In other words you think government is the answer.
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Originally Posted by host
ace, I posted reams of news reporting in the Jimmy Carter thread that discredits an argument that "the private sector" did anything in the post Carter administration, besides lobby the government to end subsidies to the solar power development, even as it bought up all of that industry's assets and reveresed the progress, to the point that a solar power plant in California was dismantled and sold, panel by panel. Carter recognized that price fluctuation of fossil fuels, whether induced by demand or by manipulation by suppliers and refiners....would discourage alternative energy development.
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Let me know when you need links to stuff.
Here is the deal - Oil is cheap. Oil has been and remains plentiful. Solar power required a subsidy because oil is and has been cheap. When the government picks one alternative to oil over others - money flows into that alternative because of the subsidy not because of its viability. Solar power will work in areas where it is economically feasable and fail when it is not. To the degree that investment occurs because of a subsidy, the investment will go away when the subsidy does.
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Carter's energy plan was sabotaged and then dismantled, and we are where we find ourselves today, as a direct result. We've just witnessed, in six weeks, a 33 percent decline in the price of gasoline. What does a sudden drop in price like this, do to prospects of attracting private investment into R&D of alternative energy?
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Price went up because of many factors including many factors that had nothing to do with the actual supply of oil. Many of these factors were the result of governments negatively affecting the market place, including our government.
I agree that we need price stability or an orderly market place for oil to promote investment in alternatives. When we have that stability we will see more long-term investment and R&D. That is one reason why I support our military presence in the Middle East-to help stabalize the oil market place.
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It' always been that way. Had the Carter energy plan of 1980, been left in place, had the Synfuel Corp. not been stacked with Reagan appointed, incompetent and corrupt crony management, and the solar energy industry not intentionally given away to "big oil", what return might we have enjoyed on those taxpayer financed investments?
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I don't know. But I do know national confidence or lack of during the Carter years had a bigger impact than anything else affecting the economy. When FDR was President it wasn't the New Deal that lead us out of the depression it was regaining our national confidence. The same was true of Reagan - not his policy as much as it was his leadership.
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Did the "private sector", trading scams carried out by Enron, as the Bush administration vowed not to involve itself in, benefit the consumers in California who were held hostage by price manipulation, and subjected to artificially influenced "rolling blackouts", as power supplies were deliberately diverted away from California, after deregulation of government controls over power supplies, made Enron's scams possible? Didn't Ken Lay pick who would head the government's FERC, in the new Bush administration?
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Didn't Enron take advantage of the transitional period between heavy regulation and the move toward lesser regulation to screw California and investors? I think the Enron guys thought they were smarter than the regulators. I am going to watch the Enron documentary this weekend - Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room. If I remember California put a cap on retail prices and restriced the devlopment in-state for power plants, but completly unregulated the wholsale energy market. And then the State entered into long-term energy contracts at the peak market price. That kind of management almost lead to California going bankrupt.
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ace, would you have supported the Standard oil petroleum and rail transport monopoly that Rockefeller built, more than a century ago?
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No. Monopolies or Ologopolies sometimes exist because of legal barriers preventing competition from entering the market. I do think there is a role for government in regulating industries and in the case of Standard Oil, action should have occured sooner than it did.
However, when Standard oil was taking over the market, they innovated, drove price down and got rid of weak ineffecient competitors. At the dawn of the industrial revolution was Standard Oil a net positive or a net negative. I don't know, but the question is worth looking into.
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What you advocate doesn't work, ace. The "private sector" cares only about one thing, it's own profits. If the transfer of the US industrial base, first to Mexico, and then to Asia, doesn't teach you that lesson, what will? Your advocacy is incompatible with the US continuing to exist as a national entity, with defined borders, and it's own government and currency. The movement of investment focus and interest of the borderless, nationless, "private sector", drives home my point that, if the US is to have an energy policy that is in the national interest, it is not to be left up to the private sector to administer or to finance and regulate. We've done just that for 26 years, and we've borrowed a billion dollars, every day this year, to pay for petroleum imports, as a result of "private sector" driven, energy policy.
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When has government been soley responsible for great innovations, excluding making war? I can think of thousands of examples involving the private sector.
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Originally Posted by dc_dux
Now, if by #1, you are referring to the first point in the article:
....the "inordinate fear of communism" is taken out of context.
It is from a major foreign policy speech of Carter's that focused on Human Rights as the central theme of his foreign policy....: we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear. I’m glad that that’s being changed."
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/l...p?document=727
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.... and is referring to the simplistic concept that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is not always a good policy, particularly when it puts us in bed with the worst (non-communist) dictators, for which we have in numerous cases paid the price at a later date.
Much of the rest of the speech focuses on promoting democracy abroad, a concept that is at the center of Bush foreign policy today.
I do agree that the Carter policy should have also had an emphasis on the need for force when diplomacy fails.....without being as belligerant as the Bush policy as exemplified in Iraq. |
In other
word - Yes?