New Hampshire to Consider Withdrawing from RGGI

Thanks, Ric, I appreciate you following this issue. RGGI is currently in the process of considering lowering the number of CO2 allocations, increasing the price, or both. It has not made any progress toward its avowed objective of lowering CO2 emission, rather it has just functioned as a cash cow (read tax). And, as you have indicated, some of the money raised for the noble purpose of increasing efficiency and’or lowering CO2 emissions is being siphoned off for other purposes. A crack in the RGGI facade is important, particularly since RGGI is the only required cap’n-trade functioning in the US.

On a vacation through Italy, my wife and I met a couple from New Hampshire. Met once in Venice (sat next to us at a restaurant) and then again in Sienna (pure coincidence). Very nice people and very committed to local governance is what I remember. I’ve been been a fan of New Hampshire since (this is from a Texan).

Good news. I’m a Stratham, NH resident who is hopeful that the new legislature will trim or better yet abolish all such unnecessary govt initiatives.

I am reluctant to comment on what political decisions are made in other place than the one I live in. This RGGI thing raises lots of red flags in my skeptical mind. The thing sounds more like a pork barrel slush fund then anything else. Since we elect our leaders we get exactly what we voters deserve and noting more.

I’m not sure if the statistic still holds, but while I lived in N.H., the state was home to the 4th largest governmental body in the world, coming in behind British Parliament, Canada, and Australia. The government was very much “by the people”, I think the rep from our town changed every 2yrs. (may have been 1yr) and received recompense of $200. You served your stint because it was your duty…and people that I knew were proud to do it.
The good old days…
JimB

At 5:19 PM on 26 December, u.k.(us) had written about:

… Chicago…selling off assets to pay for the corrupt and ever growing “public servants” [mentioning]the sale of the Skyway to the MIG-Cintra consortium for US$1.83bn (A$2.46bn). As agreed with the City this amount has been adjusted for movement in the 10 year Treasury note yield from 12 October 2004.1 [and the sale of rights to city parking meters] for $1.2 billion, [going on to note that] the sale of Midway Airport isn’t going well [and complaining that] These sales of revenue generating public facilities only encourage the incompetence/corruption of our elected officials. They are selling our children’s futures, to balance their out of control spending.

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There’s a question gone a-begging here.
Just what the hell is the City of Chicago – a corporate entity with a very, very, very limited remit – doing with any kind of “revenue generating public facilities” in the first place?
As a libertarian, I’m prone to observe that the only real reason for suffering the existence of civil government in any form whatsoever is that when killer apes (species Homo sapiens) gather into society we require a choke-chained agency to manage the objective employment of retaliatory violent force as a deterrent against those who might seek to violate the individual rights – to life, to liberty, and to property – of their fellow human beings.
That’s it. There’s no other purpose to which the armed thugs of government can ever legitimately turn their hands. Government is (in the words of Thomas Paine) “a punisher.”
It ain’t there to run airports or highways or any other kind of “revenue generating public facilities.” If there’s a viable market demand for such goods and services, government is emphatically not the entity in society to deliver said goods and services.
If there’s not such a market demand as to make building and running such “revenue generating public facilities” profitable, however in hell could it be financially feasible for private investors seeking return on their outlay to buy ’em from the City of Chicago?
Some years ago, a researcher was trying to compare the relative per-pupil administrative costs of private versus government school systems, and decided that Chicago would make a good quick test case. The Archdiocese of Chicago pretty much overlapped the jurisdiction of Chicago city government, and so the researcher could ask a few questions about number of administrative employees and the total payroll.
First, he went to the public school system. Agony. Nobody had all the information he wanted, it seemed. See person “A,” who referred him to bureaucrat “B,” who sent him along to human resources drone “C,” who told him that authorizing officer “D” was out of the country on vacation, and the computer was down, and the filing system was all in a mess from their recent move to a bigger building….
Well, you get the picture. It took a bit longer than a month for him to track the numbers down, and it was like performing root canal on an orca without benefit of sedatives or a wet suit. Slippery, messy, and at any moment you were aware that you could be pulling back a bloody stump.
That accomplished, he phoned the Yellow Pages number for the administrative office of the Chicago Parochial Schools System. He got a very nice lady on the line. He asked: “How many people work in administration for the parochial schools in Chicago?”
There was a moment’s wait, and he got ready for the hand-off to this outfit’s version of clueless wastoid “A.”
The nice lady said: “Well, I’m not sure. Can you hold on while I count them?”
Turned out that the Chicago parochial schools were educating about one-tenth the total number of students in the K-12 range as the public school system was handling (and graduating much higher percentages of them with diplomas) with about one-hundredth the administrative overhead in both numbers of people and monetary cost.
There are a lot of things that civil government should not be doing. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is merely one more of them.
So how do we get the officers of civil government to stop doing those things which are not best handled by (again resorting to Thomas Paine) “an armed banditti” and get this bloated cancer trimmed down to a small enough size that it is no longer doing us the massive damage we presently suffer?

Tucci78
“It ain’t there to run airports or highways or any other kind of “revenue generating public facilities.” If there’s a viable market demand for such goods and services, government is emphatically not the entity in society to deliver said goods and services.”
Yes, but….
Government exists to do that which is beneficial to the vast majority, but which isn’t feasible to be done by solitary actors. Police and military are one example, which you *site* [cite].
Other examples would include the paved road system. Corporate entities would have no incentive to build or maintain the road system (which was a HUGE boon to the US) back when created, and even today with modernization, every single road out there would be a toll road. While it might be cheaper in total dollar amounts collected to service it, additional expenses would accumulate from wasted gas sitting in lines, lost productive time, etc. Cheaper isn’t always better (though cheaper doesn’t always mean inferior either!)
I have libertarian leanings, but there are some things which are clearly the provinance of government, simply because they can afford to take the “big picture” approach to a problem and not have to tell shareholders that it will take 30 years for a project to pay for itself, when the shareholders are concerned about the quarter-to-quarter profits of the company.

New Hampshire grew the fastest of any northeast state according to 2010 census results. Most of them shrank as the exodus to southern states continued. New Hampshire must have been an alternative destination for those who wanted to escape liberal nanny state governments but didn’t want to drive so far or learn to speak with a drawl.

In response to my post of 8:59 PM on 26 December (see above), at 5:49 AM on 27 December, kcrucible had written:

Yes, but….
Government exists to do that which is beneficial to the vast majority, but which isn’t feasible to be done by solitary actors. Police and military are one example, which you cite.

Other examples would include the paved road system. Corporate entities would have no incentive to build or maintain the road system (which was a HUGE boon to the US) back when created, and even today with modernization, every single road out there would be a toll road. While it might be cheaper in total dollar amounts collected to service it, additional expenses would accumulate from wasted gas sitting in lines, lost productive time, etc. Cheaper isn’t always better (though cheaper doesn’t always mean inferior either!)

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And there’s a lamentable lack of perspicuity on the part of krucible.
I’m not just a libertarian, but I’m also a military history buff – indeed, a wargamer with a history of work in wargames design and development – resident in New Jersey, an area of critical military importance during the early years of the American Revolution. “Light Horse Harry” Lee earned his nickname roaming the countryside where I grew up and now live.
Roads – and how they get built, krucible – are items which lifelong military history types like me tend very strongly to learn about. Tactically, strategically, and especially logistically, roads are critically important, especially when considering the military conflicts conducted over the portion of these United States east of the Appalachians during the 18th and 19th Centuries. Bear with me.
Come to New Jersey or Virginia or Pennsylvania, and you will find a helluva lot of roads named “turnpike” or “pike” or “plank road.” Apart from modern constructions – like the famous New Jersey Turnpike – every damned one of these roads was originally laid out, built, and operated by private industry intent upon making some kind of profit.
They were only taken over by county and state governments much later.
Many of these privately-constructed roads figured large in America’s military history. On 2 May 1863, for example, Jackson’s corps of the Army of Northern Virginia hit the flank of the northern aggressors’ Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville and rolled up XI Corps like a cheap rug. The axis of their assault was the Orange Plank Road, a considerably corduroy’d wagon road that had been constructed by private businessmen to bring lumber and produce to the river port of Fredericksburg, whence shipment could be made by way of the Rappahannock to Chesapeake Bay and markets beyond.
Yes, many of these privately-constructed and operated thoroughfares were run as toll roads charging user fees. But just what the hell makes you think that government-built and government-operated roads are free, anyway? The plain fact of the matter – ever heard the expression “TANSTAAFL? – is that the costs are not only paid but exorbitantly overpaid (a tremendous source of graft and cause of government corruption all over the nation but particularly here in “the Soprano Strate”), chiefly by way of huge excise taxes levied on the sale of petrochemical fuels, with subsequent expenditure wastage on scales which ought to beggar your imagination.
To give you a starting point, the Cato Institute has been focusing upon the arguments for and against the privatization of government-mismanaged “public goods” for decades. They’ve aggregated historical and current information on the roles played by private businesses in road building and operation throughout that time, including a 2005 Policy Analysis paper on the federal highway system. Their stuff is freely accessible online. All you need invest is a bit of time and effort.
My personal concerns with civil governments handling road building and maintenance run beyond any purely ethical consideration (why in hell are armed thugs operating public thoroughfares and – in the bargain – collecting funds at gunpoint to do such a lousy job at it?) and into the simple and straightforward conclusion that by taking decisions for an economically critical activity out of the private sector and into the realm of politics, they’re making abysmally wrong decisions which waste resources and leave genuine needs unmet.
In short, government road-building doesn’t do – hell, it cannot do – what really could and should be done with regard to getting people and materials from one place to another. Worse, government usurpation of the road-building function forecloses the options which can be provided by private enterprise.
Hmph. Not that privately owned and operated roads must charge tolls for their use. Take note of how private businesses operate parking lots (at malls and such) for the convenience of their customers. They don’t charge for parking space. In the past half-century the growth of shopping malls (and the stark decline of inner-city commercial districts) illustrates how the easy availability of such parking has been figured into consumer preferences. When was the last time you dropped a quarter (and more) into a downtown city-operated parking meter in order to shop there?
Many businesses in the past have built roads to suit their own purposes – to convey resources into their shops, to conduct finished products out, and to give access to their customers. They don’t give a damn about free riders, generally because anybody driving the roads they’d built was certain (in one way or another) to serve the builders’ commercial benefit.
For pity’s sake, krucible, learn something about a subject like this before you write stuff like:

I have libertarian leanings, but there are some things which are clearly the provenance of government, simply because they can afford to take the “big picture” approach to a problem and not have to tell shareholders that it will take 30 years for a project to pay for itself, when the shareholders are concerned about the quarter-to-quarter profits of the company.

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In fact, it is the officers of civil government who – by making decisions based preponderantly upon considerations of political advantage – obliterate “the ‘big picture’ approach to a problem” and reduce every activity they pervert to the realm of economically nonviable waste.
Your adverse perception, krucible, of “shareholders…concerned about the quarter-to-quarter profits of the company” appears to be the result of inadequate education on the subject, almost certainly compounded by your largely uncritical receipt of duplicitous propaganda foisted upon you by your teachers (probably government-paid thugs) and the complicit consciously collectivist government-worshiping lamestream media.