“The issue that needs to be raised [and won’t],” says Giuliani, who knows a thing or two about the New York locality, is, “we don’t have the modern energy infrastructure that we should have. We’re operating at the brink. Every day during hot days I’d worry about the possibility of a blackout. I built 10 new generators in NY City to try and address the problem. but had I tried to build a big generator, the environmentalists would have blocked it. We don’t build nuclear power-plants, we don’t expand transmission lines, we don’t put in modern generators. Anytime you try, it’s a 10-15 year process of litigation. We have to modernize our infrastructure, otherwise, we’re living on the brink. Something goes wrong and it’s 10, 5, 4 days to come back.”

“The opposition to [modernizing] projects, especially in the northeast, is systemic. You have to undergo 10-15 years of litigation to put in a new pipeline”

[SNIP]

Washington State is outside the orbits of power, so you hear nothing much about our annual battles with nature and regulation. But as “Dispatch from Third-World Washington State” detailed, early this year, we endure devastating power failures almost annually. The main problem in our state are regulations that prevent the maintenance of a tree-free grid and power lines.

Mayor GIULIANI repeated these important points on the Kudlow Report, implicating Obama’s policies of,

“absolutely just say[in] no to any form of expansion of energy, which is the reason why we’re having such a tough time recovering. … this aging infrastructure that we have. Well, we haven’t rebuilt it, not because we don’t have the money to do it, we haven’t rebuilt it because all these groups oppose every single thing you want to do. If you want to build a new generator, they oppose that. If you want to build new transmission lines, they oppose that. God forbid you should build a new nuclear power plant. Oh, my God, oh.”

KUDLOW: But that’s what Bloomy is saying. I don’t mean to cut. That’s what Bloomy is saying. When he goes down this road of global warming and he also mentioned, Rudy, cap and trade. He is saying we’re going to put limits on the volume of energy, all energy, including, you know, the new fracking energy for natural gas. This is an era of limits. It’s anti-growth. And New York City doesn’t need anti-growth policies and neither does the rest of the country.

Mayor GIULIANI: Well, the reason for the difficulty in recovering right now is that we are always at the breaking point on energy. … I knew this when I was the mayor. I built 10 new generators as a result of that. I really pushed to do it by the New York Power Authority. Where–and this is not just true of New York, it’s true of all throughout America. We operate at the limit. Now some of that is economics because it costs money to buy that excess energy, but some of it is also that excess energy doesn’t exist because we haven’t built a new nuclear power plant in 30 years. … We haven’t expanded transmission lines, we haven’t modernized. And a lot of that is because–I would call them not the environmentalists, the extreme environmentalists who oppose it and just block it completely. …”

Circumscribing Gouging = Circumscribing Private Property

Business, Capitalism, Economy, Ethics, Individual Rights, Objectivism, Political Economy, Private Property, Reason

Rights-based arguments are seldom made by members of the media and their guests. In explaining what a (semantic) aberration the term gouging is John Stossel opted to privilege the utilitarian angle. So did his guests.

Like any voluntary exchange of goods, “gouging” amounts to free people exchanging property to which they hold title. Each relinquishes something he values less (money/goods/labor) for something he values more (money/goods/labor).

John Stossel and guests prefer to stick to purely utilitarian economics. That’s the mindset that prevails.

I’d like to hear our side argue for freedom by saying that, whether free markets work or not is secondary to the unalienable, immutable, rights of men. It so happens that—surprise!—upholding the absolute rights of the individual to life, liberty and property works very well. Wealth redounds to all.

Bless Stossel for his efforts to promote economic literacy, over decades. However, I listened to Steve Horowitz last night, and then “muted” when Stossel made the perennial decision that guides the dueling perspectives political panel.

Rather than let Steve enlighten, Stossel allowed the reality denier to hog the stage with a perversion, not a version, of the truth.

“By presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.”

This positively postmodernist format would be fine were Rome not burning. However, “a Homeric contest is underway in the USA. Rome is burning. Now is not the time to fiddle or to unwittingly defraud the public.”

As I wrote in “More Chris Christie Cretinism*: Outlawing Price ‘Gouging,’” in addition to acting as “the street signs of the economy,” “prices are the prerogative of private property”:

In a free market, the institute of private property ensures that we have prices. “Prices are like a compass: pegged to supply and demand they ensure the correct allocation of resources. Without market prices, supply and demand cannot be brought into balance and, by extension, consumer needs cannot be satisfied. Conversely, in socialized systems there are no prices because there is no private property. Absent such knowledge, misuse, misallocation and mismanagement of capital are inevitable.”

To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi: That’s The Question

Democracy, Democrats, Government, libertarianism, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, Propaganda, Republicans, Terrorism, The State, War, Welfare

“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question,” and that’s the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

The gist of a cable received by the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on August 16 this year, summarized an emergency meeting convened a day before at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya.

The post could not be defended in the case of a coordinated attack. Such an attack was in the air, as Benghazi was home to “approximately ten Islamist militias” raring to go. The compound was small and understaffed. It lacked “the manpower, security measures, and weapons capabilities” to repel an all-out assault.

The cable laid out before Mrs. Clinton’s Emergency Action Committee what Fox News’ Catherine Herridge described, on Oct. 31, as “specific warnings” and “detailed intelligence.”

Fox News has been covering the Benghazi story wall-to-wall; the other cable news stations not at all. However, one specific snippet buried in the telegram was too fraught for the folks at Fox to probe.

In “liberated” Libya, the American outpost was also up against limited “host nation support.”

This was a coordinated attack on a despised presence, timed for the 9/11 anniversary. Living under de facto American occupation had enraged the occupied. Anathema to “free” Americans, this generic creature had evinced similar rage when he lived under Genghis Bush, in Iraq.

At first, the eminence grise of American opinion makers—left and right, Republican and Democrat—got behind the central conceit floated by the Obama Administration. The Arab world had once again erupted because of those of us who dared to insult Mohammad, Jihad’s muse. As the other set of despots used to intimate during its tenure in D.C., the perennial Muslim rioter resented the freedoms of our pole dancers, potty-mouthed entertainers, and loud, loutish politicians.

From the stuff that makes us “free,” these proxies for American power always exclude the IRS (Internal Revenue Service), authorized to hound us till end of the world, the alphabet soup of regulation agencies that prosecutes and regiments our best and brightest to the gills, the War on Drugs that assumes dominion over the most precious piece of real estate we own—our bodies—a welfare state that has been likened “not [to] a principality, but [to] a vast empire bigger than the entire budgets of almost every other country in the world,” and a warfare complex that gobbles up so much wealth and so many men, ours and others around the world.

As soon as it was discovered that these things—the accoutrements of a “wonderfully” messy democracy—could not be blamed for the attack on the Benghazi Mission, most media fell silent. …

The complete column is“To Be Or Not To Be In Benghazi; That’s The Question.” Read it on WND now.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY BY:

• Using the content-sharing icons on Barely a Blog posts.

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”

UPDATED: More Chris Christie Cretinism*: Outlawing Price ‘Gouging’ (Befriending Obama)

Business, Economy, Free Markets, Private Property, Socialism

In the previous post, we mentioned an economic fallacy that gets floated during major disasters. It is that “Storms Create Jobs.” The idea of price gouging is another example of erroneous economic thinking that creeps into the discussion, especially during natural- and government-generated disasters.

Writes Salon’s Matthew Yglesias:

… there are some things politicians of both parties can agree. Price gouging, for example, is wrong. New York Attorney General Eric Scheiderman, a Democrat, wants you to know it. But this isn’t just for soft-hearted liberals. New Jersey’s notoriously tough conservative governor, Chris Christie, also put out a weekend press release warning that “price gouging during a state of emergency is illegal” and that complaints would be investigated by the attorney general. Specifically, Garden State merchants are barred from raising prices more than 10 percent over their normal level during emergency conditions (New York’s anti-gouging law sets a less precise definition, barring “unconscionably extreme” increases).

Even a progressive like Yglesias is able to grasp some of the natural laws of economics. A sharp rise in prices to coincidence with reduced supply and an increased demand for a good signals the need to conserve scare resources:

The basic imperative to allocate goods efficiently doesn’t vanish in a storm or other crisis. If anything, it becomes more important. And price controls in an emergency have the same results as they do any other time: They lead to shortages and overconsumption. Letting merchants raise prices if they think customers will be willing to pay more isn’t a concession to greed. Rather, it creates much-needed incentives for people to think harder about what they really need and appropriately rewards vendors who manage their inventories well.

Still, some truths escape liberals (and most conservatives). Prices are the prerogative of private property.

* Chris Christie has shown himself to be more of an opportunistic lowlife than expected..

UPDATE (Nov. 1): Obama’s New BFF (Best Friend Forever):

Every day that Christie is rhetorically hugging Obama is a day when he’s not making the case for Romney. Christie went even further in an interview on Fox and Friends Tuesday morning, professing little interest when told Romney might visit to tour some of the damage in his state. “I have no idea” [if Romney is coming], “nor am I the least bit concerned or interested,” Christie said. “I have a job to do in New Jersey that is much bigger than presidential politics.”