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February 03, 2010

The Wednesday Update

February 3, 2010  Volume 4, Number 5  IN THIS ISSUE: Here's What's Wrong; Meatloaf Again?

February 3, 2010 Vol 4, Number 5	Wednesday Update
In This Issue: 1. Here's What's Wrong 2. Meatloaf Again? 3. Free Speech Lives	Here’s What’s Wrong We’ve already commented on Governor Doyle's State of the State message from last Tuesday, but one line in the speech warrants a second look, because it perfectly sums up what's wrong with elitist Liberals' vision of how the world works. In the midst of a pitch for his global warming—sorry, “Clean Energy Jobs” bill—the Governor reeled off a list of 15 companies creating new jobs with alternative energy technologies. He praised them to the skies before pronouncing that none of them would be doing any of this “if it weren't for wise government policies and renewable energy standards.” We wonder if the people who provide the political cover for Doyle’s ideologically-based energy policy noticed they’d just been used and insulted. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t an insult. Maybe it was a tribute to their common sense. After all, the Governor made an important point, even if unintentionally. He admitted that nobody could ever expect to find commercial success by making energy less efficient, more expensive and less reliable without a government mandate. One sentence in Doyle’s otherwise humdrum speech captured perfectly the Liberal default setting: Everything that’s good comes from government, and vice-versa. Everything else is suspect, and we unruly citizens must be constantly supervised by our Liberal betters, lest we wander off the path. Human ingenuity will always find more efficient ways to do things and people will adopt them, given the freedom to do so. That surely applies to cleaner energy. We will soon find out whether people remain free to adopt the most efficient technologies if they turn out to be different from the ones government chooses to promote. People will do a lot better if government gets out of the way and doesn't force them to waste time and money on things that can’t succeed on their own merits. Plenty of governments have attempted the opposite, and the most satisfying moments of the 20th century were spent watching them go out of business. Meatloaf Again? Two evenings, two speeches, same menu. You may have noticed the cookie-cutter similarity of certain lines in the addresses delivered by Governor Doyle and President Obama on consecutive nights last week, especially in promoting the cure-all “clean energy economy.” We won’t begrudge them coordinating their message, it can be an effective tactic. But that’s the point: It’s a tactic that works only when the underlying ideas have some appeal. In this case, they don’t. Mr. Obama hauled out the Blame Bush china to serve up more of the same reheated leftovers that voters in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts have clearly said they don’t want. A fact worth noting is the widening margin of defeat for his agenda among independent voters. Voters are concluding that the Obama agenda is not what they signed up for, even if they voted for it in 2008. And increasingly obvious is the president’s self-adoring determination to have it his way, no matter what. As his predecessor said, “Bring it on.” In the context of 2010 we’d add, “Make our day.” Free speech lives Timing, they say, is everything. In the closing days of January and within 48 hours after Wisconsin state senators staged a smack-down against uppity citizens who might criticize them in campaign advertising, the U.S. Supreme Court blew a giant hole through the assault on on free speech known as McCain-Feingold. It’s sobering how narrowly the First Amendment was affirmed, but the Court ruled 5-4 that McCain-Feingold violates the constitution by forbidding corporate and union-funded “issue ads” in the two months preceding an election. Squelching similar ads was essentially what the senators tried to do at the state level. The Senate’s high-minded reformist principle is simple: “Don’t criticize us when people are paying attention.” The principle restored by the Supreme Court is that government can’t prohibit speech on the basis of who is trying to speak. The ruling derails a tiresome campaign in the Wisconsin Legislature to safeguard incumbency-for-life by maximizing government’s role and minimizing the opportunities for private contributors to affect the outcome of elections.