URLs du Jour

2022-08-27

  • Congratulations, New Hampshire Libertarian Party. You lost my vote. Our fair state made the Daily Wire news: New Hampshire Libertarians Dragged For Calling John McCain’s Death A ‘Holiday’. It's about this tweet:

    The official Twitter account for the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire took a beating on Friday for suggesting that people should celebrate the death of the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ) as they would any other holiday.

    The account posted a photo from the late senator’s funeral — with his daughter Meghan McCain standing beside the casket in tears — and added just two words by way of a caption: “Happy Holidays.”

    I am a registered Republican, so I can vote in primaries. But I've been a pretty reliable Libertarian vote in November general elections. No longer. I may just stay home and let the inmates run the asylum.


  • Meanwhile… as Jonah Goldberg notes, The GOP Is Shrink-Wrapping Itself Around Trump. Excerpt:

    Trump and his fans are convinced that there’s nothing wrong with the party that can’t be fixed by doubling-down on the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose the House, Senate, and presidency in a single term. Recall that Trump’s explanation for huge midterm losses in 2018 was that Republican incumbents, dragged down by Trump’s unpopularity, failed to “embrace” him. That’s because Trump would rather be the undisputed leader of a small tent than just one voice in a big one.

    As McConnell has implicitly conceded, Trump has jeopardized the GOP’s chances of taking the Senate because he cares more about nominating Trump loyalists than candidates who can win general elections in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona or Ohio.

    So, to sum up: the Libertarians have implicitly purged me; the Republicans seem to be on track to do the same by turning into a cult of personality.

    Democrats? They seem sane and decent by comparison, except for all the economy-wrecking, liberty-destroying statism.

    So the stay-at-home-in-November policy is looking increasingly likely.


  • Mister, we could use a man like Frédéric Bastiat again. Brad Polumbo is pretty close, though: Biden's Student Loan Bailout Is a Textbook Example of 'Legal Plunder'.

    There’s an apocryphal quote often misattributed to Ben Franklin that goes something like this: “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." While we’re not quite nearing the collapse of our republic, we are actively witnessing the corrosive effect it has when the political power of redistributionism is abused.

    President Biden is “canceling” (transferring) student debt for millions of Americans and forcing the rest of us to pay for it. His plan “cancels” $10,000 for borrowers who earn less than $125,000 individually or $250,000 for their household. It also includes two other forgiveness plans that bring the total cost to taxpayers up to $500 billion, a whopping $3,500 per federal taxpayer.

    Ackshually, according to the green-eyeshade folks at Penn Wharton, that last number could need some adjustment:

    Summary: President Biden’s new student loan forgiveness plan includes three major components. We estimate that debt cancellation alone will cost up to $519 billion, with about 75% of the benefit accruing to households making $88,000 or less. Loan forbearance will cost another $16 billion. The new income-driven repayment (IDR) program would cost another $70 billion, increasing the total plan cost to $605 billion under strict “static” assumptions. However, depending on future IDR program details to be released and potential behavioral (i.e., “non-static”) changes, total plan costs could exceed $1 trillion.

    There's a map at the link copped from this 2018 Urban Institute study with the (somewhat surprising) finding that New Hampshire had the highest "share of college students with new student debt 2014-2016". No idea if that's changed. NH kids, what happened to LFOD?

    Anyway, Polumbo cites Monsieur B, so we must too:

    This is precisely what French economist Frédéric Bastiat once dubbed “legal plunder.” He famously noted that, “Government is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.”

    To this end, Bastiat explained, “Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."

    Oui. Bon point.


  • Unmothball Seabrook 2. Ronald Bailey notes a (relative) sanity outbreak: Japan Set to Reopen Nuclear Power Plants, Build New Ones. And not just in Japan.

    Rationality about nuclear power seems to be breaking out across the globe over the past month. First, Germany announced as a response to Russia's natural gas blackmail that it will keep open three perfectly good nuclear power plants that it was planning to shut down this year. Germany has already closed 14 other plants in an absurd overreaction to the 2011 Fukushima meltdowns caused by a giant tsunami hitting those coastal nuclear power plants.

    Even la-la land politicians have begun to realize that running California using electricity generated solely from unreliable wind and solar power is a fantasy. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has now proposed a plan to keep the Golden State's only remaining nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon operating for at least another 10 years. That plant currently generates enough electricity to meet the needs of nearly 3 million households.

    Speaking of Fukushima, according to the Financial Times, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has announced that the government plans to allow the restart of at least 10 more of the nuclear power plants it shuttered after the 2011 disaster. In addition, Kishida is pushing for research on and the construction of new safer nuclear plants as a way to protect Japanese consumers from erratic global fossil fuel markets and reduce his country's greenhouse gas emissions. Kishida foresees Japan becoming a major exporter of nuclear generation technology to power hungry developing countries around the world.

    Our state's nuke was originally designed to have two reactors, but the first one barely got finished in the 1980s, and the second one was canceled. There have been noises over the years about restarting construction on it, but nothing recent. I guess it will have to wait until people start freezing to death in the dark.


Last Modified 2022-08-27 10:13 AM EDT