Easy Times (8/26/10)

Fantasy:

The Obama administration claimed this week that $100 billion invested in innovative technologies under the economic stimulus law is “transforming the American economy” by putting the nation on track for technological breakthroughs in health care, energy and transportation.

Reality:

The US isn’t really on its way to “doubling U.S. renewable energy generation capacity and U.S. renewable manufacturing capacity by 2012.”  In fact, doubling it would be about the same as tripling or quadrupling it anyway, since the capacity doesn’t exist in meaningful, mass-production form anyway.  Neither are we on the way to halving the cost of solar power, for much the same reason; the recession may have had more impact on lowering cost than the pork did.  High-speed rail is still a vastly expensive investment in a service that few people want to use when airplanes are faster and more economical, for the simple reason that it doesn’t take billions of dollars to build and maintain air rails.  Making health-care records electronic sounds sexy, but no one has really been able to define how that will make people healthier on a large scale — and HHS only just published its standards for the computer systems that can be funded.  None exist at the moment.

And Obama Motors' $41,000 windup toy dubbed the "Volt"?  Costs twice as much as a REAL car its size, and aside from having to carry around a three-hundred-mile extension cord, it needs to be powered by the electricity that Red Barry himself has long boasted he wants to make "skyrocketingly" more expensive by effectively banning fossil fuels and catastrophically reducing energy sources.

Marxists think markets move too slow and need to be "controlled" to "force" technological advances.  But economics is not a matter of will, but a matter of incentives.  With the profit motive as the carrot, all these gee-whiz-bang wonders will eventually be developed, just as we went from the first powered flight in 1903 to landing men our planet's moon just sixty-six years later.

But it will take time on that scale.  If, say, Woodrow Wilson had opted against getting into World War I but had instead, in the greatest "progressive" tradition, demanded that the nation pour all its resources into manned space exploration, you know what the result would have been?  National bankruptcy and the loss of the economic resources and technological processes that eventually led to Apollo 11.  At least until Warren Harding replaced him, turned America back to free market economics, and both killed runaway inflation and revived the U.S. economy within two years (just like Ronald Reagan did six decades later).

It is hubris, my friends. hubris.  Delusions of godhood to do things that "no, we can't" do just because Barack Obama says he's going to do them, and the megalomaniacal egotism that justifies theft of REAL wealth and liberty on a national scale out of frustration that reality is not the malleable clay that only the TRUE God can mold and shape as He wills.

It's not that "he doesn't get it"; it's that he will not accept it.  And that's what makes liberals dangerous and untrustworthy with political power.

***But we can't end today's edition on such a downer, so here's your daily installment of good news from Barackzarro World:

The percentage of U.S. mortgages with one overdue payment rose in the second quarter, the first gain in early delinquencies in more than a year, as economic growth slowed and jobless claims rose.

Home loans overdue by a month rose to 3.51%, from 3.45% in the first quarter, according to a report today from the Washington-based Mortgage Bankers Association.

The gain suggests a slowing economy may increase foreclosures as mortgage holders lose their jobs, said Jay Brinkmann, chief economist of the group. New unemployment claims, measured as a monthly average, rose throughout the second quarter after falling in most of the prior period, according to data from the Labor Department in Washington.

“As we work through the bucket of troubled loans, we’re seeing an increase in a new crop of troubled loans,” Brinkmann said in an interview. “It’s primarily driven by the jobs market. It still takes a paycheck to make a mortgage payment.”

Don't worry, though, folks: with the sixty-three quadrillion dollars Barry's gonna have Helicopter Ben print up, he's gonna put a Star Trek replicator in every American household, relieving us of the need to be consumers at all, except of....government-issue Star Trek replicators.

It'll share your one government-issue wall outlet with your goverment-issue Volt.