At Cato Institute, its energy and environment research promotes policies that help safeguard the environment, but not at the expense of economic liberty. As Cato’s Patrick J. Michaels points out, the environmental machine—its bureaucrats and activists—are legally empowered to do things that no Congress could think of doing. Like mandating that autos reach fuel economies that will make them “uproariously expensive.” Or, in a recent decision by the D.C. Court of Appeals, that no new coal-fired electricity will ever be generated. Or that, in California, the Delta Smelt is more important than the agricultural needs of our country.

The EPA’s own computer models show that if U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide were cut to zero today, we still wouldn’t be able to measure the effect on global temps in the year 2100.  Read the preceding startling sentence again. Mr. Michaels explains here why the environmental bureaucracy is not capable of doing anything but regulating.

The decline of Earth Day is in part an unintended consequence of its success. The older among us remember the stinging ozone-laden smog of southern California and the opaque air of Pittsburgh. These, along with countless other environmental horrors, were pretty much everywhere, and everyone agreed we had tremendous problems. The EPA was started not by lefty democrats but by Richard Nixon. People were literally sick and very tired of the obvious pollution of so many of the nation’s urban airsheds.

This was back in the day when Californians were proud to say that they led the nation to its ultimate future (such an attitude today, unfortunately, predicts national bankruptcy and one-party rule). The Los Angeles Basin is one of the worst locations on earth to place a city thanks to the combination of stable air from the Pacific maritime layer, and trapped air, thanks to the surrounding steep mountains. But somehow California cleaned it up. Similar regulations governing automobile emissions spread across the country. City air became breathable.

State and federal bureaucracies charged with maintaining environmental quality grew like mushrooms in the compost of lousy air. Like unions, once their work was done, did they decline into irrelevancy? Hardly.

Which is why Earth Day isn’t so popular any more. As problems were solved, rather than qo quietly into the night, the environmental bureaucracy doubled and tripled down. Those who made our air breathable became the pest and pestilence, enforcing all kinds of well-intentioned law in the most stringent and asinine ways imaginable. Thus the Delta Smelt is destroying agriculture in California’s Central Valley, in its heyday perhaps the most remarkable agricultural achievement in our planet’s history. A modestly sized semi-desert, when irrigated with water impounded in the Sierra Nevada it became the nation’s vegetable garden. Today we divert that water to keep the little fish alive.

This coming summer may reveal the profound bankruptcy of this policy. The California irrigation system is actually built to withstand multiple years of consecutive drought, which is the current situation out there. But that’s if the water is not poured out in favor of an irrelevant fish, instead of being used to feed the nation. This summer will probably mark its first system wide failure.

Where it was once both useful and noble, the environmental machine has now become a tool of common oppression, legally empowered to do things that no Congress would dream of, like—thanks to a recent decision by the DC Court of Appeals—making sure that no new coal-fired electricity will ever be generated.

Or, like mandating that cars—largely cleaned up during the noble era—achieve fuel economies that will make them uproariously expensive, while at the same time doing absolutely nothing about the purported problem (global warming) that this is supposed to stop. Meeting this goal will require huge amounts of copper, but the EPA is bent upon pre-empting even an application to exploit North America’s largest known deposit, the Pebble Project, some 150 miles west of Anchorage, in land zoned for mining.

The bureaucracy is incapable of doing anything but regulating, even though EPA’s own computer models show that if our emissions of dreaded carbon dioxide were cut to zero, today, that we wouldn’t be able to measure the effect on global temperatures in the year 2100.

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Here NNT.com’s David H. Newman, M.D has the surprising findings for you.

Narrative: Aspirin blocks the action of platelets, reducing clots and ostensibly lowering the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and deaths. This review examined and summarized the magnitude of benefits from daily aspirin when compared to placebo for ‘secondary prevention’, i.e. among patients who have had a recent heart attack or stroke.

Aspirin works: those taking aspirin in these studies suffered fewer heart attacks, strokes, and deaths than those taking a placebo, at the cost of a small number of bleeding events. In addition, the benefits outlined here were seen after just over two years of daily aspirin therapy, in contrast to the 4 and 5 year periods seen with many other cardiovascular preventive interventions.

Caveats: Aspirin can cause bleeding events and gastrointestinal problems (ulcers, indigestion, etc.). However the cost of generic aspirin is very low and the benefits are considerably more common than the harms, making aspirin an excellent intervention for the right patients. This intervention does not translate, however, to patients who are not at very high risk (i.e. those who have established disease). Note our related summary on the topic of aspirin for ‘primary prevention’.

For those who cannot tolerate aspirin other antiplatelet agents such as clopidogrel, ticlopidine, and related drugs are probably very reasonable and effective alternatives and seem to have similar beneficial effects, despite having more side effects.

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Sen. Rand Paul spoke with the Boston Herald prior to his talk at Harvard University. The Herald reports:

National Republicans — still smarting from Democratic drubbings in the last two presidential contests — face a stark scenario of “evolve, adapt or die” as they plot their next campaign to take back the Oval Office in 2016, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky told the Herald yesterday in an exclusive interview.

Paul — an unapologetic libertarian seen as a likely GOP presidential contender — said the Republican Party has to rewrite its standard platform to woo minorities into a broad coalition that can win national races.

“I’ve been pretty harsh about where the party is now. I think we evolve, adapt or die because we’re winning a lot of Congressional seats but we’re not winning nationally. We win rural America and we lose the cities,” Paul said during a wide-ranging interview on Boston Herald Radio and a subsequent sit-down with Herald reporters and editors.

He admitted that Republicans are “not doing so hot” with blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and other minorities, and pointed out that libertarian values focus on individual rights with broad appeal.

“When you protect the individual you protect the minority, so you protect minority rights,” he said.

A Tea Party favorite and a former ophthalmologist, Paul hasn’t been entirely welcomed by his colleagues, who have blasted him for what they see as an isolationist stance on national security and a hands-off approach to the war on drugs.

“I think any time a party loses, particularly twice in a row, and we lost 2008 and 2012 nationally, that there is a soul searching and there is a jockeying for position,” Rand said of the smack talk from pols like U.S. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) “Whoever comes out as ultimately the one who leads the party is, I think, the one who can do something a little bit different.”

Added Paul with a smile, “I think debate is healthy. I prefer it if they don’t call me names. I hate to be called names.”

In 2010, Larry Ellison paid $10.5 million for the Astors’ Beechwood mansion on Bellevue Ave in Newport, RI not far from my office. And based on all of the heavy duty staging, Ford F-150s, and workers (that I can see) $10.5 mil is simply the price for admission. Larry’s going deep on this one. Meanwhile, homes in Newport have a median price of $421,000 according to Trulia.com. Who needs the Fed? Newport and other desirable markets like Manhattan are fine without the Fed.  That raises the question; how much has the Fed really helped less desirable markets with all of its money printing?

The answer: Not much. With the trillions of dollars the Fed has created out of thin air, the real estate market is basically on life-support. Take a look at the 1959-current numbers for U.S. Housing Starts. Only now are housing starts reaching levels where they normally bottom out during a recession.

U.S. New Homes Sales  look like the rocky edges of Brenton reef off Newport’s Ocean Drive. The negative 14.5 percent wreckage in March adds insult to injury. And real estate execs want lower prices. “We’d like to try to bring our [average selling prices] down across the country,” said Meritage Homes Corp Chief Executive Steven Hilton in a conference call. “They’re getting relatively high. I don’t see anything on the horizon that gives me a lot of excitement that the first-time buyer is coming back.”

And the last four out of five months have been terrible.

We’ve seen this play out for a while now. “Yes, there has been a measurable improvement, but a certain softness continues to prevail despite record setting injections of liquidity by the Fed. So are you impressed? You shouldn’t be. The little guy is tapped out, living on a debit card and maybe sans a job. Mortgages are still under water. Small business owners are justifiably reluctant to hire, and Americans, in general, are in a pretty foul mood…” wrote Dick Young in the October issue of Intelligence Report. To add insult to injury we have a new Fed Chariwoman, Janet Yellen chomping at the bit to prove herself worthy of the lofty title. She is hammering home a misguided Fed policy that was wrong from the very beginning going back to Greenspan and then Bernanke. This cannot end well.

Debbie and I are on the Left Bank not far from the Luxembourg Gardens, the exciting Rue de Buci and Rue de Seine, as well as the classic St. Germain literary bistros Café de Flore, Deux Margots, and Brasserie Lipp, and Sylvia Beach’s original Shakespeare & Co. at 12 Rue l’Odeon. Paris comprises 20 districts or arrondissments, each with its own color and flavor. Six are on the left bank of the river Seine (5,6,7,13,14,15). We spend most of our time in Paris in the sixth and seventh arrondissments with less time spent in the fifth, first, second, eighth and sixteenth). After our stay on the Left bank, we are going to relocate to the Hotel le Bristol in the eighth. If you saw Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (an absolute must) you saw Hotel le Bristol in the opening scenes where Gil Pender meets his fiancée’s hardline Republican parents. Here are some neat books Debbie and I have spent time with in preparing for Paris; Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, Authentic Bistros of Paris, Quiet Corners of Paris and Paris, an Inspiring Tour of the City’s Creative Heart.

The Hill reports on Senator Rand Paul’s class action lawsuit against President Obama, the NSA and others involved in collecting Americans’ telephone metadata.

“I am filing a lawsuit against President Barack Obama because he has publicly refused to stop a clear and continuing violation of the 4th Amendment,” Sen. Rand Paul said in a statement back in February from his political action committee. “The Bill of Rights protects all citizens from general warrants.” He is supported by the 6 million citizens of FreedomWorks. “If you use a phone, you should care about this case,” said FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe.

The Kentucky senator has been planning the lawsuit for months, which he will file in the Washington, D.C., district court as a private citizen.

Many of his previous statements on the issue have not included Obama as a defendant in the lawsuit.

In addition to Obama and the NSA, the lawsuit will name Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Director of the National Security Agency Gen. Keith Alexander and FBI Director James Comey.

As previously announced, Ken Cuccinelli will act as lead counsel. Cuccinelli, the former Virginia attorney general, lost the state’s gubernatorial election last year to Terry Mcauliffe.

Here National Review’s John Fund looks at Scotland and Venice as two examples.

The debt crisis and years of barely perceptible economic growth are fueling independence movements in some regions of Europe.

On September 18, Scotland will vote on becoming independent from the United Kingdom. If a majority approves, the U.K. would lose a full 10 percent of its population and a third of its landmass. Polls show that backers of independence are trailing but gaining; they now have more than 40 percent of the vote.

Last month, Venice and its surrounding areas held a non-binding online referendum on independence from Italy. Of the Veneto region’s 5 million people, more than 2 million cast ballots, and an astonishing 89 percent supported secession. Even if some of the votes cast were duplicates (something security precautions were erected to prevent), the result clearly shows an alienated and angry electorate. The regional government might soon announce a more formal referendum to be held at polling places.

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The release of Thomas Piketty’s new book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Harvard University Press has caused a rush of media attention for the 42-year-old professor who teaches at the Paris School of Economics.

He advocates a steeply progressive income tax with a top rate of 80% along with a wealth tax to reduce inequality, which he finds to be on the rise globally.

If his scheme were implemented, “legal plunder” (a term coined by the 19th century French liberal Frederic Bastiat) would undermine the rule of law, which is meant to safeguard persons and property, and turn the concept of justice on its head — from meaning the prevention of injustice to the use of force to dictate some politically favored distribution of income and wealth.

Piketty claims he is not a Marxist but rather a socialist with a belief in private property. Yet, the contradiction should be apparent: One cannot defend private property and at the same time call for a massive taking of property.

“Following the policy prescriptions of Piketty and Shiller would not lead to social harmony and prosperity, but rather to injustice and the loss of liberty.”

Piketty reveals his preferences when he states: “Capitalism and markets should be the slave of democracy and not the opposite.”

In his view, property is not a natural right prior to the law; it is a creation of the state. Hence, the majority should be able to use the power of government/legislation to heavily tax the rich and near-rich. The purpose would be to rid the world of inequality. This is his moral imperative.

The likely result of this utopian scheme would be to drive creative people out of high-tax countries, slow economic growth, and make societies poorer in the long run.

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I have a hard-time with the economic viewpoint that “two-thirds of the economy is consumer spending.” It’s like saying my household “economy” is based on the bills we pay rather than the work we do. It’s a demand sider’s view of the world.

My household economy is about our J-O-B-S. It’s a supply-side view. Liberals are demand-siders. There’s never enough of other people’s money for them to spend. “Supply-side economists focus on incentives to work, save, invest and launch new businesses. Demand-side economists focus on the uses of income and debt (consumption). Supply-side economists focus on sources of income and wealth,” writes Alan Reynolds, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, in The Wall Street Journal:

The demand-side panacea for weak economic growth has encouraged families and firms to spend a larger fraction of their current income and wealth—by using tax and monetary policy to punish savers and reward debtors. A supply-side solution would incentivize families and firms to produce more income and wealth by minimizing unpredictable regulation and litigation, trade barriers, unreliable money and dispiriting tax rates.

Demand-side economists focus on incentives to borrow and spend. Supply-side economists focus on incentives to work, save, invest and launch new businesses. Demand-side economists focus on the uses of income and debt (consumption). Supply-side economists focus on sources of income and wealth.

From the perspective of demand-side bookkeeping, the fact that consumer spending in 2012 accounted for 68.6% of GDP supposedly means economic growth depends on consumer sentiment. Viewed from the supply side—the sources of GDP—private industry accounted for 86.5% of GDP. If private businesses had not produced $14.1 trillion, consumers could not possibly have consumed $11.1 trillion. Economies do not grow because consumers spend more; consumers can spend more only if economies grow.

The time for demand-side gimmicks has long passed. The remarkably aggressive fiscal and monetary effort to stimulate demand did not stimulate demand. Even if it had worked, we can’t pretend to be “fighting recession” forever. Today’s economic predicament is not a cyclical crisis but a sustained, subsidized lethargy. Different tasks require different tools. When the number of job seekers falls twice as fast as the increased number of jobs, that is a supply-side problem.

 

One-third of Europe’s gas comes from Russia and half of that flows through Ukraine. Here BBC tackles the sticky wicket.

Each escalation of the crisis in Ukraine sends a jolt of nervousness far beyond its borders as Europe worries about its energy supplies.

With about one-third of Europe’s gas coming from Russia and about half of that gas flowing through Ukraine, these are tense times.

Most worried are the four EU member states which get literally all of their gas from Russia – but another 12 rely on Russia for more than half their supply.

Conversations in recent days – mostly off-the-record – with pipeline operators, energy executives and government officials reveal a series of concerns.

And one phrase keeps coming up to describe what is at stake as energy emerges as a potential weapon: oil is money but gas is power.

If progressively tougher sanctions are imposed on Russia, would President Putin retaliate by closing off the gas taps? Or would that cost Russia too much?

If Ukraine continues to stall on settling gas bills which it regards as unfairly hiked, would Russia starve it of gas?

Talks in Warsaw on Friday between Ukraine, Russia and the EU will attempt to find a settlement.

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