The recess appointment of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) head Don Berwick is unlike previous and common recess appointments by past presidents, explains Avik Roy, for several reasons. First among them is that generally presidents use recess appointments because Congress drags its feet on hearings. But in Berwick’s case, Obama used the recess appointment precisely to avoid hearings which Republicans were eager to have to expose Berwick’s extreme views on health care. Once more the Obama administration displays that it has no intention of keeping its promise of an open, transparent and debate-healthy administration.

4. Berwick is an advocate of socialized, government-controlled health care. As we and others have documented, Berwick is “starry-eyed” about Britain’s National Health Service, in which government owns the insurers, the hospitals, and the doctors’ offices. He is a highly intelligent and articulate defender of that position. Liberals claim that Republicans are taking his views out of context. If that is true, why not give Berwick a public platform to explain himself? The answer is clear: Berwick would only generate more controversy if he aired his views in Congress. And we’re not talking “controversy” in the mountain-out-of-a-molehill sense: We’re talking about the basic philosophy of whether or not we should have a free or centrally-planned health care system. The American public and, more importantly, the American idea, are not on Berwick’s side.

Read the rest.

Another example: this way Obama doesn’t have to worry about Berwick answering a question such as: “According to the Boston Globe the ‘The number of people who appear to be gaming the state’s health insurance system by purchasing coverage only when they are sick quadrupled from 2006 to 2008, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday from the Massachusetts Division of Insurance.’ How will government-funded medical programs at the federal level not meet the same fate?”

If only George Will were in Congress he could ask Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan these questions:

– It would be naughty to ask you about litigation heading for the Supreme Court concerning this: Does Congress have the right, under its enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce, to punish the inactivity of not purchasing health insurance? So, instead answer this harmless hypothetical: If Congress decides that interstate commerce is substantially affected by the costs of obesity, may Congress require obese people to purchase participation in programs such as Weight Watchers? If not, why not?

– The government having decided that Chrysler’s survival is an urgent national necessity, could it decide that “Cash for Clunkers” is too indirect a subsidy and instead mandate that people buy Chrysler products?

– If Congress concludes that ignorance has a substantial impact on interstate commerce, can it constitutionally require students to do three hours of homework nightly? If not, why not?

– Can you name a human endeavor that Congress cannot regulate on the pretense that the endeavor affects interstate commerce? If courts reflexively defer to that congressional pretense, in what sense do we have limited government?

– In Federalist 45, James Madison said: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite.” What did the Father of the Constitution not understand about the Constitution? Are you a Madisonian? Does the doctrine of enumerated powers impose any limits on the federal government? Can you cite some things that, because of that doctrine, the federal government has no constitutional power to do?

– Is it constitutional for Arizona to devote state resources to enforcing federal immigration laws?

– Is there anything novel about the Arizona law empowering police officers to act on a “reasonable suspicion” that someone encountered in the performance of the officers’ duties might be in the country illegally?

– The Fifth Amendment mandates “just compensation” when government uses its eminent domain power to take private property for “public use.” In its 2005 Kelo decision, the court said government can seize property for the “public use” of transferring it to wealthier private interests who will pay more taxes to the government. Do you agree?

– Should proper respect for precedent prevent the court from reversing Kelo? If so, was the court wrong to undo the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that segregating the races with “separate but equal” facilities is constitutional?

– In 1963, President John Kennedy said Congress should “make a commitment . . . to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.” Was he right?

– In 1964, Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a principal sponsor of that year’s Civil Rights Act, denounced the “nightmarish propaganda” that the law would permit preferential treatment of an individual or group because of race or racial “imbalance” in employment. What happened?

– William Voegeli, contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books, writes: “The astonishingly quick and complete transformation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, from a law requiring all citizens be treated equally to a policy requiring that they be treated unequally, is one of the most audacious bait-and-switch operations in American political history.” Discuss.

– In a 2003 case affirming the constitutionality of racial preferences in law school admissions, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” If you are a sitting justice in 2028, do you expect to conclude that such preferences can no longer survive constitutional scrutiny because they no longer serve a compelling public interest?

– The president is morose about the court’s Citizens United decision holding that the First Amendment, which says Congress shall make “no law” abridging freedom of speech, means no laws abridging a corporation’s freedom to speak, including nonprofit advocacy corporations such as the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club. The court called it “censorship” for government “to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear.” Do you agree?

– You have noted that the court often considers legislative motives when deciding First Amendment cases. Should the court consider legislators’ motives if, in response to Citizens United, they impose new burdens on corporate speech?

– When incumbent legislators write laws restricting the quantity, content and timing of speech about legislative campaigns, are not their motives presumptively suspect?

– Regarding campaign finance “reforms”: If allowing the political class to write laws regulating the quantity, content and timing of speech about the political class is the solution, what is the problem?

– If the problem is corruption, do we not already have abundant laws proscribing that?

– If the problem is the “appearance” of corruption, how do you square the First Amendment with Congress restricting speech to regulate how things “appear” to unspecified people?

– Incumbent legislators are constantly tinkering with the rules regulating campaigns that could cost them their jobs. Does this present an appearance of corruption?

– Some persons argue that our nation has a “living” Constitution; the court has spoken of “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” But Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking against “changeability” and stressing “the whole antievolutionary purpose of a constitution,” says “its whole purpose is to prevent change — to embed certain rights in such a manner that future generations cannot readily take them away. A society that adopts a bill of rights is skeptical that ‘evolving standards of decency’ always ‘mark progress,’ and that societies always ‘mature,’ as opposed to rot.” Is he wrong?

– The Ninth Amendment says: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The 14th Amendment says no state may abridge “the privileges or immunities” of U.S. citizens. How should the court determine what are the “retained” rights and the “privileges or immunities”?

– The 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people”) is, as former Delaware governor Pete du Pont has said, “to the Constitution what the Chicago Cubs are to the World Series: of only occasional appearance and little consequence.” Were the authors of the Bill of Rights silly to include this amendment?

– Should decisions of foreign courts, or laws enacted by foreign legislatures, have any bearing on U.S. courts’ interpretations of the Constitution or federal laws (other than directly binding treaties)?

– The Fifth Amendment says private property shall not be taken by government for public use without just compensation. But what about “regulatory takings”? To confer a supposed benefit on the public, government often restricts how persons can use their property, sometimes substantially reducing the property’s value. But government offers no compensation because the property is not “taken.” But when much of a property’s value is taken away by government action, should owners be compensated?

– In Bush v. Gore, which settled the 2000 election, seven justices ruled that Florida vote recounts that were being conducted in different jurisdictions under subjective and contradictory standards were incompatible with the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” Were they right?

– In Bush v. Gore, five justices held that Article II of the Constitution gives state legislatures plenary power to set the rules for presidential elections. The Florida legislature fashioned election rules to produce presidential electors immune from challenge by Congress. But the legislature said that immunity depended on electors being chosen by a certain date, which could not be met if further recounts were to ensue. The court held that allowing more recounts would have contravened the intent of Florida’s legislature. So the recounts were halted. Was the court’s majority correct?

– Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom you clerked, said: “You do what you think is right and let the law catch up.” Can you defend this approach to judging?

– You have said: “There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.” But that depends on what the meaning of “is” is. There was no constitutional right to abortion until the court discovered one 185 years after the Constitution was ratified, when the right was spotted lurking in emanations of penumbras of other rights. What is to prevent the court from similarly discovering a right to same-sex marriage?

– Bonus question: In Roe v. Wade, the court held that the abortion right is different in each of the three trimesters of pregnancy. Is it odd that the meaning of the Constitution’s text would be different if the number of months in the gestation of a human infant were a prime number?

Wow, when you’re a former media-darling Democratic president and the Associated Press starts to turn on you, you must have bad ratings. Here’s how the AP describes Barack Obama’s panel to investigate the Gulf oil leak:

Only one of the seven commissioners, the dean of Harvard’s engineering and applied sciences school, has a prominent engineering background — but it’s in optics and physics. Another is an environmental scientist with expertise in coastal areas and the after-effects of oil spills. Both are praised by other scientists.

The five other commissioners are experts in policy and management.

The White House said the commission will focus on the government’s “too cozy” relationship with the oil industry. A presidential spokesman said panel members will “consult the best minds and subject matter experts” as they do their work.

The commission has yet to meet, yet some panel members had made their views known.

Environmental activist Frances Beinecke on May 27 blogged: “We can blame BP for the disaster and we should. We can blame lack of adequate government oversight for the disaster and we should. But in the end, we also must place the blame where it originated: America’s addiction to oil.” And on June 3, May 27, May 22, May 18, May 4, she called for bans on drilling offshore and the Arctic.

“Even as questions persist, there is one thing I know for certain: the Gulf oil spill isn’t just an accident. It’s the result of a failed energy policy,” Beinecke wrote on May 20.

Two other commissioners also have gone public to urge bans on drilling.

Co-chairman Bob Graham, a Democrat who was Florida governor and later a senator, led efforts to prevent drilling off his state’s coast. Commissioner Donald Boesch of the University of Maryland wrote in a Washington Post blog that the federal government had planned to allow oil drilling off the Virginia coast and “that probably will and should be delayed.”

Boesch, who has made scientific assessments of oil spills’ effects on the ecosystem, said usually oil spills are small. But he added, “The impacts of the oil and gas extraction industry (both coastal and offshore) on Gulf Coast wetlands represent an environmental catastrophe of massive and underappreciated proportions.”

An expert not on the commission, Granger Morgan, head of the engineering and public policy department at Carnegie Mellon University and an Obama campaign contributor, said the panel should have included more technical expertise and “folks who aren’t sort of already staked out” on oil issues.

The Obama administration is feeling a lot of heat regarding their reaction to the continued oil leak in the Gulf. Rather than be the executives who, you know, execute action to solve a problem (hence, The Executive Branch) the Obama administration is instead focusing on “whose ass to kick” (i.e., lawsuits — and what else would one expect from lawyers) and shifting blame. This week the blame goes to the Tea Parties and fiscally responsible conservatives. Watch how deftly Obama misrepresents the arguments of those who advocate limited government (including thus by definition James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, et. al.).

Here’s Obama to The Politico’s Roger Simon:

In an interview with POLITICO, the president said: “I think it’s fair to say, if six months ago, before this spill had happened, I had gone up to Congress and I had said we need to crack down a lot harder on oil companies and we need to spend more money on technology to respond in case of a catastrophic spill, there are folks up there, who will not be named, who would have said this is classic, big-government overregulation and wasteful spending.”

The president also implied that anti-big government types such as tea party activists were being hypocritical on the issue.

“Some of the same folks who have been hollering and saying ‘do something’ are the same folks who, just two or three months ago, were suggesting that government needs to stop doing so much,” Obama said. “Some of the same people who are saying the president needs to show leadership and solve this problem are some of the same folks who, just a few months ago, were saying this guy is trying to engineer a takeover of our society through the federal government that is going to restrict our freedoms.”

The president makes two fundamental errors in his argument, and we’ll look at them in reverse order to which he made them.

First, it’s ridiculous to compare a Federal response to the worst petroleum accident in the history of the country to daily Federal intrusions into our lives. Indeed, the very argument of those who advocate limited government is that national disasters are precisely when one should expect an overwhelming Federal response. No fiscal conservative or tea party I know is saying that government has no role (that would be the anarchists, the people who riot at world trade meetings, and hardly conservatives).

Conversely, the tea parties legitimately question, for example, daily government intrusions on your wallet and liberty vis-a-vis the type of light bulb you may place in your home, or how many gallons per flush your toilet may use, or how much money you must pay your after-school high-school employee to check out your customers at a register, not to mention Michelle Obama’s toe-dipping into the pool of the government determining what foods are or are not good for your family.

This is why Thomas Paine (of Common Sense) wrote that government “in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one”; and why Thomas Jefferson similarly argued never to misread the “General Welfare” clause: “They are not to do anything they please to provide for the general welfare…. [G]iving a distinct and independent power to do any act they please which may be good for the Union, would render all the preceding and subsequent enumerations of power completely useless. It would reduce the whole instrument to a single phrase, that of instituting a Congress with power to do whatever would be for the good of the United States; and as they sole judges of the good or evil, it would be also a power to do whatever evil they please.”

The second fundamental error President Obama makes is his implied assumption that a lack of regulation enabled the BP oil leak. I have a hard time believing that when we’ve got a Federal agency called the Minerals Management Service (MMS) — an agency that the vast majority of Americans had probably never heard of six months ago — we really don’t have a plethora of federal, state and local regulations guiding the energy company. On top of that we’ve got the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and slew of other bureaucracies — again, federal, state, local — that must on a daily basis wade through no doubt pages of regulations that when stacked are higher than an oil rig. And that’s just the complexity that our government must interpret — imagine how much it costs BP, Chevron-Texaco, Exxon-Shell, etc., and thus how much that costs you and me at the pump. Remember, it was this same MMS that gave the Deepwater Horizon oil rig a safety award last year. So how would have giving the MMS, or another agency, more power prevented this accident? There’s not one shred of proof it would have.

Now, this isn’t an argument against regulation carte blanche. Rather, it’s an argument that the facts show that that oil leak was not a systemic problem — such as Obama argues — or caused from a lack of regulation, but rather caused by a series of human errors — the humans at BP and in the government did not follow the regulations, and indeed not even follow BP’s internal regulations or oil and gas industry common practices!

This understanding — that the problem was human, not systemic — is best explained, by the way, by a small Colorado oil and gas company president this weekend in the WSJ. In short, summarizes Terry Barr, the employees at BP and at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig chose to press forward despite a minimum of three “red flags” which any other company in the energy industry, argues Barr, would have halted operations.

“Instead of asking, ‘What should we do about people who are poor in a rich country?’ The first question is, ‘Why is this a rich country?’

“Five hundred years ago, there weren’t rich countries in the world. There are rich countries now because part of the world is following basically libertarian rules: private property, free markets, individualism.”

– David Boaz, Cato Institute.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and as people start to realize how many anti-business provisions are in this 1,900-page monstrosity they’re going to find that this is really, really awful tasting pudding.

Just 24 hours into this mess, Investor Business Daily’s Dave Hogberg finds a quick 20 ways ObamaCare erodes your liberty and hurts business opportunity:

The sections described below are taken from HR 3590 as agreed to by the Senate and from the reconciliation bill as displayed by the Rules Committee.

1. You are young and don’t want health insurance? You are starting up a small business and need to minimize expenses, and one way to do that is to forego health insurance? Tough. You have to pay $750 annually for the “privilege.” (Section 1501)

2. You are young and healthy and want to pay for insurance that reflects that status? Tough. You’ll have to pay for premiums that cover not only you, but also the guy who smokes three packs a day, drink a gallon of whiskey and eats chicken fat off the floor. That’s because insurance companies will no longer be able to underwrite on the basis of a person’s health status. (Section 2701).

3. You would like to pay less in premiums by buying insurance with lifetime or annual limits on coverage? Tough. Health insurers will no longer be able to offer such policies, even if that is what customers prefer. (Section 2711).

4. Think you’d like a policy that is cheaper because it doesn’t cover preventive care or requires cost-sharing for such care? Tough. Health insurers will no longer be able to offer policies that do not cover preventive services or offer them with cost-sharing, even if that’s what the customer wants. (Section 2712).

5. You are an employer and you would like to offer coverage that doesn’t allow your employees’ slacker children to stay on the policy until age 26? Tough. (Section 2714).

6. You must buy a policy that covers ambulatory patient services, emergency services, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment; prescription drugs; rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices; laboratory services; preventive and wellness services; chronic disease management; and pediatric services, including oral and vision care.

You’re a single guy without children? Tough, your policy must cover pediatric services. You’re a woman who can’t have children? Tough, your policy must cover maternity services. You’re a teetotaler? Tough, your policy must cover substance abuse treatment. (Add your own violation of personal freedom here.) (Section 1302).

7. Do you want a plan with lots of cost-sharing and low premiums? Well, the best you can do is a “Bronze plan,” which has benefits that provide benefits that are actuarially equivalent to 60% of the full actuarial value of the benefits provided under the plan. Anything lower than that, tough. (Section 1302 (d) (1) (A))

8. You are an employer in the small-group insurance market and you’d like to offer policies with deductibles higher than $2,000 for individuals and $4,000 for families? Tough. (Section 1302 (c) (2) (A).

9. If you are a large employer (defined as at least 50 employees) and you do not want to provide health insurance to your employee, then you will pay a $750 fine per employee (It could be $2,000 to $3,000 under the reconciliation changes). Think you know how to better spend that money? Tough. (Section 1513).

10. You are an employer who offers health flexible spending arrangements and your employees want to deduct more than $2,500 from their salaries for it? Sorry, can’t do that. (Section 9005 (i)).

11. If you are a physician and you don’t want the government looking over your shoulder? Tough. The Secretary of Health and Human Services is authorized to use your claims data to issue you reports that measure the resources you use, provide information on the quality of care you provide, and compare the resources you use to those used by other physicians. Of course, this will all be just for informational purposes. It’s not like the government will ever use it to intervene in your practice and patients’ care. Of course not. (Section 3003 (i))

12. If you are a physician and you want to own your own hospital, you must be an owner and have a “Medicare provider agreement” by Feb. 1, 2010. (Dec. 31, 2010 in the reconciliation changes.) If you didn’t have those by then, you are out of luck. (Section 6001 (i) (1) (A))

13. If you are a physician owner and you want to expand your hospital? Well, you can’t (Section 6001 (i) (1) (B). Unless, it is located in a county where, over the last five years, population growth has been 150% of what it has been in the state (Section 6601 (i) (3) ( E)). And then you cannot increase your capacity by more than 200% (Section 6001 (i) (3) (C)).

14. You are a health insurer and you want to raise premiums to meet costs? Well, if that increase is deemed “unreasonable” by the Secretary of Health and Human Services it will be subject to review and can be denied. (Section 1003)

15. The government will extract a fee of $2.3 billion annually from the pharmaceutical industry. If you are a pharmaceutical company what you will pay depends on the ratio of the number of brand-name drugs you sell to the total number of brand-name drugs sold in the U.S. So, if you sell 10% of the brand-name drugs in the U.S., what you pay will be 10% multiplied by $2.3 billion, or $230,000,000. (Under reconciliation, it starts at $2.55 billion, jumps to $3 billion in 2012, then to $3.5 billion in 2017 and $4.2 billion in 2018, before settling at $2.8 billion in 2019 (Section 1404)). Think you, as a pharmaceutical executive, know how to better use that money, say for research and development? Tough. (Section 9008 (b)).

16. The government will extract a fee of $2 billion annually from medical device makers. If you are a medical device maker what you will pay depends on your share of medical device sales in the U.S. So, if you sell 10% of the medical devices in the U.S., what you pay will be 10% multiplied by $2 billion, or $200,000,000. Think you, as a medical device maker, know how to better use that money, say for R&D? Tough. (Section 9009 (b)).

The reconciliation package turns that into a 2.9% excise tax for medical device makers. Think you, as a medical device maker, know how to better use that money, say for research and development? Tough. (Section 1405).

17. The government will extract a fee of $6.7 billion annually from insurance companies. If you are an insurer, what you will pay depends on your share of net premiums plus 200% of your administrative costs. So, if your net premiums and administrative costs are equal to 10% of the total, you will pay 10% of $6.7 billion, or $670,000,000. In the reconciliation bill, the fee will start at $8 billion in 2014, $11.3 billion in 2015, $1.9 billion in 2017, and $14.3 billion in 2018 (Section 1406).Think you, as an insurance executive, know how to better spend that money? Tough.(Section 9010 (b) (1) (A and B).)

18. If an insurance company board or its stockholders think the CEO is worth more than $500,000 in deferred compensation? Tough.(Section 9014).

19. You will have to pay an additional 0.5% payroll tax on any dollar you make over $250,000 if you file a joint return and $200,000 if you file an individual return. What? You think you know how to spend the money you earned better than the government? Tough. (Section 9015).

That amount will rise to a 3.8% tax if reconciliation passes. It will also apply to investment income, estates, and trusts. You think you know how to spend the money you earned better than the government? Like you need to ask. (Section 1402).

20. If you go for cosmetic surgery, you will pay an additional 5% tax on the cost of the procedure. Think you know how to spend that money you earned better than the government? Tough. (Section 9017).

Got an issue you oppose strongly enough, at least now you can pick up your phone or write an e-mail to your state and federal representatives. But who do you call once the “global bureaucrats” are in charge?

Janet Daley of the UK Telegraph explains:

… the word “global”, as in “global economic crisis”, meant: “It’s not my fault”. To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.

The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of “global agreements” reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion. Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people.

Nor was much consideration given to the logical conclusion of all this grandiose talk of global consensus as unquestionably desirable: if there was no popular choice about approving supranational “legally binding agreements”, what would happen to dissenters who did not accept their premises (on climate change, for example) when there was no possibility of fleeing to another country in protest? Was this to be regarded as the emergence of world government? And would it have powers of policing and enforcement that would supersede the authority of elected national governments? In effect, this was the infamous “democratic deficit” of the European Union elevated on to a planetary scale. And if the EU model is anything to go by, then the agencies of global authority will involve vast tracts of power being handed to unelected officials. Forget the relatively petty irritations of Euro‑bureaucracy: welcome to the era of Earth-bureaucracy, when there will be literally nowhere to run.

Great points. Read the rest.

John Stossel adds to the evidence that President Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program damages the economic environment in unseen ways — indeed, it doesn’t help the poor, it actually hurts the poor:

If you can only afford $500 – $1,000 for a car, you’ll find many of these vehicles are now unavailable.  They have been sent to the junk yard thanks to this program…The Blogger News Network points out that junk yards that demolish the clunkers aren’t allowed to pull engines and other parts before they’re crushed, making parts for older cars harder and more expensive to get.

Once more, nothing is more deadly than a politician who has vast power over the economy but who knows little of economics.

Gwen Ottinger of the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s Center for Contemporary History and Policy in Philadelphia — and boy is that a mouthful — appears to be one of those rare environmentally conscience persons who also happen to have common sense. “Keep your clunker,” says Gwen, it’s better for the economy and the environment:

First, even when new cars and appliances are more efficient than the ones they replace, the act of replacing them entails environmental costs not accounted for in the stimulus programs. Building a new car, washing machine or refrigerator takes energy and resources: The manufacture of steel, aluminum and plastics are energy-intensive processes, and some of the materials used in durable goods, especially plastics, use non-renewable fossil fuels as feedstocks as well as energy sources. Disposing of old products, a step required by most incentive and rebate programs, also has environmental costs: It takes additional energy to shred and recycle metals; plastic components often cannot be recycled and end up as landfill cover; and the engine fluids, refrigerants and other chemicals essential to operating products end up as hazardous wastes.

Policies that encourage purchases of energy-efficient products may also increase, rather than decrease, energy use by confusing efficiency with consumption. For example, Energy Star refrigerators, which now qualify for rebates in many states, are certified to be 10 to 20 percent more efficient than “standard” models. Yet the Energy Star rating is awarded overwhelmingly to refrigerators far larger than would have been the norm two decades ago, and smaller models of refrigerator, which use less energy simply because they have a smaller volume of air to cool, were not even included in the Energy Star program until 2002. Consumers who wish to benefit from environmentally friendly stimulus money, then, are pushed toward purchasing “efficient” but relatively large models rather than being encouraged to opt for the smallest refrigerator, with the smallest energy demands, that meets their needs.

Beyond these concrete environmental drawbacks, product-replacement policies also send a message that old things are dirty and inefficient, while new ones are necessarily green and efficient. Under the Cash for Clunkers program, for example, old cars must be traded in for new ones. Yet plenty of used cars exceed the required 22 mpg: The Toyota Prius hybrid, on the market since 2001, gets upward of 40 mpg, and even a 15-year-old Honda Civic gets 28. By assuming that only new products can be environmentally friendly, these policies lead us to discount the environmental gains that could be made through well-established and low-tech means, such as smaller refrigerators. They also reinforce the idea that all products, even “durable goods,” quickly become obsolete — a notion that leads to overwhelming amounts of environment-despoiling waste.

All good points, and reminiscent of the 19th century’s “Broken Window” policy, which Frédéric Bastiat debunked in That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen — the boy who breaks the shopkeeper’s window, went the fallacy, is actually helping the economy because the shopkeeper must replace the window, helping out the vendors for that, who in turn spend that profit on other needs, etc.

Bastiat:

It is not seen that as our shopkeeper has spent six francs upon one thing, he cannot spend them upon another. It is not seen that if he had not had a window to replace, he would, perhaps, have replaced his old shoes, or added another book to his library. In short, he would have employed his six francs in some way, which this accident has prevented.

And so, it is not seen that the now proposed $3 billion dollar program takes from the taxpaying population $3 billion they might have spent on other things. The folly of Keynesian economics continues…

In 40 years working in television news, and now living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I’m surrounded by people who sneer at “profit.”  At Princeton, I was taught that pursuit of profit was largely destructive, and I took that attitude to my consumer reporting. I hated the profits made by the scam artists and demanded that the government step in and do something. But the more reporting I did, the more it dawned on me that the government is often the problem, and that the biggest profit-makers were the ones who served their customers well.

– John Stossel, ABC News.