Search: feed

Equality under law is a core principle of every free society. It means the law does not discriminate among persons based on irrelevant characteristics. It sets the ground rules for competition but does not seek to advantage one person or group at the expense of others.

Equality under law is not an arbitrary preference but the logical implication of a more fundamental, natural equality rooted in the unity of the human species. The Declaration of Independence, which proclaims the equality of all human beings in respect to certain unalienable rights, is the locus classicus of this philosophy. Thomas Jefferson concisely explained the natural basis for equality under law when he stated that, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.”

Societies that reject (or do not recognize) the Declaration philosophy include not only those based on explicitly anti-egalitarian ideologies (Hitler’s master race, the feudal hierarchy of noble and serf), but also those based on the false equality of Marx and Lenin, who asserted that the human race is fundamentally bifurcated into two unequal classes — bourgeois and proletariat. Unsurprisingly, in Marxist-Leninist regimes all power ends up in the hands of a corrupt self-selected elite (nomenklatura) posing as the ‘vanguard of the proletariat.’

I’ve been thinking about this lately, because ‘progressive,’ activist government continually seeks to rig energy markets to favor some industries (those deemed green) at the expense of others (those deemed dirty). Moreover, interest groups continually lobby for special privileges, usually based on some public-interest pretext (‘What’s good for General Motors is good for the country’).

In his treatise The Law, 19th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat, discusses how to tell when law is perverted into a system of legal plunder:

But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.

The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.

Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.

Imagine if we had a government today that lived by Bastiat’s maxims! Bye-bye bridges to nowhere, the wind production tax credit, the ethanol mandate, green jobs programs, and Obamacare.

To Bastiat’s simple test for identifying legal plunder, I would add another — presumably with his approval were he alive today: The law aims to pick market winners and losers by imposing unequal burdens and/or conferring unequal benefits on different industries or firms.

The ethanol mandate clearly falls into the legal plunder category, and so does the campaign to restrict natural gas exports for the benefit of the chemical industry. I discuss those policies as equality-of-law-violating plunder schemes in recent comments on National Journal’s Energy Insiders blog. My comments (lightly edited) appear below. [click to continue…]

A new study by Heritage Foundation analysts Nicholas Loris, Kevin Dayaratma, and David Kreutzer clarifies the economically-devastating potential of the war on coal.

In effect, the study asks: What if anti-coal ‘progressives’ get everything they wish for?

Using the Heritage Foundation Energy Model, which is based on the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s National Energy Model System (NEMS), the three researchers analyze the economic impacts of a regulatory agenda phasing-out coal electric generation between 2015 and 2038. They find that by the end of 2023:

• Employment falls by nearly 600,000 jobs.
• Manufacturing loses over 270,000 jobs.
• Coal-mining jobs drop 30 percent.
• A family of four’s annual income drops more than $1,200 per year, and its total income drops by nearly $24,400 over the entire period of analysis.
• Aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) decreases by $2.23 trillion over the entire period of the analysis.

What accounts for those losses? First, phasing out coal generation will dramatically increase demand for natural gas, boosting gas prices by 28%. Gas is a key feedstock for several manufacturing industries:

Natural gas is not only a critical source of electricity generation; natural gas and liquids produced with natural gas provide a feedstock for fertilizers, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, waste treatment, food processing, fuel for industrial boilers, increasingly used as a transportation fuel, and much more.

The main reason, though, is simply that killing a major source of affordable electric power will increase business and household energy costs:

It will cost more to heat, cool, and light homes, and to cook meals. These higher energy prices will also have rippling effects throughout the economy. As energy prices increase, the cost of making products rises. Higher operating costs for businesses will be reflected in higher prices for consumers. Because everything Americans use and produce requires energy, consumers will take hit after hit. As prices rise, consumers buy less, and companies are forced to shed employees, close entirely, or move to other countries where the cost of doing business is lower. The result is fewer opportunities for American workers, lower incomes, less economic growth, and higher unemployment.

Two maps in the Heritage study should remove any doubt that the war on coal is an attack on a vital component of the U.S. economy and, thus, a danger to public health and welfare. [click to continue…]

Following EPA’s  proposal to implement regulations forcing coal power plants to reduce emissions, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy announced that her agency would be holding eleven public listening sessions around the country to discuss EPA’s plans and to receive feedback from the public (Atlanta, GA, Boston, MA, Chicago, IL, Dallas, TX, Denver, CO, Lenexa, KS, New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, San Francisco, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, DC). Coal power plant operators have repeatedly said these regulatory standards cannot be met without either adopting a technology (carbon capture ans sequestration) that doesn’t yet exist, or switching to another fuel. Notably, only one meeting is being held in a city located in a state ranked in the top ten coal producing state.

It would seem the administration has no intention of promoting legitimate debate as it excludes the very people who are affected most by these regulations.

Congress is outraged by the omission of impacted states from EPA’s listening tour destinations. Last Friday, 41 House representatives sent a letter to the EPA demanding to know why the proposed meeting sessions are not in the regions they affect.

These closed and existing power plants are not located in any of the areas you are holding these listening sessions. In all fairness, residents and businesses in rural areas deserve to be heard just as much.

There’s a simple reason EPA would prefer to not listen to people from coal-reliant regions: The agency’s regulations threaten jobs for no purpose, other than the placation of a special interest.

If the administration is sincere about addressing the concerns of the public, they should be holding these public listening sessions in cities located in states with the highest coal production such as Charleston, Cheyenne, Frankfort, Harrisburg, and Helena. These are the cities most accessible to people affected by the regulations and where people stand the greatest risk to lose their entire way of life.

As a pretext for expanding political control of the economy, redistributing wealth, and bilking consumers for the benefit of special interests, nothing beats the pseudo-science of social-cost-of-carbon estimation.

A new study by economists Laurie Johnson, Starla Yeh, and Chris Hope, The Social Cost of Carbon: Implications for Modernizing Our Electricity System, has the unintentional virtue of exposing what a menace SCC analysis has become.

Before examining the Johnson, Yeh, Hope (JYH) study, let’s review some preliminaries. [click to continue…]