power

The world is threatened with a renewed wave of anti-capitalism and anti-business sentiments and policies. Many who cheered the demise of Soviet communism in the early 1990s, presumed that this meant that, by default, the case for free markets and competitive enterprise had won in the battle of ideas. Over the last twenty-five years it has become clear that the same misguided arguments against free market capitalism constantly reemerge, like an ideological vampire waiting to rise from the intellectual grave and drain market freedom of its lifeblood by more government regulations and controls.

The great white environmentalist sharks smell blood in the water. It’s gushing from mortally wounded US coal companies that the Obama EPA has gutted as sacrifices on the altar of “dangerous manmade climate change” prevention and other spurious health, ecological and planetary scares.

It’s generally taken as a given that the American left is in favor of individual freedoms, but when it comes to the First Amendment that seems hardly any longer to be the case. A few examples should suffice. Let’s start with one: what can only be described as the Left’s irrational obsession with attempting to overturn the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which by now has become a virtual plank in the official Democratic Presidential Platform.

Everything in Washington, D.C. established to do X – ends up doing X, Y, Z, and triplets of every letter in the alphabet. This anti-federalism is fueled by several basic precepts. Of course DC wants as much power as it can grab. The more power it wields – the more it can lord over us and the more favors it can dole out. And the more coin it can spend – and the more coin it can justify taking from us.

If advocates of freedom were to make up a list of New Year’s resolutions for 2016, one of the most important items should be ending government’s monopoly control over money. In a free society, people in the marketplace should decide what they wish to use as money, not the government.

In “Court and Democracy” Jeffry Rosen speaks of the Supreme Court as playing a paradoxical role in American democracy. He states: “Americans think of the Supreme Court as the least democratic branch of the federal government, designed by the framers of the U.S. Constitution to ‘protect vulnerable minorities’ against the tyranny of the majority.”

Nevada’s casinos and the state’s largest electricity supplier are locked in an escalating conflict, but the Nevada Legislature can turn the impasse into a victory for both parties if it will merely restore economic freedom to electricity markets.

In what has been a rough couple of months for the Obama administration on the regulatory front, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has issued a temporary nationwide injunction halting the controversial new Waters of the United States rule (WOTUS) of the Clean Water Act. The U.S. District Court in North Dakota had already issued a preliminary injunction against the rule in late August, but the Obama administration claimed the injunction applied only to the 13 states bringing suit. The nationwide injunction is a significant setback for Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Germany and the United States are embarking on two drastically different energy policies, and these countries are reaping dramatically different results. In Germany, the government devised a top-down plan called Energiewende, a term meaning “turn” or “revolution,” intended to make Germany the renewable-energy center of the world. The United States has experienced its own energy revolution thanks to hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking,” which has transformed our nation into the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world in spite of, not because of, the federal government.

What this amusingly quantifies is that money is a vital component of any and everything we do. Certainly for how we (allegedly – used to) organize our economy. “Capital” is the fundamental element of capital-ism. It is the engine that drives our yachts – right up alongside the happiness we all pursue.

Look, we get why Democrats want to use the giant-ness of the federal government to punish their enemies and reward their friends. Crony Socialism is in their ideological DNA. And they grow government as huge as possible – to then have the largest possible weapon to wield.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, H. Sterling Burnett, managing editor of Environment & Climate News speaks with Amanda Maxham. Maxham, a writer and research associate at the Ayn Rand Institute, is a physicist who became a policy wonk. Maxham joins Burnett to discuss how alarmism regarding climate and science is preventing society from thriving.

How many times has government royally messed up something? And not fired anyone? Or done anything that remotely resembles improving their performance? Oh so very often. In part because they don’t care – once they have the power, they don’t care what happens to us. In part because they are too busy planning their next grabs.