ZipTies

Strength is the redeeming virtue in adversity, but modern life has encouraged a nation of self-centred, consumption oriented sheep.

Instead of receiving protection and safety, they were detained within Australia’s Pacific Solution before being returned to Afghanistan; a country racked by violence.

Barack Obama’s election was symbolic, certainly, but an election landslide it wasn’t.

China can stimulate the economy by diffusing the wealth effect, promoting private ownership and entrepreneurship.

The minutes of the November RBA Board meeting appear to point towards a further outsized reduction in the official cash rate at next month’s meeting.

The idea of relocating Israel to the Kimberley is not so crazy if the cost of the relocation is less than the cost of Israel staying where it is.

Australia’s involvement in East Timor partly succeeded because of Indonesia’s reluctance to fight a full scale war.

Michael Giberson

Chris Davis at Discovery News: Powrtalk:

Automakers must be allowed to fail if they are to succeed. To date they’ve been supported just enough to muddle somewhere above the line of failure. But failure at least allows concrete recognition that the current model does not work. Creating the possibility for new models, new incarnations of the existing companies, growing room for the emerging companies.

There are vibrant solutions waiting to be born. The death of the Big Three as we know them could create room for new life …

Or, we can pour oodles and oodles of taxpayer money into the Big Three, and help keep all of that automotive design talent and automaking expertise locked into the industry’s old ways of doing things (for a few more years, anyway).

Lynne Kiesling

Reason’s Shika Dalmia has been making some libertarian-friendly Cabinet recommendations, and in her discussion of possible candidates for Secretary of Energy, she reminds us of a great idea floated jointly by Ed Crate of the Cato Institute and Carl Pope of the Sierra Club a few years ago, in 2002:

But there is a better way for Obama to promote green energy that doesn’t involve breaking the federal bank: A zero subsidy energy policy, something that Carl Pope, former executive director of the Sierra Club, and Ed Crane, president of the CATO Institute, jointly advocated some years ago. Instead of asking taxpayers to subsidize green technologies, such a policy would simply eliminate existing subsidies for coal and oil that supply the vast bulk of American energy. It would also replace existing coal and oil taxes with pollution taxes to internalize emissions that pose actual harm to human health or property. This would create a level playing field in energy markets - whose absence environmentalists have long claimed is responsible for making solar, wind and other green fuels uncompetitive.

I endorse this approach enthusiastically; in fact, I blogged it back in 2005, along with related work by Cato’s Jerry Taylor, as well as in 2002.

Interestingly, that 2005 post of mine was a critique of the then-draft energy bill (a version of which ultimately passed). At the time, my reaction to that bill was the same as is my growing opinion of how the Obama administration is shaping up:

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

With thanks and apologies to Pete Townsend (and yes, it’s a Who song, but Pete’s the songwriter on that gem, so I’m being a pedant).

Lynne Kiesling

All of this Eric Holder gossip today unfortunately creates an opportunity for me to pick a grammatical nit: the plural of “attorney general” is “attorneys general”, not “attorney generals”. The “general” in “attorney general” is an adjective that modifies the noun “attorney”. The plural attaches to the noun, not the adjective.

Bet you didn’t know that I was such a grammar weenie … unless you’re the KP Spouse, my friend Amy, or my long-suffering students whose writing I grade!

On a more substantive note, Eric Holder as Attorney General bodes poorly for both civil rights and a more reasonable legal approach to drug policy. This Reason post and its links make that argument from a libertarian perspective, as well as from John Nichols at The Nation.