"Defund The Police": Maybe The Most Counter-Productive Progressive Policy Yet

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  • One of the big themes of this blog over the years has been chronicling the counter-productive results of various progressive government schemes for perfecting the world — everything from “anti-poverty” programs, to “affordable” housing, to energy restrictions in the name of the “climate,” to punitive tax rates on high earners, and so on and on.

  • My general observation has been that all of these things inevitably fail to ameliorate the problem they are supposed to address, and instead bring about gradual economic and societal decline in the jurisdictions that try them. Decades into the effort, places that have continuously followed the progressive prescriptions have turned into what I have called the “basket case” cities — cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and many more, that have seen a long term of premium taxes and large “caring” bureaucracies, but accompanied by inadequate private investment, shortage of good jobs, declining populations and high rates of crime and violence.

  • But at least the declines of these places have generally been gradual — often so gradual that the people living through the decline can barely perceive it. Not so with the latest progressive fad, the movement to “defund the police” and otherwise withdraw political support for assertive policing, theoretically replacing that with some kind of “new paradigm” of social workers or something.

  • The defunding movement, and related initiatives, has been followed by sudden and dramatic jumps in the rates of violent crime, particularly murders, in the progressive jurisdictions. The overall result has been thousands of additional deaths, mostly of young black men. This could be the most counter-productive progressive policy yet.

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"Settler Colonialism": More Of The Usual Progressive Racism And Hatred Of Freedom

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  • Several years ago, in connection with a family trip to Israel, I looked into the issue of Israeli “settlements” in the areas of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. I then had a post in June 2017 titled “Do You Know The Difference Between ‘Settlers’ And ‘Immigrants’?” .

  • The Israeli settlements, and the “settlers” who inhabit them, have come in for constant attacks from the international left, culminating in condemnation from a UN Security Council resolution in 2016. The resolution was approved by a 14-0 vote in 2016 (on which vote the U.S., during President Obama’s tenure, abstained, rather than exercising its right to veto).

  • Yet viewed in a broader context, the Israeli settlements are a tiny part of annual migrations of millions of people around the world, going from one political jurisdiction to another. All, or nearly all, of these other migrations are applauded by the international left. Indeed, these other migrations are applauded even when they are clearly violative of the law of the destination — illegal immigration into the United States being the most prominent example.

  • So what makes the Israeli settlers so subject to widespread condemnation while other migrants are applauded?

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What Biden And The Environmental Left Are Really Planning For Us

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  • Can you remember as far back as the 2020 campaign for President? If you can, you will surely recall candidate Joe Biden carefully positioning himself as the moderate relative to the other candidates from his party.

  • This principle applied particularly to issues of energy and “climate.” For example, candidate Biden repeatedly denied on the debate stage that he had any plans to ban “fracking” for oil and gas. . . .

  • Well, that was then, and this is now. So what’s the real story? You’ll never find out where this administration is going from trying to listen to Biden himself, since he doesn’t say much, rarely takes a question, and in the few things he does say generally borders on incoherence.

  • But there’s another place you can look. As President, Biden gets to appoint all kinds of advisory councils and committees. The members of these things are not subject to confirmation. He (and his handlers) can put on them anyone they want, without asking anyone’s permission. Essentially, the whole “advisory council” thing therefore is a well-understood ruse, where members can be chosen based on their already-known positions, and the “advice” consists of recommending to the powers that be that they should do what they already wanted to do.

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Add The Wall Street Journal To The People Who Can't Do Basic Arithmetic

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  • Let’s face it, lots of people aren’t very good at math, even rather basic math. On the other hand, some people are quite good at it. If you aren’t very good at math, there are plenty of other things for you to do in life. My own field of law practice mostly does not require much skill at math, and there a plenty of math-challenged people who are nevertheless very good lawyers.

  • But some big societal decisions require a certain level of math competence. Some of these decisions can involve multi-hundreds of billions of dollars, or even multi-trillions of dollars.

  • For example, consider the question of whether proposed electricity generation system X has the capability to deliver the amount of electricity a state or region needs, and at the times it is needed. Answering this question is just a matter of applied basic arithmetic.

  • Given the dollars involved, you would think that when a question like this is being addressed, it would be time to call in some people who could do the arithmetic, or who at least would be willing to try.

  • Yet when the issue is replacing generation of electricity by fossil fuels with generation by “renewables,” it seems that the need to believe that the renewables will work and be cost effective is so powerful that all efforts to do the arithmetic get banished.

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EPA Updates Its "Climate Change Indicators"

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EPA Updates Its "Climate Change Indicators"

  • It appears that some time last month the EPA provided a major update of what it calls its “climate change indicators.” The EPA’s web page is headed “Climate Change Indicators in the United States,” with the sub-heading “Climate Change Is Happening Now.”

  • The update is an initiative of the Biden administration, now eager to invest a few trillion dollars of your money in new “green” infrastructure, after several years in which the Trump EPA paid no attention to keeping these data up to date.

  • The New York Times reports on the big event on today’s front page, under the headline “Climate Change Is getting Worse, E.P.A. Says. Just Look Around.”

  • The basic technique here is to propagandize you with every sort of essentially irrelevant anecdotal information, while diverting your attention away from the only indicator of “climate change” that actually counts, which is temperature. After all, if temperatures aren’t going up, it isn’t “global warming.”

  • Here, we have some 54 supposed climate “indicators” — everything from rain to drought to ice to sea level — of which things relating to actual temperature are only a handful, and then are buried deep in the midst of all the others, probably in the hope that you will miss them. And moreover, the temperature data are then grossly misrepresented in what has to be an intentional effort at deception.

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California's Zero Carbon Plans: Can Anybody Here Do Basic Arithmetic?

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California's Zero Carbon Plans: Can Anybody Here Do Basic Arithmetic?

  • In California, as we all know, the inhabitants and their elected officials are far more sophisticated and virtuous than the rest of us rubes who inhabit the other parts of the country. This particularly goes for the arena of climate change, where California is leading the way to saving the planet by rapidly eliminating all of the carbon emissions coming from its electricity sector.

  • California’s CO2 emissions are about 1% of the world annual total, and its electricity sector accounts for about 15% of those emissions, so we’re talking here about approximately 0.15% of world emissions — an amount whose elimination, as you can easily see, will rapidly transform the world’s climate.

  • In 2018 California enacted a law known as SB100, which mandates a 100% carbon-emissions-free electricity sector by 2045. But how to get from here to there? That question was finally answered in March of this year, when the California state agencies responsible for achieving the goal (California Energy Commission, California Public Utilities Commission, and California Air Resources Board) issued a Joint Agency Report and accompanying Summary Document setting forth their Plans. The Plans can be accessed via this link.

  • The Plans show that the California regulators have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

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