates such as minimum wage hikes.

If we are to ever get our debt back in order (and I'm not certain our leaders have any intention of ever doing so) the size of our government must shrink while it dispenses with its desire to control the behavior of each of its subjects.  Somehow I don't think this idea is catching on.  Today it was announced that the brokest nation in the history of all mankind has entered into a partnership with the brokest state in the history of our nation to begin construction on a train project that will ultimately cost hundreds of billions of dollars that neither entity can afford, will cost future billions in maintenance that neither entity will ever afford and if everything goes as smoothly as could ever be expected will provide a service that is inefficient, perpetually subsidized, and grossly underused--that is until the multi-car family is outlawed, a provision easily adhered to if only the size of families could be regulated.

Today's progressives believe for a fact that things will begin to turn around if only their policies are given the opportunity to work for a sufficient amount of time.  The failures of the Soviet state, European socialism, and the generational enslavement of a billion Chinese prove nothing to this nation's elite who firmly believe that the reason those systems failed is because their leadership made bad decisions and not because there is a definational flaw in centralized planning.

So today's 80,000 created jobs are a step in the right direction.  How many steps does it take to walk to Greece?