25 Aug 2008

Obama: Liberal Magic Think in Action

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George Will notes how liberals like Obama believe government can simply order new energy sources to come into being.

Obama recently said that he would “require that 10 percent of our energy comes from renewable sources by the end of my first term — more than double what we have now.” Note the verb “require” and the adjective “renewable.” …

What will that involve? For conservatives, seeing is believing; for liberals, believing is seeing. Obama seems to believe that if a particular outcome is desirable, one can see how to require it. But how does that work? Details to follow, sometime after noon Jan. 20, 2009.

Obama has also promised that “we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years.” What a tranquilizing verb “get” is. This senator, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both — billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers and billions more to bribe customers to buy cars they otherwise would spurn.

Conservatives are sometimes justly accused of ascribing magic powers to money and markets: Increase the monetary demand for anything, and the supply of it will expand. But it is liberals such as Obama who think that any new technological marvel or other social delight can be summoned into existence by a sufficient appropriation. Once they thought “model cities” could be, too.

Where will the electricity for these million cars come from? Not nuclear power (see above). And not anywhere else, if Obama means this: “I will set a hard cap on all carbon emissions at a level that scientists say is necessary to curb global warming — an 80 percent reduction by 2050.”

No, he won’t. Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute notes that in 2050 there will be 420 million Americans — 40 million more households. So Obama’s cap would require reducing per capita carbon emissions to levels probably below even those “in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood.”

Liberal statism is a cult, fundamentally based on a narcissistic belief in the omnipotence of the calculative powers of human reason employed by an educated elite, to which class its subscribers by some curious coincidence invariably belong.

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2 Feedbacks on "Obama: Liberal Magic Think in Action"

Scott D

Cult behavior never modifies its priors based on actual experience. The cult belief of liberals is that if you have a worthy goal and if you chant the right words over and over (e.g. “No Child Left Behind”) and if you make a sufficient sacrifice at the alter (i.e. gobs of money), then human behavior and the laws of economics will magically yield to your authority. That this has failed to happen over and over throughout history leads rational observers to question the premise, but for the truly faithful liberal, it has as much impact as would God’s failure to respond to an evangelical believer’s daily prayer for a cure to his lumbago. What is needed is more chants, more money, a different priest. YES WE CAN! YES WE CAN!



T F Stern

Has anyone explained that plug in hybrid electric cars use a source of energy that is generated by something which must be consumed, mostly fossil fuels such as coal or oil? I hope the tooth fairy has extra electricity to hand out for these eco- stupid dreamers.



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