Guest post by Viv Forbes
The deaths of Steve Jobs and Neil Armstrong could signal the end of a remarkable era of scientific and engineering achievement that started about 200 years ago when James Watt and Robert Stephenson managed to harness coal-fired steam power to drive engines and locomotives. This was followed by technological innovations like electricity, diesel engines, nuclear power, the Model T, Colombia and the Apple 2.
During that era of innovation, we progressed from horse and buggy to supersonic flight; from semaphore to smart phone; from wood stoves to nuclear power; from the abacus to the PC; from flickering candles to brilliant light at the flick of a switch; and from wind-jammers sailing to the New World to rocket-ships landing on the Moon.
That era brought prosperity, longevity and a richer life to millions of people while creating the surpluses that allowed them to take better care of their environment. It also gave the free world the ability and tools to defend itself from aggressive dictators in two World Wars and the Cold War.
We are now living in the after-glow of that era, relying on past achievements and investments while Green doom-mongers are allowed to scare our children and reject our heritage.
What will today’s “Green Generation” be remembered for?
Already they have re-discovered wind power, wood energy and electric cars that were tried and largely rejected a century ago; they now encourage the production of once-banned ethanol corn whiskey, but waste it on cars; they spurn the energy potential of nuclear, coal, oil and gas; and they would close our airports and lock up our resources whilst developing computerised spy-ware to record, regulate, ration and tax our usage of everything.
And one branch of NASA, the once-great risk-taking body that put Neil Armstrong on the moon, is now supporting an anti-carbon cult that advocates the closure of the whole coal industry from mine to power station.
The legacy of today’s doom-mongers will be measured by the number of dams not built, the number of mines, factories, farms, forests and fishing grounds closed and the number of humans living in poverty.
Like the emperors of the Nero era in ancient Rome, they celebrate their destructive achievements by staging expensive Climate Circuses, while behind closed doors they plot to destroy the last vestiges of the freedom and property rights that allowed past generations to “Reach for the Stars”.
The slogan of the coming era should be “Retreat to the Past”.
So vale Neil Armstrong and Steve Jobs – we are losing far more than most people realise.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood Qld Australia
I am happy for my email address to be published.
It would seem that all relatively successful economic/political systems eventually decay into crony capitalism/facism irrespective of where they started. Chinese “Communism” and US “free enterprise” are now both much more crony capitalism than when they started. The communists seem to be heading toward more free enterprise while the US toward more socialism, depending upon who wins the US election. The US constitution was supposed to prevent that but it ain’t workin’. Free enterprise depends upon personal greed, socialism upon the good will of those in charge. Easy to see why one works better than the other. Incentive. Unfortunately without some government controls, free enterpris results in some real bad stuff, child labor, slave labor, etc. And when the government gets involved you get crony capitalism.
davidgmills says:
August 28, 2012 at 9:38 am
“For you “Economic experts” I suggest you know very little about monetary policy.”
How so? Your only comments on economics so far are 1) that Governments are not like individuals as they can print money and 2) Governments should print money and spend it instead of raising taxes.
On point 1), nobody has yet commented – probably because it is an axiomatic statement of little value.
On point 2), one poster has pointed out that this would necessarily dilute the existing money supply, eroding its store of value and that this would in turn hurt working people most as they struggle to play catch up with the bankers. A more regressive tax strategy it would be difficult to imagine, other than to exempt wealthy people from tax altogether.
What other great insights do you possess on economic theory?
” Jim Clarke says: August 27, 2012 at 1:41 pm
I just read this essay to my 17 year old son, then set him the task of restoring humanity to a noble race of achievers and reversing the thinking that humans are a virus that needs control or eradication. He said he would do it.”
I like you, him and what a great idea! I have some kids to talk to 🙂
While the scammers seem to have the upper hand I can’t but think I’ve seen this movie before and it ended very poorly for the scammers. That is one advantage to being older.
Steve Jobs? LOL
Who else, Obama?
http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/
Gail Combs says:
August 28, 2012 at 7:06 am
Big D in TX says:
August 27, 2012 at 3:25 pm
….. Don’t like what the government is doing? Fine, let’s change it. But instead of having a bloody insurrection, we prefer to peacefully vote out the people we don’t like every few years. Even the most powerful position in our government (most powerful seat in the whole world, I think most people will agree) is kicked out after only 2 (two!) terms…..
_______________________________
“I used to believe that too. Unfortunately the people we elect to government seats are no longer selected by us and do not actually run our government.
Want an example?
Let’s start with a recent Supreme Court ruling:
Supreme Court refuses to reconsider campaign finance controversy
The Supreme Court refused Monday to reconsider one of its most controversial decisions of recent years, which has had a dramatic effect on election campaigns.
In a 5-4 ruling, with the more liberal justices dissenting, the high court refused to hear arguments over whether a state can limit campaign spending by corporations.
The case focused on Montana, but its implications were widespread.
In a nutshell, the court decided that its 2010 Citizens United decision — which helped open the floodgates to massive corporate spending in elections and give birth to super PACs — trumps state laws. And it won’t be revisited any time soon.”
Since the mass media, with few exceptions, is controlled by the left, the Citizens United decision was needed to get some balance so that at least the right could BUY some positive media exposure. Not a great solution given the way corporate America buys favor with our government but so do the unions and other left wing groups, particularly the public unions, which even FDR said should never be allowed. The real problem in corporate America is that publicly owned corporations are not controlled by their stockholders due to interlocking boards and CEO’s and the ability of management to pay themselves with stock to maintain control irrespective of the will of the shareholders. I approve your ridiculous compensation and you approve mine. Plus there is no one held rsponsible in executive management for their terrible decisions that penalize stockholders while enrichenng management. Example, Bank America and Ken Lewis.
Government should fix these issues, but are paid not to. Crony capitalism.
Jim G says:
August 28, 2012 at 1:02 pm
Ever notice that the people who criticize the Citizen’s United decision never complain that it also applies to the unions?
Have you ever noticed that none of the people worried about the influence of money in politics never complain about George Soros’ spending?
more soylent green! says:
August 28, 2012 at 2:09 pm
Jim G says:
August 28, 2012 at 1:02 pm
“Ever notice that the people who criticize the Citizen’s United decision never complain that it also applies to the unions?
Have you ever noticed that none of the people worried about the influence of money in politics never complain about George Soros’ spending?”
Gail Combs is, however, right in much of what she says. The right will allow the big corporations to enslave you and the left will allow the government to do it. The Supreme Court ruling on the individual right to keep and bear arms was troubling in that the court still allowed that the government had the righ to regulate that freedom. Guess they do not understand the word infringe.
Really, we went from horse and buggy to landing on the moon in ~100 years. Literally, someone could have been born in a wagon on the Oregon Trail, and lived long enough to see Neil Armstrong on the moon.
I don’t know if we’ll ever see technology advance that far in that short of time ever again.
j ferguson says:
August 27, 2012 at 2:37 pm
Jim Clarke, “defend my freedom to participate?” are you kidding?
My take is that many of the people who are depressed about the present have absolutely no idea what is going on. They are the same type of people who thought the end was on the horizon in Macaulay’s time.
To be blunt, my appraisal of the folks who think our peak of accomplishment is behind us are people who contribute next to nothing themselves to what is happening now, and likely little to what happened in the past. They think because they aren’t doing innovative things, no-one else is. Again, total nonsense.
—————————————————-
No one is claiming that innovation has stopped, but frankly most of the big (tech) ideas we use and rely upon were invented decades ago. Much of the progress of the last 40 years has been in manufacturing technology and miniaturization than in truly novel new science. No new space propulsion technologies (strange theoretical matter excepted) have been devised in the last 40 years. Computing has become more powerful, cheaper, ubiquitous, but the vast majority of that technology was laid down in the 60’s. Englebart demonstrated many of the communication technologies you ascribe to modern engineering:
On the hardware side we’ve actually nearly come full circle in our material sets. Early semiconductors used germanium and ultimately switched to silicon (GaAs was/is a niche player). And today, high speed, mixed signal has reverted to SiGe. Maybe Graphene will finally give us a breakthrough after decades of mostly optimization.
Again, we’ve made a lot of hay out of optimizing these discoveries. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the atmosphere today actually makes new discoveries harder and more expensive and in some ways more trivial. Social media? Really? Facebook and FarmVille as genuine technical progress? But more corrosive, we have become a risk averse society. No one can die. Ever. Everything must be provably safe and so progress is slow. That’s what we’ve really lost since the 50’s and 60’s.
Tsk Tsk,
One might suppose that MTBGD (Meant Time Between Great Discoveries) might necessarily increase the low-hanging fruit having been plucked. No, and I agree, it is certainly not facebook, etc.
But it might be Google and the other search engines.
A visiting professor from Russia gave the Monday Evening lecture during my tour at the U. It was 1966. He brought one half of the the then two volume Yellow Pages to the podium, riffled through the pages until he came to construction materials (this was architecture school), found Concrete Blocks and asked if a member of the audience could describe how one might acquire 10k blocks. Someone did. He then described what he would need to do in Russia, which IIRC involved helping the guy who ran their block plant to solve problems he had. But that wasn’t the point of the lecture.
The point was that they had no Yellow Pages, didn’t have the range of offerings it contained, and if you needed something outside your more frequent arena, it could be very difficult to find.
This was a long time ago and my memory may be inaccurate.
The ability to find things, knowledge, and people has improved beyond reckoning in the last 50 years. The number of people with wiggle room to think in has probably increased by an order of magnitude. To imagine that our rate of discovery and application of innovation has plateaued is to reveal a woeful lack of imagination, and perhaps awareness.
Tsk,Tsk, and others,
If I remember Macaulay’s observations on pessimism written in the 1840s, his defense of inexorable progress depended on realizing how much better things were at the time than then they had been 60 years earlier.
I submit that unless some thought is applied, anyone under 40 or 50 years of age might not sense the rate of progress we’ve enjoyed. I tried to build computers with old telephone company relays in the ’50s. I had no idea what I was doing, could find nothing on the subject in the local library, and generally faked it, but I did make some gadgets that did relatively simple things like recognize numbers written with a stylus on a segmented copper plate. I was a kid then, so maybe if I’d been doing revenue work, I might have been working with other people who understood this stuff.
More recently, I came to a hard sport while integrating several hardware bits, could find nothing locally, but by googling over a couple of weeks located a guy in Seoul Korea who had come up against the same problem and had figure it out – and it wasn’t intuitive. Other projects involve email correspondence with engineers in Bangalore and China.
I submit that the capability to do this is relatively recent and has provided a development environment which is completely different from that which I grew up in.
When you think about our sorry lot, you might want to consider it over a longer time frame – say 40 or 50 years.
@jim G says:
August 28, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Jim, Gail Combs starts about telling us about how Citizen’s United is going to have horrible repercussions and then switches to discussing the actions of unelected bureaucrats. Citizens United has nothing to do with either our out-of-control bureaucracy or lobbying.
Gail lists several actions of government agencies that threaten our freedoms. Why do companies lobby? Two basic reasons are to work for laws or regulations that favor them over their competition or to block laws or regulations that gives favor to the competition.
Notice it’s not the government lobbying corporations. If the corporations had power, they would [not] need to lobby. It’s the government that has power over our lives, not ADM, not Exxon-Mobile, not Google, not Apple, etc.
more soylent green! says:
August 29, 2012 at 6:05 am
“Notice it’s not the government lobbying corporations. If the corporations had power, they would [not] need to lobby. It’s the government that has power over our lives, not ADM, not Exxon-Mobile, not Google, not Apple, etc.”
As a small business owner, I can assure you that our major publicly owned corporate suppliers are in many cases at least as big a problem to our continued existence as the government. Most are oligopolies and suffer from all of the problems I noted above.
Re economics. I posted the three hour video that addresses my two points. I can’t encapsulate three hours of documentary here.
Re “small” government. I have been a lawyer for nearly 35 years and I find the concept of “small’ government naive and just downright silly. We have over three hundred million people according to our census. How many laws do you think we have? A billion? Five billion.? Ten billion?
We have fifty states that make their own laws in addition to the federal government. We have municipalities that make their own laws. Laws are made in at least four ways: by a majority vote of the people directly, by a majority vote of a legislature, by a majority vote of some kind of administrative body, and by a majority vote of a judiciary. Making these laws is the essence of a democracy and a republic. Every one of these laws was passed because a majority of the people who voted on it thought the law was a good idea. Once a law is passed it has to be administered, executed, and adjudicated.
Under the US Constitution, federal law is the supreme law of the land. All state and local laws potentially conflict with federal law in some way, so how can a small federal government do its duty of being the supreme law if there is no manpower to see that the supreme law is administered, enforced and adjudicated? The larger state governments and their body of laws become, the greater the necessity for a large federal government to assume its role as the supreme law and government.
If you want small government, the only solution is to disband the United States or to amend the constitution to make the federal government and federal law of no higher standing than state law. Of course if you did that, essentially you would have a confederacy of states, which we tried initially, and which didn’t work at the time.
davidgmills,
You are not part of the solution. You are part of the problem. You write:
“Every one of these laws was passed because a majority of the people who voted on it thought the law was a good idea.”
You could not be more wrong. Take the EPA for example. The EPA arbitrarily fines individuals and businesses tens of thousands of dollars for very minor infractions, and often for purely political reasons. How do you justify taking someone’s property, and the part of their life used to earn and save that money, only to have an unelected EPA bureaucrat confiscate it?
There was a recent case where a low level EPA bureaucrat single-handely imposed a building ban based on labeling a property as “wetlands”. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, before the EPA was slapped down. But 99 out of 100 people lack the resources to take a case to the Supreme Court, so the EPA has free rein to fine anyone it likes.
The EPA example is only one of many unelected authorities. And your argument in favor of big government is that of a self-serving anti-American extremist. If the EPA, the Departments of Energy, Education, Commerce, Interior and others were simply red-lined out of existence, the country would be immensely better off. States are fully capable of handling any problems. The need for a federal government applies to a judiciary, a national currency, and national defense; and not much else.
It is no wonder that you speak so highly of the “billions” of laws. You are, after all, a lawyer. More laws mean job security. But people like you are making it hell on ordinary Americans.
j ferguson says:
August 29, 2012 at 5:15 am
If you have been around those 40-50 years, as I have, you will also recall that without wars or threat of wars most of our technological advancements would not have occured. That includes the great space race, which was cold war induced. One might even argue that WE would not be here as a species were it not for tribal scirmishes thousands of years ago that lead to abductions and widening the gene pool and preventing too much inbreeding. Where would we be without war?
Smokey: I don’t speak highly of these billions of laws at all. In fact, I would like to see a lot fewer laws. Most of the laws put in place do not help the people I represent, so these laws are not job security. In fact just the opposite.
Your example about the EPA shows a great deal of ignorance about administrative law in particular and about the judicial process in general. If the EPA fines anyone, it has to have a rule or regulation in place before there is a violation which would justify the imposition of a fine. Those rules or regulations are put in place by a majority of the people working at the EPA with rulemaking authority. Hence my point about a majority of the people voting to make a law.
But anyone who gets fined by the EPA has a right to appeal that decision to a federal court. Sometimes as you say, it takes a long time to get through the federal court system or any court system. Cases languish in the state systems for years as well. I have had cases that were ten years old that were in the state system.
And actually states aren’t very capable of handling their own matters in this age of globalization. A good example is the states’ inability to take on the insurance industry. Most states have small budgets and can’t take on any large corporation. Sometimes even the even federal government doesn’t have the budget.
People have the right to disagree with your viewpoint of how limited the federal government should be. It is called democracy. And your view of how limited the federal government should be has not won the necessary political support to be the law. I think the federal government should also do much to ensure and promote the general welfare of the people (part of the Constitution’s preamble and Article I Section 8) and to do so, you have to have some rules to prevent the strong from abusing the weak.
davidgmills,
I may be ignorant, but I know right from wrong. You say: “…you have to have some rules to prevent the strong from abusing the weak.”
I guess you don’t yet realize that the ‘strong’ is government itself; the citizens are weak, and get constantly abused by self-perpetuating bureaucrats. Examples abound. I live in The Peoples Socialist Soviet of California, where the government of this broke state is ramming through a $100 billion 19th Century transportation ‘solution’ that will never pay for itself. The citizens do not want it, because there is already a cost-effective infrastructure in place: air travel. I can fly from San Francisco to San Diego in an hour and a quarter, for about $100. And unlike a government train, the airlines pay taxes. No train can compete with those econmies of cost and time saved. That is a typical example of 21st Century government for you.
Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution only authorizes Congress to lay and collect taxes, to pay the national debts, and to provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United STATES. Now, the President arbitrarily sends more than $100 million to the Palestinian Authority, without any Congressional authorization. He high handedly dismissed the legally elected CEO of GM, along with half the GM Board of Directors, then he unilaterally appointed their replacements. To add insult to injury, he overturned two hundred years of contract law and put bondholders and shareholders behind the UAW. That is ruling by decree, and people like you are are his enablers.
To the extent that we have gotten away from the literal meaning of the original Constitution and Bill of Rights, things have gone downhill. And don’t bring up that canard about how good we have it now. Things would be MUCH better if we had stayed with our legal founding document. The federal government would be far smaller, and citizens would have a lot more money in their pockets.
But nefarious people, all led by a phalanx of self-serving lawyers, have royally screwed up our once great system. You bear more than a little blame.
Jim, like the Obama White House, my message just isn’t getting through very well. So please tell me, can your corporate suppliers throw you in jail? Can they tax you if you don’t buy something? Can they send armed agents into your home or business and confiscate your computers, your inventory, your funds or other property if you don’t do what they say?
Only the government can force you to buy something, or tax you for not buying it.
Please tell me how I am wrong, or what part of my message isn’t getting through.
more soylent green! says:
“Jim, like the Obama White House, my message just isn’t getting through very well. So please tell me, can your corporate suppliers throw you in jail? Can they tax you if you don’t buy something? Can they send armed agents into your home or business and confiscate your computers, your inventory, your funds or other property if you don’t do what they say?
Only the government can force you to buy something, or tax you for not buying it.
Please tell me how I am wrong, or what part of my message isn’t getting through.”
First of all the Obama message IS getting through since he has the mass media in his pocket. Second, no one is more concerned than I about big government, just remember, you cannot trust either party, though the Republicans, I believe, are the lesser of the two evils and third parties never win. You are not wrong on your message, only missing the problems created by oligopolistic major public owned corporations as they can also force you to buy things at the prices they set and if you don’t you’re out of business. As a small business, I have experienced just that. As a consumer, do your really believe that gas should legitimately cost $3.75/gal?Government has a roll to play or we will be back at child labor, like China. Unfortunately, government is purchased by the highest bidder and does not play the roll it needs to play but sets up systems that get the government officials re-elected and keep them at the trough.
Smokey: The literal meaning of the Constitution…. Do you mean like the literal meaning of the bible? You literalists are all alike. Always think only you know what words mean and you can devine what people what the author intended.
Are people not part of the United States? Who else would general welfare refer to if not its people? Remember “We the people?” That is the problem. You want to forget about “we the people.” It didn’t say we the corporations or we the states, the preamble said “we the people.”
More Soylent Green: Anybody can hold a gun to my head and force me to buy something. Happens to people all the time. And as for putting people in jail, I personally am glad that only the government can do it at this time. But the day may not be far off when some corporation can do it. Corporations already run prisons and have security operations and their own police. Are corporate judges next (I mean judges directly employed by corporations)? What is the difference between a Somali warlord and a corporation to you anarchists?
davidgmills,
Don’t be ridiculous. The Bible is a collection of verbal stories handed down, and then put into writing at different times. You might as well make a comparison between the Kama Sutra and the Constitution.
The Constitution was debated, and eventually written by people who didn’t have video games, TV, or computers to distract them. They understood human nature, which I don’t think you do.
And I know what words mean: “…shall not be infringed…” has a pretty clear meaning. Why does Big Gov’t want to deny us that freedom? I know what “inalienable rights” means. I know what “…shall be reserved to the Several states” means. Those words and meanings have now been disregarded. The promoters of Big Gov’t have neutered them.
The self-serving among us use the ratchet effect, always pushing toward Big Government. It is the road to serfdom, and it is thoroughly un-American.
davidgmills,
Once again, you’ve shown your hand. You got nothing but trash talk. No facts, no logic, just empty bluster, insults and browbeating. Which semester in law school is it where they teach you to pound the table when you have no argument?
I could debate you guys till the cows come home and you would not come up with an original idea. You simply rehash the tired old common generic libertarian commentary that does a real disservice to genuine libertarians. You really need years of genuine book study and not hours of TV and talk radio. Read a few thousand pages of cases and get a bare bones grasp of the government and back to me.
My greatest fear is a police state. We are nearly there. But a police state can come from a state government as much as from a federal government. The NDAA is an abomination; as is Guantanamo. I detest the federal government’s foreign policy as it has existed for the last fifty years and the obscene spending on our military. There are lots of things wrong with the federal government and the federal laws, but that does not mean that turning over huge parts of the federal government to the states would be better.
The states do not have a stellar record when it comes to justice; in fact, many states have some pretty bad records when it comes to justice. The insistence upon the application of state justice caused a civil war.
And I think what would be even worse than a government police state would be a corporate police state where the people would have even fewer rights and an even lesser say than they do now. We are headed that direction. More than a few senators and congressmen have lamented about how the banks and big corporations own the government.
Seriously guys. Do some extensive reading of history and law.