Energy: Release the Market!

 I'm not for or against any particular kind of energy. We need it all.

I do, however, oppose any subsidies or penalties for any kind of energy.

Petroleum, for instance, gets a gigantic "gunboat subsidy" -- American warships and troops protecting the Suez Canal, and so on. Our ring of bases along the borders of Russia, Iran, and China is likewise a subsidy -- intended to secure oil supplies to us and our "allies". On the other hand, petrol also has numerous penalties. For instance, auto emissions are now so insane that what comes out of a new car's tailpipe is cleaner than the average sample of ambient air. That's just dumb. Petrol supplies in the US are increasingly at risk because it's now almost impossible to build or expand refining or storage capacity, due to ever-tightening zoning and environmental laws . Refineries are aging and locked into footprints they can't grow out of; ensuring more maintenance failures into the future.

Wind energy likewise gets both subsidies and penalties.  At the same time energy companies are heavily subsidized to bring more wind energy online, turbines don't last forever and the increasing number of decommissioned turbines fills up gigantic landfills fast. American laws have virtually shut down mining for the precious metals wind energy needs, so we're shipping vast amounts of wealth to China to supply our expanding demand for those materials.

Nuclear has the same dynamic going on. The Price-Anderson act is a massive subsidy to nuclear energy. There are no insurance companies that are currently willing to cover the damages nuclear plants can cause -- witness the inability of even the Japanese government to be able to fully pay for the damage caused by just ONE Fukashima. Plus, the cost of burying (or storing) spent nuclear waste is huge -- and energy companies are largely excused from paying for it. Instead, governments do.

Get rid of all of the subsidies and penalties for all forms of energy, and allow the market to sort out which one is the safest and most efficient.

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, April 2021.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Montoni For Mesa County - Survey Answers for CRV

Colorado Candidates: I don't know how many of you are answering candidate questionnaires from groups that typically oppose Libertarian or non-government solutions, but I answered the rather long survey from Colorado Rural Voters.

My answers were rather long, too --there wasn't a text limit in the entry boxes, and I saw no notice that they preferred <100 words until I got to the confirmation screen.

Oh, well.

In any case, Colorado Rural Voters would be better named "Colorado Gimme Your Money and Rights Voters" -- look at their wish list on their main page.

Some of those wishes might sound good upon first blush to Libertarians.  But the tyrannical reality is how they want to implement them.

Anyway, most of my answers on their survey questions were copypasta from things I'd written earlier (in one case I copied something I wrote in 1999).  While some would quip that only proves I'm a closed-minded jerk, what I believe it means is that the takers are making the same arguments and coveting the same rights and property in 2020 as they were in 1999.

And in 1899.

Here is the actual survey.

Jeriel Clark is the contact person for this thing.  I have not looked into who funds this "nonpartisan" group (nonpartisan my ass).   If I remember correctly, before this she was a paid staffer for another group that was trying to saddle up the taxpayers of Grand Junction and every other municipality in Mesa (including the county itself) and take them for a sweaty ride on a massive debt load for a city-owned gym/fitness/pool/recreation center.   It is my fading memory that she was the person who came before the Mesa Libertarians and did a presentation for the gym.

I'm in the wrong business.  It apparently pays to be a leftist activist.

But getting on with the story, here is how I answered their survey:

Bootlickers Want YOU Out of Your Car

Eric Peters, a car enthusiast in Virginia, wrote on Sept 7, 2018, about something that's been gnawing at me too:

The average cost for insurance for a new teen driver is now north of $250 per month.

How is he supposed to get a car – or afford gas – when he is obliged to pony up $250 each month to the insurance mafia? ... How is a teenage kid working a minimum wage/part-time gig supposed to deal with it?

Faced with this extortion – and that’s exactly the right word; there’s no choice about paying the $250 per month, if the kid wants to drive legally – many simply opt out. A record-high percentage of 16-25-year-olds haven’t even got a driver’s license and forget the car. They stay home instead, game and text. When they need to get somewhere, they ride share or Uber or something that doesn’t require them to spend a minimum of 20-25 hours working at minimum wage (currently $10.50 er hour) gig hauling pizzas or some such just to tithe the mafia.... More and more of them just don’t care about cars – or driving.

Mission accomplished.

One way to get people out of cars – an agenda that has existed since at least the early ’70s in furtive “urban planning” circles but which has become aggressively obvious in recent years – is to make sure they never get into them. And the easiest way to do that is to make driving prohibitively and unavoidably expensive for new drivers especially. If they never learn to drive, they’ll never miss not driving.

I agree with Eric Peters that the dramatic increases in the cost of insuring new drivers is INTENTIONAL on the part of bureaucrats. It is government policy that allows insurance companies to do this. Just one of those policies is mandatory insurance -- which is nothing more than a massive subsidy to rent-seeking insurance companies.

It's many times more expensive to repair accident-damaged cars now than it was at the peak of Car Culture USA. That is again a direct result of federal policy: Cars must be built to federal standards, rather than customer standards. So what might have been a fender, hood, and grille replacement in 1968, now requires dozens of large and small parts, each one engineered to comply with federal crash standards, air bag systems (required by the feds), and crumple-zone standards -- and each one predictably pricey as a result.

Not long ago, there was an article in a car magazine where a GM engineer was reviewing past GM greats -- like the 1966 Chevrolet Malibu.  He said his department had actually studied the idea: that with the identical manufacturing, engineering, and features as one had in 1966, the same identical car would cost a buyer around $15,000 in today's dollars.

He also said that with modern regulation, all of the changes to every part of the car to comply with current regulations, you'd end up with a car that was almost unrecognizable, twice the weight, about the same power, and roughly three times the cost -- and either impossible to repair or horrendously expensive to repair.

The Murderous Left wants people out of cars. The single greatest liberator of all time -- the personal automobile -- is anathema to bootlickers who want to know who you are, where you are, what you're doing, who you're with, and what you have in your possession. AT ALL TIMES.

Bootlickers are control freaks who want the unwashed masses shuttled around in cattle cars that they can centrally shut down for whatever reason, and grab who or whatever they want.

They don't give a rat's ass about the environment, or deaths and injuries from accidents. All they are really after is CONTROL. And one way to get there is to make mobility-at-will all but impossible.

The Libertarian answer is to:

1) Abolish mandatory insurance requirements, like all other regulations

2) Abolish all government-issued identification regimes.

3) Eliminate all government-owned or operated transportation systems, and allow private ownership to mitigate the harm done by poor drivers.

4) Abolish government-operated police, and allow road owners to provide the kind of traffic control that suits them and their paying customers.

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, September, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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The Left's National Forest Reichstag Fires

Regarding the big wildfires in the American West this year:

A number of them are attributed to "pyroterrorism".  It's actually a real thing: USFS and other federal agencies have been holding training sessions and meetings about pyroterrorism at a more & more feverish pace the past few years...

Why?

Because jihadi groups have discovered that American forests have become supremely vulnerable -- and as a consequence, they can cost the US lives and billions -- for the price of a cellphone, a few ounces of gasoline, and a few matches.
 
The idea is not new: Hamas has been torching Israeli farm fields and nature reserves for many years in similar ways; and there is mounting evidence that the disastrous fires in Greece this year were largely a result of Turk and Muslim pyroterrorists who snuck into Greece alongside refugees & immigrants.

What's new, though, is that these extremists in America have begun training in remote-activated incendiary devices designed to ignite fires in fire-prone areas (think IED's for Smokey Bear).

Plus, stupid people are always around.

So why are American forest and grasslands are increasingly vulnerable?

One reason is that federal land policy has gotten trapped by lawsuits (many of which are funded by the forced "investment" by American taxpayers via the EAJA -- in other words a wholesale wealth transfer from taxpayers to the lawyer-industrial complex) which have done much to shut down logging on forests “managed” by the federal government, together with environmental activist political pressure to stop forest "management".   Land managers are increasingly restricted from setting up prescribed / controlled burns to eliminate fuel.  Nor can they contract out to resource (eg logging) companies to clear overgrown areas.

Besides the external pressure towards ignoring management, there is internal inertia trending in the same direction: older forest managers who understood that American forests and open land were supposed to be for a balance of uses, including recreation, wild areas, logging, mining, and drilling, and so on, are gradually being replaced by a newer generation of land managers who are increasingly opposed to any uses other than recreation -- or, better yet: human-prohibited wild space.

So a perfect storm is building bigger and bigger every year -- with increasingly devastating wildland fires as the predictable result.

Common sense says global warming isn't global if it's local.  However, environmentalists and their leftist brethren are now peddling the idea that global warming can occur in one small region, which is absurd.  Nevertheless it is the "logic" behind claims that local heat records are evidence of global warming.  This is how environmentalists play their game.

Suppose those of us who are not alarmists do the same?  Let's try it:

"Arsonist forest fires are definitely a sign that Man’s activities has increased local temperatures – as much as 800-1000 degrees C. If environmentalists' opposition to sensible forest management contributes to this 800 degree rise in the local temperature, they should pay for the damages they've caused."

That’s the way, right?

If, by your actions, you create conditions that result in the destruction of property, which includes causing "local" ... er... "global" warming by 800 degrees, then you can expect to bear the consequences in law and liberty:

Pay up, y'all.

But the real solution is to get politics out of the environment (and insurance), and thenceforth to protect property rights.

The fed should sell off the millions of acres it owns to the highest bidder, and from that point on, allow property owners to provide for the protection and management of their property.  How they do so will be managed by their insurers.  Such a regime will encourage proper management of forest resources and the mitigation of harmful practices.

Libertarians have called for the abolition of the BLM, USFS, NPS, and other alphabet-soup bureaucracies, and the wholesale privatization of government property.  We also call for the abolition of welfare for lawyers and political activists who profit endlessly by suing government.  If governments didn't own property, taxpayers wouldn't be left holding the bag on both sides of every argument over the environment.

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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, August, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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The Elites Will Run You Over, and Not Lose Any Sleep Over It

A couple of years ago, Karen Kwiatkowski  was out campaigning at the Rockingham County Fair.  I had been acquainted with her and considered her to be a friend, so of course when my family and I spotted her, we all stopped to talk a bit.

As I was speaking to her, a bureaucratocade (motorcade) drove into the exhibition area we were in.  The kids were fascinated.

I watched them come in, inwardly chuckling at the arrogance of the elites.

But then the two lead motorcycles with two very over-sized cops turned straight towards my children.  I was expecting them to hard right behind the pavilion, but then they cut diagonally across the grass without really slowing down.  I grabbed my child and pulled him behind me, as we were out of room behind us; we could not back up any further.  The elitists of the state missed me and my 5-year-old old by inches.  I was backed all the way up and holding him behind and beside me.

Couldn't have the governor walking more than a few feet to the big top, now, could we?

It was Bob McDonnell, the state's top Republican.

Besides the kingly driving, I was flabbergasted by the waste of it all.  There were at least twenty cops around the pavilion, and the motorcade disgorged a half-dozen more on motorcycles with disco lights flashing and a few more the big ol' full-size SUV the Guv was riding in.  There were maybe fifty people milling about to meet elected officials, including McDonnell.

You'd think Republicans supposedly interested in smaller government would order the police escort to go fight crime instead of showboating the self-importance of the political class -- and drive himself to the Fair himself in a second-hand, gas-sipping, 41 mpg city Ford Fusion hybrid.

Or maybe even an old, paid-for 1990 Ford Escort or Chevy Cavalier.

NY: Subways Stolen!

The subject of the NY subway system is a fascinating read that shows the true greed and hypocrisy of government-run operations.

The private NY mass transit operators were driven out of business in the 20s to 40's by government edict.

The tools used were regulatory -- denials of permits for infrastructure maintenance, denial of permits for expansion to new areas, a cap on fares of 5 cents, and other tactics.

The federal government prints money -- and as it prints more and more of it to cover deficit spending, the cash becomes worth less and less. This phenomenon was happening with federal money in the 1930's, just as it is today. With their nickel fares being eroded in value by federal inflation and the refusal of the city government to permit the companies to raise fares or do just about anything else, the handwriting was on the wall.

How long could **you** run a business if you could only charge one price for your product or service?  For the 42 years since the first subway opened in 1904 the fare had remained a nickel -- by law.

It is by no means a rare occurrence for governments to slaughter the golden goose in this way. For example, Vladimir Putin stole an oil empire from the private sector using the state's monopoly on force and handed the empire over to close political cronies at fire-sale prices.

Something very similar happened in New Jersey just a few years ago (late nineties), in the insurance business: wildly unpredictable, out of line liability awards made insurance in several industries impossible to write. The state government limited premiums on the front end, and allowed outlandish awards on the other. When insurance companies began to lose their shirts, and some began closing their NJ operations, the NJ government quickly stepped in with a law prohibiting the insurers from leaving the state -- so many went bankrupt instead.

Another similar tactic was used by the New York bureaucracy with regard to the subway system.

Check out the sanitized version of the story on the Metropolian Transit Authority's website.  Example: "Around the time the Independent was first conceived, in 1920, there was severe overcrowding on the subways. They were victims of their own success. The word "unification" was very politically correct during this time. The idea behind unification was to have the City of New York buy out the privately owned Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) Company and the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) Corporation. On April 25th, 1921, the New York Transit Commission was formed to develop a plan to resolve the overcrowding and delays on the current lines in any manner it saw fit, including "recapturing" existing lines from the privately owned rapid transit subway and elevated lines."


[NOTE: Links in the above paragraph were added by this author.]

"Recapturing" is bureaucratese for "stealing".

Notice the sleight-of-hand there?  The bureaucrats assume everything belongs to The State, and you only get title to it by the good graces of ... bureaucrats.  Because if you're not in their good graces, they get to "recapture" whatever they "loaned" to you.

There is a fairly good Wikipedia article about the shady history of the government takeover of the private transit system.

The "progressive" pols of New York from the twenties to the forties followed a well-worn path to seize the private subway and elevated train operators.  And other forms of mass transit.

One of the politicians, Mayor Hylan (also see this), a Democrat, involved in bankrupting the transit companies had earlier been fired from one of the subway companies. Once in a position to do so, he wrought his revenge - big time.

If the subways were crowded, then they were profitable! Thus, the city could have allowed the PRIVATE companies to build more lines. Instead, they put up the Independent (IND) lines in direct competition - right UNDER them - the 6th Avenue subway was put right under the 6th Avenue El and the Fulton Street subway in Brooklyn was put right UNDER the Fulton Street El.

Now, if there was a need for more subway & elevated lines, why not build them in other places not yet covered (for example, 5th Avenue or 10th Avenue?).  In fact, on the East Side of Manhattan, there were 3 IRT owned lines : Lexington, 3rd Av, and 2nd Av - back in 1921.  Now, under GOVERNMENT ownership to "relieve overcrowding", there is just the Lexington!  Transportation bond issues to raise money for another 2nd Av line came about in 1946, 1967, the 1970;s, etc. and were passed - but no subway line was built.  What the government was very good at was TEARING DOWN existing lines (and selling the scrap to our ally Japan who used it on Pearl Harbor).

After tearing down lines, the city then used the Maintenance budget as a slush fund.  The politicians became tools of the unions and paid ridiculous contracts.  "Chic" politicians like John Vliet Lindsay and his ilk encouraged graffiti "artistes" for a while.  As a "public accomodation", they were not allowed to remove winos, bums, beggars, etc. who slept and stunk up the subways.  After hitting rock bottom about 1980, there has been a little bit of a resurgence but more and more people take cars into Manhattan.

One of the few lines built by the City in the last 50 years was a tunnel from 63rd Street Manhattan into Queens that dead ends in Queens with no connections - not even to Queens Plaza a mile away - something like $2,000,000,000 for a tunnel to nowhere!


Mass transit was evolving naturally before government got involved.   The death of it was largely coincident with government interference.  its rebirth as a socialist government enterprise is fraught with waste and delay.  Any student of economics should study the history of mass transit in America -- especially with regard to subways -- if he wants a good picture of the corrupting hand of government.


For additional reading on the topic, here are a few links:


1.  "Subway Hijinks", by Gregory Bresiger, on Mises.org.

2.  "Subway Tax in the Rancid Apple ",  by Gregory Bresiger, on Mises.org.

EnviroLibertarian

In the lamestream media today was a lapdog-type article about an alleged "former skeptic" named Richard Muller.

This seems to be another in a long line of breathless media front-page hyping of the warmist agenda; especially as the articles printed in most outlets didn't report on any contrarian views.

By the way, Muller is not a 'skeptic'. Having a couple of questions about the 'facts' his fellow alarmists have put forth does not make an alarmist a skeptic. He has been an alarmist for a long time, and in fact has received a not insubstantial amount lot of money from the government and alarmist NGO's.

I think the science is wholly unsettled and it will have to be studied for a long time at length with real science and accurate data, rather than politicized claims based on corrupted data with less-than-reliable measurements and falsified reporting. Climate will probably need to be studied for a good century or two -- before humans will have acquired sufficient data to be able to accurately predict climate changes due to anthro activity.

There is also the question of what to do about it if science really does eventually prove beyond a reasonable doubt that human activity causes climate change. In essence, "so now what do we do?"

Doing some simple math might help put it all in perspective.

That said, solar power is in my future and I practice recycling to a greater extent than most "greens" I know.

I think practicing enviro "harm reduction" should be done by individuals at the individual level -- rather than at the collective level:

- Have fewer children (of course, the responsible already do; the irresponsible are still having huge families and don't care what they do to the planet as a result)

- Stop buying new Toyotas and Buicks, and bike, walk, or ride the bus. "recycle" an older car by fixing it up and using it until the seats fall through the floor.

- If government is going to force people to reduce their emissions, it is government that should lead the way.

- Grow your own no-till garden, without pesticides or chemical fertilizers.

- Stop using chemicals and pesticides on your lawn. [Our neighbors -- who include a number of Democrats and at least two families who are Green Party supporters -- use them and many have perfect monculture lawns as a result. We don't. I am slowly expanding our tree, bush, and flower plantings to cover more of our yard, so I can stop mowing it. I regard mowing lawns as a very strange habit that we Americans have gotten into due to cheap oil.]

Some of this I do because I find the idea of [essentially] giving my money to 8th century racist, sexist, violently intolerant religious bigots in the Middle East utterly repugnant.

But some of it I do because I really see no point in stripping the planet to the point where it can no longer support the population we have. I recycle because I consider burying perfectly good raw materials in landfills to be a complete waste.

Label me a skeptic of global warming if you wish. But before you throw stones, you'd better clean up that glass house of yours.

• If you DRIVE to an environmental rally, YOU are the problem.

• If you don't recycle, YOU are the problem. Yes, even if your county or city does not offer pick-up recycling, YOU can still recycle -- even counties that don't offer curbside recycling still have recycling units at their landfill; so get yourself a bunch of large garbage bags to store recycling in until it makes sense to take them to the dropoff yourself. Heck, You don't need curbside pickup -- most Targets and Wal-Marts now have a bunch of recycling bins in the front of the store, so you can just combine recycling with shopping. Some of the recycling centers even pay you for your trash!

• If you have a new or new-ish car, even if it's a Prius, YOU are the problem. Buy one of the millions of small cars from the 80's and 90's still out there, and use it until it drops dead beyond all repair.

In the meantime, I remain a skeptic.