Complex Societies Need Simple Laws - Stop The Madness!

 "If you have 10,000 regulations," Winston Churchill said, "you destroy all respect for law."

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That's what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities have probably doubled that. We have so many rules that legal specialists can't keep up. Criminal lawyers call the rules "incomprehensible." They are. They are also "uncountable." Congress has created so many criminal offenses that the American Bar Association says it would be futile to even attempt to estimate the total.

So what do the politicians and bureaucrats of the permanent government do? They pass more rules.

That's not good. It paralyzes life.

Politicians sometimes say they understand the problem. They promise to "simplify." But they rarely do. Mostly, they come up with new rules. It's just natural. It's how the public measures politicians. Schoolchildren on Washington tours ask, "What laws did you pass?" If they don't pass new laws, the media whine about the "do-nothing Congress."

This is also not good.

When so much is illegal, common sense dies. Out of fear of breaking rules, people stop innovating, trying, helping.

Think I exaggerate? Consider what happened in Britain, a country even more rule-bound than America. A man had an epileptic seizure and fell into a shallow pond. Rescue workers might have saved him, but they wouldn't enter the 3-foot-deep pond. Why? Because "safety" rules passed after rescuers drowned in a river now prohibited "emergency workers" from entering water above their ankles. Only 30 minutes later, when rescue workers with "stage 2 training" arrived, did they enter the water, discover that the man was dead and carry him to the approved inflatable medical tent. Twenty other cops, firemen and "rescuers" stood next to the pond and watched.

The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, sometimes called the first libertarian thinker, said, "The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished.

... The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be." He complained that there were "laws and regulations more numerous than the hairs of an ox." What would he have thought of our world?

Big-government advocates will say that as society grows more complex, laws must multiply to keep up. The opposite is true. It is precisely because society is unfathomably complex that laws must be kept simple. No legislature can possibly prescribe rules for the complex network of uncountable transactions and acts of cooperation that take place every day. Not only is the knowledge that would be required to make such a regulatory regime work unavailable to the planners, it doesn't actually exist, because people don't know what they will want or do until they confront alternatives in the real world. Any attempt to manage a modern society is more like a bull in a darkened china shop than a finely tuned machine. No wonder the schemes of politicians go awry.

F.A. Hayek wisely said, "The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design." Another Nobel laureate, James M. Buchanan, put it this way: "Economics is the art of putting parameters on our utopias."

Barack Obama and his ilk in both parties don't want parameters on their utopias. They think the world is subject to their manipulation. That idea was debunked years ago.

"With good men and strong governments everything was considered feasible," the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote. But with the advent of economics, "it was learned that ... there is something operative which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success, in precisely the same way as they must taken into account the laws of nature."

I wish our politicians knew that. I wish they'd stop their presumptuous schemes.

We need to end the orgy of rule-making at once and embrace the simple rules that true liberals like America's founders envisioned.

Original article by John Stossel

America's Per Capita Debt Worse Than Greece (Graph)

Think America Can't Burn Like Greece? Think Again!

 

 

Under Obama's Plan, Gross Federal Debt Alone Soars to $75,000 Per Capita in 2022

Vice President Biden Says He Doesn't Know Who Van Jones Is. Well Joe.. He Is A Radical Commie. Now You Know

Senile Joe is obviously being kept in the dark by Obama and his Marxist buddies. He is not even aware Barry O. once had the radical commie, Van Jones, as his "Green Czar" and still keeps him around as a trusted insider. 

This administration is more dysfunctional than the Addams Family.

Wake Up America!

In a radio interview Tuesday, Vice President Biden said he didn't know who Van Jones, the former so-called White House "Green Czar," who resigned amid controversy in 2009, is.

Biden was asked about the Tea Party and Van Jones' organization while talking to Tampa radio station 970 WFLA. Jones recently announced he was creating a movement out of the "Occupy Wall Street" group which has been protesting the financial sector in New York City this week.

"I really don't know about the Van Jones group, except what I read in the press," the vice president said when asked.

He went on to say, "There's a great frustration here in America that the two parties haven't been able to get very much moving. We have been in this period where there is just nothing but fighting, and so you have on the one hand Van Jones' guys. whoever he is."

Host Jack Harris then interrupted and pointed out Jones used to work in the Obama administration, at which the host and Biden briefly laughed.

"Oh is that - alright," Biden said.

The Jones group has been presenting its ideas this week at a conference in D.C. Over the weekend, Jones announced he would be launching an "October Offensive" out of the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street protests as a chance to counter the influence of the Tea Party.

Biden was in Florida touting the American Jobs Act and said how it would help jobs for teachers.

As for the Tea Party, Biden actually had some positive things to say, even connecting their mission to Jones'. "And, by the way, I don't disrespect the Tea Party, I think the Tea Party and the Van Jones folks are part - different halves of the same concern, there's an overwhelming frustration," he said.

"The point is talking about the excesses of Wall Street and there's some truth in what he [Jones] says and the Tea Party, there's some truth in what they say, I don't have a disagreement."

Jones left his position as "Green Czar," which was a new administration position, after there were questions raised about his political past, including allegations of ties to a group in the 1990s that associated with Marxism, and his name appearing on a petition for the so-called 9/11 "truther" movement, which questions what happened and if the government actually was covering something up or mischaracterized what happened on September 11th.

Article by Kimberly Schwandt, Fox News

Federal Loans Fund Big-Ticket Energy Projects of Non-US Firms. Taxpayers Will Pay Billions for Another Administration Boondoggle

Among the biggest recipients on the Department of Energy's controversial list of loans to renewable energy companies like the failed Solyndra Inc. are a number of non-U.S. firms whose big-ticket energy projects will cost taxpayers billions of dollars -- but will generate no more than a few hundred permanent U.S. jobs.

Some of the companies employ complex solar technologies that cost more than twice as much as any other land-based renewable system, including nuclear.

The huge cost and relatively low long-term employment payoff for the investments could cast doubt on the Obama administration's claims that big investments in new green technologies will lead the U.S. to innovative parity with countries like China, and also create significant long-term employment gains for the U.S. economy.

As recently as July, for example, President Obama declared in a radio address that "we're accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy and doubling our use of renewable energy sources like wind and solar power -- steps that have the potential to create whole new industries and hundreds of thousands of new jobs in America."

A case in point is Abengoa Solar, Inc., a Spanish-owned firm that has received more than $2.6 billion in federal loan guarantees from DoE for two power-generating complexes, with the most recent $1.2 billion guarantee closing just this month. Abengoa's press releases tout the thousands of construction and other jobs that will be result from the projects, one in the Mojave Desert in California, the other southwest of Phoenix.

Nonetheless, the DoE's own website reveals that the two projects will permanently employ no more than 130 people after completion.

Abengoa's entire staff worldwide, according to its 2010 annual report, was 526 employees.

The Solyndra scandal erupted at the end of August, when the company filed for bankruptcy about two years after it was given a loan guarantee from the Department of Energy for nearly $530 million, followed by a loan for the guaranteed amount from the Federal Financing Bank.

Loan guarantees under DoE's so-called 1703 program are given for "innovative clean energy technologies that are typically unable to obtain conventional private financing due to high technology risks."

In the case of at least one Abengoa property, its Mojave Desert project, the administration's involvement apparently goes well beyond a loan guarantee. In its 2010 annual report, the Spanish company reports that it was subsequently able to obtain a loan from the U.S. Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank, which according to its website has "statutory authority to purchase any obligation issued, sold, or guaranteed by a federal agency to ensure that fully guaranteed obligations are financed efficiently."

It may also be debatable whether Abengoa should be able to get federal financing guarantees for its projects purely on the grounds that its technology is so innovative that private sector funding would not be forthcoming. According to its annual report, the use of cutting edge high technology in marketing and creating solar energy facilities is one of the key elements of Abengoa's business model, and a part of its global competitive advantage in solar energy construction.

"This proprietary technology development and a strategy of continued investment in R&D preserves Abengoa Solar's leadership position," the report says. It gives the company "a competitive advantage in an industry where technological change happens quickly, a better chance to offer competitive technologies in the future, as well as an adaptable portfolio of solutions and components for each project or market."

Click here for the annual report

Several efforts by Fox News to contact Abengoa executives to discuss the company's U.S. projects prior to this article's publication were unsuccessful.

In its annual report, Abengoa says it is successfully building plants using similar or related technology in Abu Dhabi, Algeria and multiple locations in Spain -- where expansive subsidies for solar power inaugurated by the Socialist government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero were cut back dramatically in 2008, as the country entered its current deep financial crisis.

In the case of its Mojave Desert plant, located about 100 miles south-east of Los Angeles, Abengoa has announced that it has begun building foundations in time to qualify for a 30 percent federal cash grant.

When the Mojave Desert plant is complete -- currently anticipated for 2013 -- it will sell energy to Pacific Gas and Electric, a California utility that is subject to dramatically increased mandates for renewable energy signed earlier this year by California Gov. Jerry Brown, and described in various reports as the most aggressive in the country.

Under the new mandates, California must get 33 percent of its energy from renewable resources -- solar, wind, biofuels -- by the end of 2020. That is a 65 percent increase over the previous mandate, which called for 20 percent renewable by the same deadline.

Critics of the new mandate have said that they will hike already steep electricity prices in the Golden State by an additional 19 percent.

Abengoa's Arizona solar energy plant, which was dubbed the largest solar energy facility in the world when the contract was announced in 2008, is now under construction. It will deliver energy to the Arizona Public Service Company, a state utility, under an Arizona renewable mandate that calls for 15 percent renewable energy generation by 2025.

The Arizona utility has announced that it will hike consumer energy bills by about 6.6 percent to meet the mandate.

In addition to "thousands" of temporary construction jobs on the project, and 60 permanent jobs tallied by the Department of Energy on its website, Abengoa has said that an additional 180 permanent jobs will be produced in Arizona in a factory that will make specialized mirrors for the project.

Both Abengoa projects make use of specialized "solar thermal" power rather than the photovoltaic sun-to-electricity panels familiar to most homeowners and consumers. Solar thermal power generation involves the construction of huge arrays of curved solar mirrors to focus the sun's energy on a tower containing water or another fluid medium, which is superheated and ultimately powers an electricity-producing turbine. Retaining and using heat when the sun is down adds to the expense and complexity of the system.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), such solar thermal power is far and away the most expensive option that it considered in projecting the cost of new electricity technologies over the next four years.

Using a complex calculation known as "levelized cost," EIA says that solar thermal energy will weigh in at $311.60 per megawatt/hour, vs. $210.70 for more conventional solar paneling, and $113.90 for "advanced nuclear."

Click here for the EIA cost estimates

Compared to more conventional energy sources, solar thermal is even pricier -- much pricier. The EIA says that natural gas-fueled energy plants, even using advanced techniques to remove carbon from their emissions, would cost $89.3 per megawatt/hour, while ordinary gas fueled natural gas generation would cost $66.10.

A conventional coal-fired electrical plant -- anathema in green circles -- would provide energy at $94.80 per megawatt/hour, and one equipped with "clean" coal technology and sequestration of carbon emissions would provide electricity at a cost of $136.20 per megawatt/hour.

The second-most pricey option on the EIA list, after solar thermal, is energy from wind turbines placed in the ocean, which comes in at $243.20 per megawatt/hour.

In other words, even that difficult and costly-to-produce energy source is projected to cost only three-quarters as much.

Article by George Russell, Fox News