Pun Salad

Last year, FIRE contacted the California Institute of Technology with concerns that new event funding guidelines issued by the university’s Graduate Student Council risk viewpoint discrimination and threaten student rights — maybe even break the law.

The university’s response? Not much.

Public schools are based on coercion. – and teach obedience and acquiescence to coercion as a part of their structure. The entire government is founded upon the idea that some people are superior to others (like royalty vs peasants or white people vs slaves). We should not allow our children to be educated by the elite class who believes that they are inherently allowed to use coercion and violence to maintain obedience. Taxation, regulations, gun control, and nearly all other laws imposed by politicians violate our natural rights. We should leave their system entirely.

The debate over the federal role in education has been going on for decades. Some say the feds should have a relatively large role while others say it should be relatively small. But while most people believe there should be at least some federal oversight, some believe there should be none at all.

Rep. Thomas Massie is one of those who believes there should be no federal involvement in education, and he is actively working to make that a reality. In February 2021, he introduced H.R. 899, a bill that perfectly encapsulates his views on this issue. It consists of one sentence:

“This bill terminates the Department of Education on December 31, 2022.”

So it’s worth casting our minds forward to how the world might look if small power stations start making huge quantities of energy from tiny quantities of water (the source of deuterium) and lithium (the source of tritium). We could heat our homes and power our cars with cheap electricity. We could synthesise fuel for planes and rockets. We could speed up productivity through automation. We could desalinate seawater. We could suck carbon dioxide out of the air, achieving net zero painlessly. We could rewild all wind and solar farms. Above all, we could tell the eco-killjoys who preach that our use of energy is not just a problem but a sin to get lost.

And therein lies the problem, because they will fight us every step of the way, inventing ludicrous objections to fusion. Remember, for the eco-elite, hair-shirt asceticism is a feature not a bug. Giving ordinary people unlimited energy would horrify these high priests. What they love about climate change is the excuse it gives them to disapprove of people having fun. Imagine the scowl on Greta’s face when we tell her electricity is going to be abundant, cheap, reliable and low-carbon. It’s shooting their fox.

Notice too how it would make a mockery of the urgent rush to net zero today. The BBC’s Jon Amos delivered a predictable sermon on this theme this week following the fusion announcement: “Fusion is not a solution to get us to 2050 net zero. This is a solution to power society in the second half of this century.”

He’s got it backwards: if fusion does come after 2050, why spend trillions and force people into austerity in the rush to net zero by 2050 instead of say 2070? We are hurrying to shut down coal, gas and nuclear prematurely with no reliable replacement. Looking back that might prove to have been very foolish.

When your party controls the presidency and Congress but produces disappointing results, that ought to tell you something about your political assumptions.

Joe Biden, like many (probably most) Democrats, often speaks about the economy in moralistic terms. Like most politicians, he is more likely to speak about it in moralistic terms when he and his party are out of power than when they are in power, for reasons that should be obvious enough. When the other guys are in charge, the indictment reads: “We know what policies will bring about economic growth, higher wages and employment, and more economic opportunity for those most in need of it, but those rat bastards won’t enact those policies, because they are bad people and don’t care about people like you.” This is silly to the point of stupidity, but it is the dominant theme of popular economic-policy discourse.

To believe that it is true would require believing that politicians are too committed to some principle to act in their own self-interest, a claim that brings with it a very heavy burden of proof. In reality, the president and the party in power always want to see strong economic growth, low unemployment, and high wages — and, though we didn’t talk about it very much for a generation or so, no president wants to see high inflation on his watch. If there were some magical policy sweet spot that would provide all of the economic results we want in a predictable, consistent way, craven political self-interest — a force more powerful than gravity — alone would ensure that these policies were the No. 1 item on everybody’s list. There would never be a recession, or a financial crisis, or runaway inflation. President Biden is not an especially smart, honest, or decent human being, but he doesn’t want to see food and fuel prices going supersonic during his presidency. The fact is that nobody really knows how to deal with the inflation problem without inviting a whole raft of other economic problems. The economy is complex — it isn’t a LEGO set that will all come together the right way if we just follow the instructions.