printThe excerpt is from “Man With The Reverse-Midas Touch,” my new WND.COM column:
I’m really looking forward to hearing a speech by someone who is involved in innovation, knows America’s place in the world market and has fiscal responsibility. And I hope that Obama is listening very carefully when Steve Jobs speaks tomorrow.
“That was Penn Jillette on the eve of Barack Obama’s first, much-anticipated State of the Union address. The celebrity libertarian magician was making mischief with one of Larry King’s stock
questions.
It takes a magician to know one. On the day of Obama’s State of the Union sermon, Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple Inc., launched a magic mobile device called the ‘iPad.’ Perhaps Jillette thinks that the solution to America’s economic inertia lies in visionary producers like Jobs, and not in vain, profligate politicians like the president.
Technology is certainly a task for which Obama and minions are singularly ill-equipped. But that has not stopped them from tinkering – and attempting to bend industry in ‘green’ directions.
‘We should put more Americans to work building clean-energy facilities,’ Barack boomed last night. “You can see the results of last year’s investments in clean energy – in the North Carolina company that will create 1,200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries.’
Not according to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Against its politically correct instincts, the IEEE was forced to ‘cast stones at a wide selection of … poorly conceived technology projects.’ One of these was Government Motors’ Chevrolet Volt, ‘a car known as a plug-in hybrid because it will get most of its power from the wall socket in a garage.’
You see, unless the Big O issues a mandate compelling Americans to purchase the commie car, the Volt won’t be making money. …”
Read the complete column, “Man With The Reverse-Midas Touch.”
And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.
The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!
Electric vehicles might make sense if we could generate most of our electricity in nuclear plants. If we confine the discussion to American commercial nuclear plants, it’s still true that more people have been killed in Ted Kennedy’s car. The Argonne National Laboratory claims to have tested a passively safe design. Give me cheap nuclear electricity generated using uranium mined in America, and I might just buy an electric car, assuming that the batteries will have improved by the time the plants are built.
Electric cars do, however, create another problem. What will happen when some other Kennedy drives his electric car into salt water?
Link to the excellent analysis of the ridiculous Chevy Volt:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced…/why-the-chevy-volt-doesnt-add-up
Another link to the fraud known as Grasslands Ethanol:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/loser-grassolines-dark-side
All this economic meddling reminds me of Nikita Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Lands_Campaign
GOVERNMENT DOES NOT CREATE WEALTH, although it can impede its creation. A free market, through trial and error and the laws of supply and demand, will. The only constitutional powers given to Congress on the economy is to coin money (hopefully honestly and not the Federal Reserve deceit) and patents/copyrights (sadly abused).
Tax Credits is a transfer of money from future generations (via debt and counterfeiting inflation) to those who generally pay no taxes. Those who pay most of the taxes generally get none of the tax credits. The 1787 Constitution talked about GENERAL Welfare and UNIFORM taxes as opposed to the specific, corrupt, manipulative use of the tax power by Republicrat/Demoplicans. As Daniel Webster observed “An unlimited power to tax involves, necessarily, a power to destroy.”
LESS GOVERNMENT EQUALS MORE JOBS via: (1) reducing regulation, (2) simplifying, not adding to, the tax code, (3) reducing spending and debt, (4) lowering marginal tax rates – especially on savings.
Except for those masses of cheering, black teenage girls who seem to make up the hand picked audiences attending Obama’s “town hall meetings”, and a few other non thinkers even the faithful have reached the point where they realize his speeches are just so much yak dung.
Dear Ms Mercer
Nice comments
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=123427
As for the Chevy VOLT and other electric vehicles.
The greenies and other seem to forget a critical subject !
that subject is ENERGY and its sources:
So VOLT is a plug – in and uses electricity and NO gasoline
sounds to good
And where does this electricity come??
OOH you just plug it in and the magic ELECRICITY comes in wire!
BUT what makes this electricity?
AAAAAAH
You can make it at Nuclear Power Plants ( ooh Nuclear that a NO NO NO)
You can burn coal to run generators (oh that not good – pollution)
then there OIL fire generators AH back to Oil again!
We could use natural gas
OK there are Hydro plants they generate electricity but that is Not a big source of electricity ENERGY
Forget windmills they do NOT contribute significant energy to the electrical grid. Hey Didn’t the late Senator Kennedy want to ban Windmills on Martha’a vineyard as being unsightly
So here’s the question:
We get rid of our gas – guzzling cars and replace them with millions of all – electric vehicles.
How are we going to supply the millions of kilowatts of electricity (Energy) to run the cars?
EngiNERD