Road to the Middle Class - by Christopher Chantrill

OUR DEMOCRATIC friends, led by Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), insist that we can’t drill our way out of high energy prices. The reason changes from moment to moment, of course. Sometimes it’s because of the “peak oil” argument, the notion that we have already passed the peak of oil production because there just isn’t that much oil left to find.

Alternatively, they argue that drilling at ANWR won’t put a dent in oil prices because it will take seven years to get the first drop of oil out. Or that the amount of oil won’t be that much so it isn’t worth drilling. You get the point.

Imagine the surprise of young intern Joel Alicea when he found an article entitled â€śThe Effect of Opening Up ANWR to Drilling on the Current Price of Oilâ€ť by Morris Coats et al.

Guess what the article says.

If an amount of newly discovered oil is significant enough to reduce prices in the future . . . [this indirectly] reduces the current price of oil just as if there were a reduction in the marginal costs of extracting oil now.

Well, that happens to be exactly what Republicans are saying. Conservatives are claiming that the reason that oil prices have taken a dive lately is that President Bush has rescinded the federal ban on offshore drilling, so speculators must take into account the odds that oil supplies will increase in the future. This could really contribute to the debate, couldn’t it?

But here’s the twist. The article was rejected by The Energy Journal. Not orignal research, old boy.

It’s a Catch 22. Democrats go on and on about how the law of supply and demand doesn’t work when it comes to energy. But you can’t get an article refuting them into a scholarly journal because it’s not original research. Here’s what the rejection letter said to Coats et al.:

Basically, your main result (the present impact of an anticipated future supply change) is already known to economists (although perhaps not to the Democratic Policy Committee) . . . It is our policy to publish only original research that adds significantly to the body of received knowledge regarding energy markets and policy.

These days, the American people really do need to be rocket scientists. Because they only get one chance to read about important economic findings. After that, it’s too late. Vieu jeu old chap. Old news. Can’t print that sort of thing.

But it sure is convenient for economic fabulists like Al Gore and Barack Obama.

McCain and the Internet

SEN. JOHN McCain (R-AZ) don’t know nothin’ about the internet. Doesn’t even use email, apparently. And Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) has run an internet-savvy campaign. Everyone knows that.

So when McCain’s campaign put up the celebrity spot on YouTube, suggesting that Sen. Obama was a celebrity like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, the experts howled. McCain was crazy for trying to make a mark being hip.

Only now it seems he was crazy like a unfold

Dueling Energy Futures

REPUBLICANS believe that we should let the market figure out the future of energy. Will we run out of oil? Can wind and solar make the difference? Is nuclear a viable option? Ultimately, entrepreneurs, inventors, and speculators will tell us. The government’s job is to think seriously about the rules, particularly the environmental rules.

Democrats see the future in more apocalyptic terms. They see the future as a question of saving the planet: from pollution, from Big Oil, from global warming.

So it is healthy that unfold

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89

WHAT CAN we say about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn except to say that he was a Witness. He was a witness to perhaps the greatest evil mankind has ever seen. We shall not see his like again.

Solzhenitsyn’s place in history is his witness to the horrors of the Soviet penal camp system. His Gulag Archipelago describes the gruesome islands of labor camps that were spread across the Soviet Union. An estimated 60 million people unfold

Good Old Rush

RUSH LIMBAUGH was just getting into a riff about the stupidity of Sen. Barack Obama’s plan to take money out of oil company profits and give it to people to help pay the cost of energy. It was the 20th anniversary, on August 1, 2008, of the Rush Limbaugh program on radio.

And guess who the first caller was on Open Line Friday? It was the three Bushes, President Bush 41, President Bush 43, and former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida. They called from Maine to wish Rush well on the 20th anniversary of the Excellence in Broadcasting unfold

Beware the Hip Urbanites, Mr. Obama

THAT’S what Joel Kotkin and Mark Schill recommend in “Urban America: The New Solid South”.

Yes, all the fashionable people agree that hip urban living in the “ideopolises” of the Cultural Creatives of Richard Florida is the wave of the future—not to mention necessary to save the planet.

In recent months, the city-centered media such as CNN, The New York Times and National Public Radio have jumped unfold

L'Esprit d'Escalier at KPLU

LAST NIGHT I went into the belly of the beast to the taping of a roundtable at the local NPR affiliate KPLU. I and five others listened to audio clips of presidents past, present and future talking about Social Security and welfare—safety nets—and then talked about our feelings to KPLU reporter Paula Wissel.

After an experience like that you always think of the zingers you could have delivered, but didn’t. The French have a word for it: l’esprit d’escalier, the spirit of the stairs.

No unfold

| August blogs | July blogs |

OPED

The Politics of the Social Safety Net

LAST WEEK I participated in a voter roundtable on Social Safety Nets at KPLU, a local Puget Sound NPR affiliate. Reporter Paula Wissel played us some audio clips from presidential speeches on Social Security, Medicare, and welfare, and then we got to talk about our feelings.

As you’d expect, there was an unspoken assumption that “safety net” and “government program” are just about one and the same thing. President Hoover was presented recommending good old American self-reliance in the depths of the Great ...

| more | comment | 08/07/08

"Obama Doesn't Really Think This Way"

This last week conservatives spent a lot of time in the vomitorium. ...

| more | comment | 08/01/08

Energy and Freedom

Beyond the Blame Game

New Hope for Global Warming Deniers

RMC CHAPTER-A-DAY

RMC Contents

Chapter 1: After the Welfare State

Chapter 2: Down in South Carolina and Out in Brooklyn

Chapter 3: Awakenings of Monotheism

THE SUPRISE OF REDNECKS debouching from the Appalachians into the Atlantic plain and the explosion of Pentecostalism in the inner cities has unnerved those who had convinced themselves that religion was a thing of the past, now that God was dead.... more

Chapter 4: The Nineteenth Century From the Top Down

Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century From the Bottom Up

RMC BOOKS

RMC Book of the Day

Burke, James, The Day The Universe Changed

RMC Books on Education

Andrew Coulson, Market Education
How universal literacy was achieved before government education

Carl Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic
How we got our education system

James Tooley, Reclaiming Education
How only a market in education will provide opportunity for the poor

James Tooley, The Miseducation of Women
How the feminists wrecked education for boys and for girls

E.G. West, Education and the State
How education was doing fine before the government muscled in

RMC Books on Law

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital
How ordinary people in the United States wrote the law during the 19th century

F. A. Hayek, Law Legislation and Liberty, Vol 1
How to build a society based upon law

Henry Maine, Ancient Law
How the movement of progressive peoples is from status to contract

John Zane, The Story of Law
How law developed from early times down to the present

RMC Books on Mutual Aid

James Bartholomew, The Welfare State We're In
How the welfare state makes crime, education, families, and health care worse.

David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
How ordinary people built a sturdy social safety net in the 19th century

David Green, Before Beveridge: Welfare Before the Welfare State
How ordinary people built themselves a sturdy safety net before the welfare state

Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy
How the US used to thrive under membership associations and could do again

David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry
How modern freemasonry got started in Scotland

RMC Books on Religion

David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing
How Christianity is booming in China

Finke & Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
How the United States grew into a religious nation

Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
How progressives must act fast if they want to save the welfare state

David Martin, Pentecostalism: The World Their Parish
How Pentecostalism is spreading across the world

Amazon.com Widgets

READINGS

Lose the "hockey-stick," pal
"Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in." Steve McIntyre has just shown that the temperature proxies in the hockey stick are not reliable, and the scientists doing the research knew it. This is a red-letter day in climate denial.

Why Prices Anticipate the Future
write an article on how opening up ANWR for drilling will depress prices today. Won't be published in The Energy Journal because it's not original research. Hum.

Where's the Outrage? Really.
guess which group is angrier than ten years ago. Right first time: "very liberal"

The Green Hornet
WSJ edit page analyzes Obama's stupid energy plan.

Michelle Malkin on Don't Drill Nancy Pelosi
she tells America's daughters to use their power responsibly then acts like a male partisan hack.

Take the Test!

THE PROJECT

Work to restore the Road to the Middle Class. Here’s how. Ground it in faith. Grade it with education. Protect it with mutual aid. Defend it with the law. more>>

THE ARGUMENT

The Road to the Middle Class is a journey from a world of power to a world of trust and love. In religion, it is a journey from power gods that respond to sacrifice and augury to the God who makes a covenant with mankind. In education, it is a journey from the world of the spoken word to the world of the written word. In community, it is the journey from dependence on blood kin and upon clientage under a great lord to the mutual aid and the rules of the self-governing fraternal association. In law it is the journey from the violence of force and feud to the king´s peace, the law of contract, and private property.