The Labor Theory Of Value

Sarah Hoyt destroys it. Go read the whole thing.

Politics Doesn't Stop

Mr. Obama's big problems so far have been his relations with corrupt politicians. I think it will be a continuing problem with his new administration. However, his biggest problem is that the Democrat Party is prone to strangling the economy.

A case in point his his nominee for energy czar, Carol Browner. She is also referred to as the climate czar. And what is with is with this czar business? A drug czar, a car czar, and now a climate/energy czar. I suppose the purpose of the czar if to oversee the 10,000 Federal efforts in a given area and make them all pull in the same direction. Of course a czar is a petty dictator. And you know where that leads. Such a policy has been tried before only it was called by another name Fuehrerprinzip. You know it doesn't sound nearly as appealing in the original German.

So where were we? Oh yeah the new climate fuhrer has an interesting past. However, she was no National Socialist. She was an international socialist (bigger ambitions?). A member of the Socialist International which was founded in 1951. And what is their fundamental policy on energy/climate and other ecological matters?

The best and cheapest solutions to the crisis are those that change the basic framework of production and consumption so that environmental damage does not occur in the first place.

Let me repeat the critical part change the basic framework of production and consumption. What would that mean in practice? Appointing really smart fuhrers who would tell us what to do. No more of that try things out and see who profits capitalist crap. Nope. This will all be very scientific. The smartest people (with the right political connections) will be giving orders. Friedrich Hayek in his book The Road to Serfdom explained why that is impossible. No one person actually knows enough to give the right orders for millions of people. No one can know the correct trade offs in all cases. There is a Hayek I might be willing to take orders from. But it would have to be up close and personal. And even then it would probably lead to Mi Vida Loca as it does in economics.

So back to Browner and her economic ideas.

According to its own principles, Socialist International favors the nationalization of industry, is skeptical of the benefits of economic growth and wants to establish a more “equitable international economic order.” In true Marxist form, it asserts that, “The concentration of economic power in few private hands must be replaced by a different order in which each person is entitled -- as citizen, consumer or wage-earner -- to influence the direction and distribution of production, the shaping of the means of production, and the conditions of working life.”

Of course to carry out that sort of economics you can't just have people going off on their own deciding what is just. You need a dictatorship of the proletariat. In other words the fuhrer decides what is good for you and what you will get. And you will be getting it good and hard.

So how does she intend to reduce carbon emissions? She has a plan. It is called decoupling. Profits will be decoupled from production.

In late-December, Carbon Control News reported that Browner was a “strong backer” of utility “decoupling,” which had emerged as a “key climate policy priority for Obama.”

What is utility decoupling? The profits of electric utility companies have traditionally depended on the amount of electricity sold; basically, the more power that is sold, the more profit that is earned. The productivity-profitability link is a logical and standard business principle that is easy to understand, easy to implement and that has worked for, well, millennia in myriad business ventures -- but no more for electric utilities, if Browner has her way.

Browner wants to sever, or decouple, a utility’s profits from the amount of electricity it sells. More electricity means more coal and natural gas burning, which, according to green dogma, means more greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. So Browner believes that less electricity production is, at least, a partial answer to climate change. But less electricity would mean less profitability for electric utilities, a powerful Washington lobby that Browner can ill afford to antagonize.

To date, the electric utility industry has aided and abetted the climate alarmist cause, if not by actually lobbying for global warming regulation, then at least by its willingness to entertain such regulation as public policy worthy of serious consideration. But since endangering utility profits would likely galvanize the industry once and for all against emissions regulation, the green dilemma boils down to figuring out a way to reduce electricity sales while guaranteeing utility profits. Enter decoupling.

How would decoupling actually function in practice? There are several different schemes for decoupling, but their tedious complexity precludes elaboration here. But the schemes all essentially amount to the same thing -- sticking it to ratepayers and taxpayers. This should come as no surprise, when you stop to think about it.

Decoupling involves government guaranteeing electric utilities steady or steadily increasing profits for selling less electricity. That means implementing one of three basic scenarios: (1) consumers paying more for less electricity; (2) electricity prices remaining steady and taxpayers being called upon to subsidize the difference between the profits from actual electricity sales and the profits guaranteed by government; or (3) some combination of the two. There are no other possibilities.

Obama did promise in his election campaign to bankrupt the coal industry and it looks like he has found just the woman to do it. The British are well into such a scheme and it looks like they are losing their power. Their electrical power.

It was in July of this year that the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee - prop. Tim Yeo - told the government that it must set a deadline for coal-fired power stations to install technology massively to cut their emissions, or they must be shut down.

In so doing, the committee sought to add to the burden on an industry which is already, for diverse reasons, failing to get to grips with the looming electricity shortage – offering a strategy which would make it near certain that the lights went out in 2012 or sooner.

Now, from the same House of Commons which brought you this lunacy, we have the Business and Enterprise Committee, headed by another Conservative MP – this time Peter Luff. His committee is warning that Britain is threatened by an "energy crunch" with disastrous social and economic consequences.

Ah yes the social in socialism brings disastrous consequences. When was it ever otherwise? The electric utilities will make out and the consumer will do without electricity. Corporate socialism at its finest. For the people. With political connections.

So is the Obama team proud of Ms. Browner's socialist connections? I don't think so.

Then there’s Carol Browner, Obama’s pick as energy czar and Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency director. She’s a member of Socialist International, the world’s leading home for socialism and SI’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which calls for “global governance” and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address man-caused climate change.

What’s wrong with socialism?

Not much, too many Democrats say. But someone on Obama’s team was a bit concerned, though, because by Thursday, Browner’s name and biography had been removed from Socialist International’s Web page.

It is almost as if they had something to hide.

And there is another reason why socialist Browner is kind of a funny choice for Obama. When she headed the EPA it was a hotbed of racism.

According to a February 2001 report in TIME magazine, the EPA was plagued with “festering racial problems” during Browner’s time in charge. One African-American EPA employee, Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, told TIME that she’d been passed over for promotions for being “too uppity,” adding, "We [African-American employees] were treated like Negroes, to use a polite term. We were put in our place.”

Coleman-Adebayo was later awarded $600,000 in damages in a settlement that found the EPA guilty of “discrimination and retaliation against whistle blowers.” Shortly thereafter, Congress passed the “No Fear” government whistle blower protection act in response to the Coleman-Adebayo v. Carol Browner decision.

Dr. Coleman-Adebayo lamented in a recent interview, "The very woman I prevailed against in court is being elevated to a White House decision-level position."

At least 150 EPA employees filed similar lawsuits during Browner’s time there. In one particularly bizarre incident, blogger Shawn Mallow notes, “Anita Nickens, an EPA specialist, and the only black present during a visit of Mrs. Browner, was told to clean the toilet prior to her arrival. Afterward, the rest of her white co-workers bragged about it.”

It's a good thing Browner's appointment to the newly invented post of "Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change" isn't subject to Senate approval.

There are a lot of good things about the Obama administration. Understanding the scientific arguments about global warming isn't one of them. Fortunately, although the scientific arguments about global warming aren't settled the politics is. Green on the outside, red on the inside. Socialism all the way. Because they believe, despite over a hundred years of recent evidence, that government can run your life better than you can.

Our only hope is that Mr. Obama is kept busy with corruption scandals and foreign wars so that he does not have much time or political capital to do serious damage here at home.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

You Can't Say That

Evidently in Britain there are fewer restrictions on polite conversation than there are in America. So Melanie Phillips says it:

You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded, politically promoted and supported by a nexus comprising black power anti-white racists, Jew-haters, revolutionary Marxists, unrepentant former terrorists and Chicago mobsters, is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. And apparently it’s considered impolite to say so.

Well. More like racist. But that is a minor quibble.

H/T Gateway Pundit

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Dark Ambition

So what is Mr. Obama's dark ambition? I'll give it to you in his own words from his book Dreams From My Father.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout,I chose my friends carefully.The more politically active black students.The foreign students.The Chicanos.The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets.At night,in the dorms,we discussed neocolonialism,Franz Fanon,Eurocentrism,and patriarchy.

Sounds like he was a Marxist at heart. And not very friendly to Western Culture. Not ready to lead - sure. My question is this: is he even ready to be an American with those kinds of attitudes?

H/T Gateway Pundit which has some nice links that are worth a look. Gateway also traces his ties to ACORN at least back to '92.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Update: 11 Oct 008 0453z

Evidently some one thinks there are copyright issues with the ad so it is no longer available on YouTube. You can still watch it here.

Demoralization

The video (link below) explains how Marxists have destroyed a significant swath of America. The fact that Obama is the Democrat nominee shows just how far the rot has gone. Watch the Video. Ex-KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov is the speaker.

Redistribution

The only people who actually need to "define rich" are the folks who are trying to establish a threshhold for redistributing your money.

Commenter JM hanes at Just One Minute

The Irony Of It All

Recently Chicago Magazine, the magazine of the University of Chicago, posted a short bit on a protest by a group of about 100 faculty members against the Milton Friedman Institute. The Chicago Maroon has more details.

More than 100 academic faculty members have united in protest over the University’s soon-to-be established Milton Friedman Institute, sending a letter to President Robert Zimmer in which they take issue with the economics research institute’s name and its foundational precepts, and requesting a meeting of the complete faculty to discuss their concerns.

And just what would those concerns be?

...approximately eight percent of the University’s faculty members were concerned enough over what they believe to be the Institute’s potential biases that they formally expressed their concerns to Zimmer and Provost Thomas Rosenbaum.

“It was a heterogeneous group,” said Bruce Lincoln, a professor at the Divinity School. “But we all felt a reason to discuss this.”

Lincoln, who helped draft the letter, said that some of the issues raised by the faculty were a perceived ideological bias for the Institute toward a conservative agenda, disciplinary narrowness, and the amount of money being spent. The University plans to invest $200 million in the project.

“This endeavor could reinforce among the public a perception that the University’s faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity,” the faculty wrote.

Ah yes. They want a very diverse faculty. Every one should think like them. i.e. be anti-capitalist. Not bad for a University founded by John D. Rockefeller.

Now for the irony part. In the same issue of the magazine, an article reprinted in the Maroon, discusses the best way to allocate scarce water resources where people have water rights. And what was the conclusion?

One solution, says Coursey, is to persuade senior-rights holders to curb their water consumption and sell the surplus to junior owners for profit. Under current laws, community members can’t exchange or sell water rights; Coursey’s market system would change that. Think of it like a lemonade stand, he says. “I have water. You want to buy it. We make a deal.” Based on market prices, owners would decide whether to keep the water to which they’re entitled or else lease or sell their rights on the open market.

“People are slowly but surely realizing the power of markets” to cope with scant environmental resources, says Coursey, whose past research includes evaluating the relative value people attach to environmental quality versus other public goods, such as education and safety. “Regulatory markets not only help you achieve your goals, but help you achieve them more efficiently.” To this end, Coursey and researchers at the University of New Mexico (UNM) have conducted economic experiments to predict how a water market would work. Using UNM undergraduate volunteers to represent farmers, city water officials, and environmental groups, the researchers track quantities traded and sale prices under differing conditions, such as average water supply or predicted drought.

So how did the article conclude?

As with any stock exchange, participation in the Mimbres market is voluntary. “If you want to sit on your rear end and do the same thing that your great-grandfather did with the water, that’s fine,” says Coursey. Those who choose to buy and sell can boost their profits while also helping manage a scarce natural resource. “Greed,” he says, “leads to a water system that is much more efficient than a situation where trading isn’t allowed.” Such avarice is good news for Mimbres residents who otherwise might not have enough water to go around.

So there you have it. Greed, properly harnessed through property rights and markets (commonly called capitalism) is the best way to allocate scarce resources. Something capitalists have been saying for quite some time. Only now we have evidence not just anecdotes. Actually more evidence. Since there always was a lot. For instance, hear much about the USSR these days? I thought not.

So I sent an e-mail to Chicago Magazine saying:

I note in the latest Chicago Magazine (July-Aug. 2008) that 101 Professors decry naming an economics institute after Milton Friedman. In the same issue another scholar's work (Don Coursey) shows that property rights and greed are the best way to allocate scarce (water) resources.

Evidently there are a number of UC professors pontificating well outside their areas of expertise. Too bad there is no list (or a link to a list) of the 101 so future students can tell which professors to avoid.

Well they got back to me saying my letter may be published in the next issue. We will see if they have the courage.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Commenter JL at Classical Values provides a list of the signers.

Is Obama A Marxist?

Obama’s upbringing was in a Marxist household. One of his mentors was Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

Black Liberation Theology at the core of TUCC/Wright is politically Marxist.

Obama’s analysis of flyover country makes more sense if you think the Big O looks at the world through the eyes of a Marxist. Given his upbringing and his mentors and then his work as a “community organizer” (organize for what? - what part of the political domain uses that term?) he could very well be a Marxist at heart.

Choose Your Commissar

I'm really depressed by the news that Fred Thompson will drop out of the race if he does not come in second in Iowa. In my opinion Fred would have the best chance in the general election. He also best represents my position on the major issues. So maybe I'm biased. Huckabee depresses me. Totally. Almost as bad as Hillary.

I’m from Illinois and closely followed Obama’s ’004 Campaign. He is more Marxist than Hillary. It does not bode well for the future of our country.

At least for the time being we have our choice of Commissars. Obama seems like a nice Commissar.

Prompted by an e-mail discussion with Eric of Classical Values.

Commenter LarryD says the rumor about Fred dropping out if he doesn't do well in Iowa is a false one. He cites this Captain's Quarters post which links to Iowahawk. I stand by the rest of my observations.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

The Whole University System

Some one claiming to be a professor at Duke asks in the commetnts at Durham in Wonderland that the credentials of some of the University Faculty not be questioned. That the dignity and internal cohesiveness of the university might be undermined. Here is my answer. The "pot bangers" refers to people actually banging on pots in the early days of the case and calling for castration of the accused 3 boys.

Are you telling me that the dignity of the pot bangers needs to be preserved?

Let me give it to you in Marxist terms:

The whole university system in America is being ripped apart by internal contradictions.

Sorry Duke had to be first.

Most unfortunate.

Euston We Have a Problem

There has been quite a bit of talk lately about the Euston Manifesto and what it means to be a principled leftist in time of war. Jeff Jarvis is covering it (with a link to Austin Bay included). Harry's Place covers it in a number of posts. Go here and here to start. Norm Geras also has a bit on it.

Here is something I sent to Norm:

Nice bit of work.

Still the adherence to socialism seems to me similar to Einstein's rejection of quantum mechanics. True socialism is a much prettier economic theory than
capitalism. The problem is it doesn't work.

Marx understood the problem well. Capitalism is necessary to create the capital that socialism intends to re-distribute. Full socialism will only be possible when capitalism is no longer profitable.

In the mean time the greater the inequality the faster the progress to socialism.

In other words all real socialists should be as much
as possible free market capitalists. The less capitalism is hindered by socialist policies the more wealth there will be at some future point.

It is very difficult to sacrifice today for tomorrow. Especially for socialists.

BTW if you really want to make poverty history read DeSoto. He says that the problem is government not money. I have a short introduction to DeSoto with links here:

Property.

As you know DeSoto is from Peru. His basic premise is that poor people are poor because they are shut out of the property system. It is not property that is bad
but the lack of it.

M. Simon

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