Mark W. Hendrickson

Mark W. Hendrickson

Tuesday, 03 September 2024 12:33

Hendrickson's View

Hendrickson’s View

Mark W. Hendrickson

Mark Hendrickson is an economist who recently retired from the faculty of Grove City College, where he remains a Fellow for Economic & Social Policy for the college’s The Institute for Faith and Freedom. These essays are republished from The Institute for Faith and Freedom, The American Spectator, and The Epoch Times.

The Secret Democratic Cabal’s Openly Anti-American Agenda — the Democratic Cabal Is the True Threat to Democracy

You’ve got to hand it to the Democratic Party. They have a slick operation going. Four years ago, they hatched a plan to circle the wagons around Joe Biden and somehow convinced all the other contenders for the presidential nomination to step aside. Joe, a notably undistinguished but loyal party apparatchik, had great name recognition and seemed safely normal compared to, say, Bernie Sanders. Sure, he was visibly failing even back then, but with COVID as a cover, they could keep Joe in his basement and hide the truth of his condition. As we know all too well, that strategy was successful.

And now, in 2024: Round Two of the — what, mysterious, unconventional? — Democratic strategy for selecting a presidential candidate. They pulled the plug on Biden, instantly installed Kamala Harris as their candidate, and have already gone through the motions of nominating her democratically via a virtual vote before the Democratic convention. Unsurprisingly, the polls showed that the odds for the Dems winning the November election improved hugely. What else would you expect from a vibrant, photogenic, lively candidate replacing the listless, semi-coherent man who seems more suited for life in a retirement home than in the White House?

Ah, but who exactly are “they”? Who has orchestrated these machinations, giving the American people first Biden, now Harris? It must be a small, tightly knit cabal, for large committees are too unwieldy (dare we say, too democratic) to choose presidential candidates so smoothly, quickly, and quietly. I mean, does anyone really think that either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris has in any meaningful way been leading the Democratic Party? No, they are puppets and figureheads, nothing more.

I suspect that many of us have a pretty clear sense of who composes “the cabal” staging these political dramas, but rather than take educated guesses here about who they are, let’s examine what their agenda is. In short, the agenda of the Democratic cabal is to terminate the American Republic as established by our Constitution. The Democrats want power. The Founders sought to protect us from the depredations of unchecked political power. The whole purpose of the Constitution was to place limits on the powers of government and to defend the rights of individuals to live freely and decide how to maximize their well-being under a system of impartial laws.

The addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution underscored the Founders’ emphasis on rights. That emphasis drew upon the Declaration of Independence, the fundamental principles of which are that each human being is endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that the sole purpose of government is to uphold and protect those rights. If you want further confirmation of the priority of individual rights over government powers, take a look at the 9th and 10th Amendments. The 9th basically states that any right not specifically spelled out in the Constitution is presumed to belong to the people, while the 10th states that any power not explicitly delegated to the government is assumed not to be a legitimate power.

A main feature of the design of the Constitution was the separation of powers between three distinct branches of government — the legislative, executive, and judicial. For the past three and a half years, Team Biden has worked overtime to usurp the legislative prerogative of Congress by issuing a flood of regulatory edicts. This tendency is nothing new. For many years, it has been common practice in Washington for unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch to issue 18 or 20 regulations with the force of law for every one actual law passed by Congress.

The Supreme Court has attempted to slow this regulatory onslaught in decisions like West Virginia v. EPA in 2022, but Team Biden has been playing whack-a-mole, promulgating regulations with far greater rapidity than the court will ever be able to keep up with. And now, for trying to preserve our constitutional order and defend us from executive supremacy, the Democratic cabal is attacking the Supreme Court, blustering about bogus ethics concerns and threatening to impose term limits. How blatantly anti-constitutional! The Founders deliberately gave lifetime tenure to the members of the Supreme Court to insulate them from popular political passions. The Supremes were never supposed to be popular or well liked. It was their job to throw cold water on any attempt by the other two branches of government to subvert the Constitution and arrogate more power to themselves.

The cabal saw that Biden could still throw mud at the Supremes. Having already achieved a large degree of dominance over Congress, neutering the other branch of government — the remaining check on executive power — became the next logical step in the cabal’s strategy to achieve rule by fiat for a Democratic elite. The Dems talk a lot about Donald Trump being a threat to democracy, but their actions speak louder than their words. By hand-picking their figureheads and by their agenda of defying the Constitution to grab ever more power, the Democratic cabal is the true threat to democracy.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party Are Amoral — Don’t Expect Anything Better from His Successor.

Many today would consider the adjective in the phrase “cynical politics” to be a pleonasm. We may look back wistfully at periods in history when statesmen rose above politics; when those running for public office were not afraid to campaign and govern on noble principles; when an office-seeker’s political career took a back seat while he stood up for what was right; when politicians placed a higher value on morality than on demagoguery and the latest public opinion polls.

Lest that sound too gloomy, let us remember that history often moves like a pendulum. We may long with hope and optimism for a future when statesmen will make a comeback over today’s bankrupt ethos of selling your soul if that’s what it takes to win.

For the present, though, we must reckon with the utter amorality of the Democratic Party —which is not to assert that there are no amoral individuals in the Republican Party. In a democratic system in which presidents and legislators gain office by winning elections, the goal of winning becomes paramount. Indeed, all other principles and values recede into the background. Today’s Democrat has one cold calculus: Win regardless of what innocent people may be hurt.

Joe Biden Has Hardly Approached Politics with a Moral Compass — President Joe Biden epitomizes the amoral politician. A lifelong mediocrity of limited ability and questionable ethics (people who went to law school with him remember him as an intellectual dullard and a plagiarizer), Biden went all-in on learning to play the political game at an early age. Like others who have no skills or talents that could translate into achieving distinction in the private workplace (think Bernie and AOC), Biden found a lucrative career in politics by using what can only dubiously be called a “talent” — the ability to spout out glib gobbledygook that pushes voters’ emotional hot buttons and exploits their ignorance, prejudices, and fears. Joe learned the one all-important political lesson: Go along with the leftist mob and pay attention to which way the wind is blowing in the polls.

In Biden, we see a Catholic who found it expedient to reject his church’s teachings on abortion and align himself with the politically powerful pro-abortion forces. He would publicly abuse, bully, and humiliate judicial nominees at Senate confirmation hearings (Judge Robert Bork comes to mind) and subsequently approach the devastated family with a smile and the lame explanation, “Don’t take this personally; it’s just the way the game is played.”

In decades in the Senate, Joe Biden never crafted any significant legislation. He simply bided his time, watched the polls, and went with the flow. As president, his actions have shown us just how dangerous a politician’s self-serving amorality can be.

The President’s Self-Serving Amorality Is Dangerous for Americans — Think of the incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan: American servicemen and many Afghani friends of America died simply because Joe wanted to score political points by announcing the withdrawal on Sept. 11, 2021 — the 20th anniversary of 9/11 — an artificially rushed date that left our forces without time to organize an orderly withdrawal.

Biden has greatly depleted the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that we maintain to keep us supplied in an emergency. Why? To push gasoline prices lower to mollify voters who were angry about rising gasoline prices. Gaining votes for Democrats was more important to Joe than national security.

Biden has treated the lives of American allies (Israelis) and friends (Ukrainians) as expendable, presuming to tell those allies not to fight for victory. Why? Because he needed the votes of Americans who side with Hamas or want to appease Putin.

In a case of stunning poetic justice, the win-at-all-costs prime directive has come back to bite Biden in the rear. His fellow Democrats turned against his reelection candidacy — not because they objected to his amoral policies, nor because they are opposed to having a doddering, semi-coherent older man struggling with glaringly obvious senility if it advances their socialistic agenda.

Once it became inescapably obvious that Biden could not win the November election, and that his candidacy would cause the Democrats to lose key seats in the House and Senate — only then did his fellow Democrats turn against him. They abandoned Biden like rats jumping off a sinking ship. The cold, amoral calculus of doing whatever is necessary to win asserted itself, so Biden had to be dumped.

I had thought that Biden might use his recent bout with COVID as a face-saving way to exit the presidential race. Instead, Biden tried to sound like a statesman, solemnly stating that he felt he had to step aside for the good of others. Alas, playing the statesman is an unfamiliar role for Biden. He is a partisan through and through, and so he announced that he was withdrawing for his party’s sake first and his country’s sake second. (His exact words were, “I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down. . .”.)

Biden’s departure is no victory for our country. His party will nominate someone similarly amoral in his place.

“Far-right” and “Right-wing” in the So-called “Mainstream Media”

The longstanding usage (or misusage) of “far-right” and “right-wing” in the “mainstream media” (MSM) manifests a bias that has been around for decades. If you are of a certain age, you may remember how during the Cold War it was considered a flagrant faux pas in media and intellectual circles to identify any sort of threat as coming from the political left. Reporters lived in dread of writing anything that might be interpreted as being anti-communist, for that would open them to scorn and disapprobation in the editorial rooms of MSM publications and media outlets. The so-called “establishment” would brand anyone sounding anti-communist as jingoistic, unenlightened, and backward-thinking. In fact, one of the surest ways to solidify one’s reputation as an acceptable journalist was to establish one’s bona fides as an anti-anti-communist. Writers didn’t necessarily have to come out explicitly for the communist side as long as they criticized and denigrated anti-communists.

Two examples of the MSM’s usage of “far-right” or “right-wing” this summer — one focused on Europe, one on the U.S. — illustrate the glaring fatuity of these adjectives.

In the first round of French elections, Marine LePen’s National Rally party was the leading vote-getter, receiving 33 percent of the popular vote. The MSM hastened to sound the alarm about this strong showing by “the far right.” “Watch out for those dangerous extremists” was their message. But isn’t it silly, even nonsensical, to characterize the largest chunk of votes in a democratic election as “extremist”?

Exit polls revealed what motivated so many French citizens to vote for the “far-right” National Rally. Their three primary concerns were crime, uncontrolled immigration, and the falling purchasing power of their money. That sounds pretty normal and mainstream to me. It’s a weird world view that brands anyone as “far right” for wanting to live their lives in safety, to want their money to retain its value, and to have their government forbid entrance into their country to drug runners, supporters of terrorism, those with infectious diseases, etc.

Here in the States, journalists resorted to the “right-wing” canard this summer in their commentary about the Supreme Court decision, Trump v. USA — the case that somewhat extended presidential immunity. This has been a key part of a concerted effort by non-conservatives to tar-and-feather the Supreme Court as “right-wing.” From the MSM point of view, the Court must be extremist since a 6-3 majority held that former President Trump has more immunity from prosecution than progressives wish he had.

What is driving the establishment nuts about Trump v. USA is nothing other than Trump Derangement Syndrome. Because the decision undermines the efforts to cripple Trump’s presidential campaign by bombarding him with questionable charges — the so-called lawfare strategy — they are furious and have gone berserk. In this case, “right-wing” can be translated as “to the benefit of Donald Trump.” By that logic, the MSM are essentially declaring that all 74 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 are “far-right.” Is over 40 percent of the electorate “extremist”? Sorry, MSM, that does not compute.

The politically motivated assault on the Supreme Court included sniping reports that the Trump v. USA decision was deemed reasonable only by Republicans and “right-wing commentators.” Once again, we have the absurdity of the most widespread opinion being classified as extremist. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the media to describe the three dissenting justices as “extremist” or “left-wing”? After all, they’re the ones out of step with the majority. Alas, to the MSM (like to Communists) all enemies are on the right.

The partisans and ideologues bleating “right-wing” about Trump v. USA chatter incessantly that Trump is a threat to our democracy. Look in the mirror, people. You are defending an administration that tramples democracy on an almost daily basis, whether by issuing green rules and regulations in contravention of the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. EPA decision (2022), or usurping a Congressional prerogative by unilaterally pardoning student debt, or by ignoring the national security needs of the country by depleting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in an attempt to temporarily lower gasoline prices in an election year, etc., etc.

Today’s Democrats and MSM allies warn about their opponents’ alleged tyranny while turning a blind eye to their own tyrannies. This glaring double standard is reminiscent of Communism: Tyranny is bad — unless it’s our tyranny. Then it must be defended at all costs, including by slandering the other side as “extremists.”

The establishment media should be embarrassed by characterizing normalcy as extremism. Those pejorative terms long ago lost any objective definition (if, indeed, there ever was an objective definition to begin with). Their usage has become lazy, unthinking, reflexive, and increasingly absurd. It’s time for the MSM to retire the nonsensical smears “far-right” and “right wing.”

Some Good News on the Climate Change Front

It’s highly encouraging to read of a shift toward taking practical, more affordable steps to incrementally improve our defenses against destructive natural forces.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal reports:

“Efforts to address the cause of climate change have fallen short so far. That is leading to a big push to treat the symptoms. Government and private money is pouring into plans to control flooding, address extreme heat, and shore up infrastructure to withstand more severe weather caused by climate change.”

What a welcome report! It represents a triumph for wisdom and common sense.

Everyone knows that weather periodically becomes destructive and deadly. We all agree that we need to try to protect ourselves against these mighty forces. It would be unconscionable to passively submit to nature’s fury rather than to combat it. Where we disagree — often passionately — is on the best overall strategy for dealing with the challenge of destructive weather events.

For the past several decades, policy has generally been to try to reduce the frequency and intensity of destructive weather events. How? By trying to stabilize Earth’s climate, particularly the average surface temperature, by imposing radical changes in our energy consumption and lifestyles. I call this the idealistic or absolutist approach. Proponents literally want to change the world.

By contrast, the opponents of these policies, including yours truly, join the proponents in accepting the following facts: The climate is changing, violent weather events happen periodically, and humans need to do what we can to minimize the damage inflicted by such events. But like the WSJ article states, we believe that the focus should be not a Quixote-like obsession to control Earth’s climate, but on building and developing technological and physical tools that enable us to survive and withstand inevitable violent weather events. I call this the realistic approach.

There are two major problems with the idealistic approach: Enormous costs and uncertain, limited effectiveness. Even the proponents themselves have made it clear that trillions and trillions of dollars ($150 trillion by 2050, according to a Bank of America study) must be spent in order to achieve such idealistic goals as “net zero” (achievable at a cost of $275 trillion by 2050, according to a McKinsey study — more than twice as much as the world’s entire gross domestic product). And for what? To shave a few hundredths of a degree to a tenth or two off Earth’s average temperature. Never before in human history has it been proposed to spend so much for so little. And that assumes, contrary to abundant evidence, that scientists have a correct understanding of how all the various forces that affect the climate work. We certainly may question the accuracy of the calculations, given how wildly inaccurate climate change models have been. In short, we could end up wasting trillions of dollars tackling forces that lie beyond human control.

The realistic approach to combating violent weather events involves building out technologies that work — things such as more wind- and rain-resistant structures, more intelligent forest management, and improvements to drainage. One advantage that these measures have over the idealistic attempt to radically transform human society is that we know that these realistic approaches work. A second advantage is that they cost so much less than the unfathomable trillions that changing human society would cost.

In fact, one of the dangers of the idealistic approach is that in addition to there being no guarantee that they can control Earth’s climate (nor is there any guarantee that curbing CO2 emissions will, in fact, lead to fewer floods, hurricanes, droughts, fires, etc.) the enormous expenses of their experiment would leave human society poorer, hence less able to afford improvements to infrastructure and other known ways of protecting people from nature’s convulsive destructiveness.

We need to remember the lesson of the Kuznets curve, named after economist Simon Kuznets. Contrary to 1970s-era environmental alarmism that warned that the more prosperity human beings achieved, the more pollution and environmental damage would accumulate, we found that once societies achieve a certain income per capita (a level far below our current income per capita) pollution lessens rather than increases. That is because humans value environmental quality, and once they are prosperous enough to afford it, they are willing and able to pay for measures that either remediate prior pollution or reduce future pollution.

Similarly, the wealthier people are in the future, the more safeguards they will be able to afford in the ongoing battle against weather and climate. I have long averred that we need an environmentalism as if people matter. Poverty has long been the most lethal condition for human beings. Conversely, wealth, prosperity, affluence, higher standards of living, a richer society, whatever term you prefer, are what will maximize human protections against adverse weather.

It is highly encouraging, then, to read of the important shift from trying to regulate the climate at astronomical, impoverishing costs to taking practical, more affordable steps to incrementally improve our defenses against destructive natural forces year by year. That is good news indeed.

The Green Version of Socialism: What Is Familiar and What Is Different

In my previous column, I described the socialistic character of the greens’ masterplan for American society in the name of “climate change.” In one important way, the current green iteration of socialism is like prior versions: It clearly demonstrates the incompetence of top-down economic central planning. In another way, though, it is strikingly different: There is virtually no rhetoric about uplifting the poor.

Let’s examine the incompetence issue first.

Consider:

The poster child for green socialism’s absurdity undoubtedly is the embarrassing report that $7.5 billion of government investment has so far only produced “7 or 8” EV charging stations.

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that power production from wind is declining even as subsidies to wind energy continue to rise.

Late last summer, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) assessed the five greatest risks to the reliability of the USA’s electric power grid. The top-ranked risk was government energy policy, as the green fanatics insist on replacing time-tested energy sources (primarily fossil fuels) with less reliable and less affordable alternatives (i.e., solar and wind).

Socialistic incompetence is obvious when some of the planners are pushing electric vehicles (EVs) that increase demand for electricity at the same time other planners are imposing green mandates that hamper the production of electricity. Even when the ill-considered detour into EVs eventually becomes a passé fad and a spent force, today’s anti-reliable, supply-crimping electricity policies should be seen as working against a prosperous future. Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cryptocurrencies, virtual reality, and who knows what other innovations will require massive increases in production of reliable electricity, but the greens are oblivious to this undeniable reality. Did they not learn that the unprecedented economic progress of the past century-plus was a result of harnessing electricity?

And let us not overlook the horrific environmental costs of green socialism. Besides being an economic boondoggle, wind energy in particular is causing an environmental catastrophe. Besides killing right whales, wind turbines kill millions of bats, birds (some endangered species), and insects every year. Yet, environmentalists, who once cheered when Uncle Sam would impose a huge fine on an oil company if a couple of dozen birds perished on their property, now call for the number of wind turbines to be massively increased. Greens, who squeal with indignation if a natural gas company lays a 36-inch pipeline anywhere, now call for 100-mile-wide swaths of natural habitat to be cleared to make room for ever-more turbines and the mind-boggling quantity of transmission lines needed to convey electricity from the remote countryside to crowded cities. Plus, wind turbines collectively shed tons of microplastic annually with as-yet unknown consequences to human health through the air we breathe and the water we drink.

Now let’s look at how green socialism is impacting the poor. Other than some pro forma clichés from a few “climate justice” groupies about how the poor should be spared the costs of addressing climate change, we hear virtually nothing about how Team Biden’s green agenda will actually help the poor. Instead, what we have had is a barrage of green policies that mercilessly and relentlessly hammer the poor.

The poor have been smacked with the inflation unleashed by the Biden spending binge to wage his war against fossil fuels. In the first three years of the Biden presidency, the price of heating oil has risen by over 60 percent, gasoline 37 percent, and electricity 27 percent. Not surprisingly, since energy costs are embedded in virtually every other consumer price, prices in general have risen substantially, too. These have been tough times for the poor.

And there’s more economic pain for the poor: The Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been issuing regulation after regulation mandating increased energy efficiency for stoves, refrigerators, hot water heaters, freezers, dishwashers, air conditioning units, heat pumps, light bulbs, etc. Maybe the good folks at the EPA view such items as luxuries, but to the average American today, they are necessities. The EPA’s regulations will jack up the prices of these modern amenities, in some cases by hundreds or thousands of dollars — far more than any savings from (hopefully) cheaper electricity. That can’t help but hurt the poor the most.

The greens warn us about the alleged danger of increased heat deaths due to global warming. Then by what logic do they pursue policies that dramatically raise the prices of electricity and of air conditioning units, which are human beings’ primary line of defense against heat? Don’t be surprised if you start to encounter occasional heart-tugging reports about poor Americans having to choose between keeping the A/C on and eating three meals per day.

Not only is green socialism aggressively and shamelessly making the poor poorer, the green central plan adds insult to injury by doling out subsidies to upper-income Americans. EVs are unaffordable to poor Americans, but Uncle Sam gives thousands in tax breaks so that richer Americans will buy them.

Similarly, government subsidies incentivize well-to-do Americans to install solar panels on houses. A wealthy friend of mine in Florida received a generous tax break to put solar panels on his roof. Those tax-subsidized panels add to the value of his house. Plus, he receives a monthly payment from the electric utility company because the panels enable him to sell more electricity to the utility than the utility sells to him. Think about it: Poorer Americans are struggling to pay today’s higher electric bills, while richer Americans enjoy an additional income stream from their local power company, thanks to taxpayer-funded subsidies.

Biden’s green version of socialism is typical in its display of arrogant self-righteousness matched by the colossal economic ignorance of the planners. Meanwhile, the green agenda is rushing our society toward a totally unnecessary economic crisis that will be even more tragic because of an oh-so-avoidable humanitarian crisis caused by green policies that unfairly crush the poor.

The Halfway Point of Another Eventful Sports Year

Congratulations to the Boston Celtics for winning the NBA championship and the Florida Panthers for winning the NHL’s Stanley Cup.

We have now officially entered the annual summer lull in North American team sports. With the NFL’s training camps still being more than a month away, only major league baseball, among the four traditional North American team sports, is active. Perhaps this summer lull will provide an opportunity for the fifth team sport — soccer — to ride the coattails of the surrealistically talented Lionel Messi to greater popularity.

The storied Celtics franchise won the NBA championship for an astounding 18th time, prevailing over the Dallas Mavericks four games to one. Sports fans saw the same basic pattern that played out in both the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball championships in April: The team that had the best player (Mavs superstar Luka Doncic) lost to the more balanced team. Once again, while superstars are exciting to watch, the bottom line is that basketball truly is a team sport.

The Stanley Cup finals between Florida and the Edmonton Oilers was one for the ages. The Panthers had been impressive in defeating two powerful teams — first the Boston Bruins and then the New York Rangers — on the way to the final round.

The Oilers’ journey to the finals was even more dramatic. In October and November 2023, the Oilers got off to a horrendous start in the regular season, losing 10 of their first 13 games. At that point, the management of the Oilers made what has turned out to be a brilliant move. They fired the team’s coaching staff and brought in Kris Knoblauch, who had never been a head coach in the NHL before. The Oilers quickly got untracked, winning 26 of their next 32 games.

The Oilers’ resilience continued during the playoffs. In the second round, the Oilers were down three games to two to the Vancouver Canucks, who had finished above the Oilers in the regular season standings, but the Oilers rallied to win the last two games. In the third round, the Oilers faced a Dallas Stars team that had looked unbeatable in the previous round. Once again, the Oilers fell behind, this time two games to one, only to suddenly overwhelm the Stars and reel off three straight victories to advance to the final round.

In the finals, the Panthers raced off to a three-games-to-zero lead. Once again, though, the Oilers rallied, winning the next three games. Were they a team of destiny? It definitely appeared that way, as they were on the verge of becoming only the second NHL team in history to win a Stanley Cup final after losing the first three games.

Alas, it was not to be. Momentum in sports and the bounces of a hockey puck are both very fickle things. Florida carried a 2-1 lead into the third period. The Oilers then mounted a furious effort, buzzing the Panthers’ goal, but they just couldn’t quite get the puck into the net, and the game ended with the score unchanged.

The Panthers-Oilers final will be remembered by hockey fans for a long time. It was one of those years when an impartial observer such as yours truly could say, “It’s a shame one of those teams had to lose.” As it is, I am happy for the Florida team, because they had never won the Stanley Cup before. I am also happy for their head coach, Paul Maurice, who no longer will be known as the NHL coach who has coached the most games in his career without having won the Stanley Cup.

As in the NBA, so in the NHL, the winning team was not the one with the best player. Edmonton’s superstar, Connor McDavid, was awarded the Conn Smythe Trophy as the best player through the four rounds of the playoffs, becoming only the second player ever to have won the award while playing on the losing team.

Individual Sports — Pardon me for the jarring transition, but let’s take a quick look at individual professional sports. Both tennis and golf crowned champions in May and June — a mixture of new and repeating champions.

The men’s French Open tennis tournament may have witnessed the changing of the guard to younger champions after many years of dominance by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic. Federer has retired; 14-time winner (yes, 14!) Nadal, battling age and injuries, lost to eventual runner-up Alexander Zverev in the opening round, and the GOAT, Djokovic, had to withdraw partway through the tournament with a knee injury that required surgery. The winner was Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz (maybe they should call this tournament the Spanish Open, since Spaniards win it so often), who, having just turned 21, has already won three of tennis’ four grand slam tournaments. On the women’s side, Poland’s Iga Swiatek won in dominant fashion. At the tender age of 23, she has already won the French Open four times.

In golf, American Xander Schauffele won his first major title at the PGA Championship in May, and fellow American Bryson DeChambeau won his second U.S. Open Tournament this month. Both were suspenseful matches. Schauffele won by one stroke, scoring a birdie on the last hole to finish 21 under par for 72 holes — the best-ever score in the history of golf’s four major tournaments. DeChambeau likewise won by one shot following a nerve-wracking final few holes when he blew a putt of less than four feet only to have the runner-up, Rory McIlroy, make the same mistake twice.

There were plenty of thrills for us sports fans in the first half of 2024. Now let’s see what the second half of the year gives us!     *

Monday, 06 February 2023 12:15

Hendrickson's View

Hendrickson’s View

Mark W. Hendrickson

Mark Hendrickson is an economist who recently retired from the faculty of Grove City College, where he remains a Fellow for Economic & Social Policy for the college’s Institute for Faith and Freedom. These articles are from The American Spectator, The Epoch Times, and The Institute for Faith and Freedom, an online publication of Grove City College, in Grove City, Pennsylvania.

Democrats’ Cynical Politics and Pernicious Energy Policies — There Is a Lot of Money Being Made Due to the Climate Change Cabal’s Entrenchment in the Democratic Party

Americans are deeply (and rightly) concerned about high energy prices. All we have to do is look across the Atlantic to see how grim life can be when there is an acute energy shortage. Clearly, an intelligent energy policy should be a priority of our national government. Electing representatives who will formulate such a policy is not only a crucial mega-issue for this midterm election, but will continue to be of immense, and potentially existential, importance in American elections for the foreseeable future.

Americans need to wake up to how wrong-headed and destructive are the Democratic policies of stifling domestic fossil fuel production and imagining they can replace the lost energy with intermittent (misnamed “renewable” or “clean”) energy in the next decade or two. There are encouraging signs that the great awakening has commenced. Americans are aware of the Biden Administration’s animus against American oil and gas companies, and how Biden has preferred to beg the governments of Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to increase production so as to lower gas prices and hopefully boost his popularity in an election year. That seems rather anti-American for an American president, doesn’t it?

The American people generally have the common sense to connect high prices at gas stations to tight supplies. They know that Team Biden jettisoned the “let Americans produce oil and gas” spirit of the Trump Administration that led to U.S. energy independence. They know that Biden has restricted drilling, shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline, and made no secret of his desire to put American oil and gas companies out of business by 2030. They have seen his Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, laugh callously when asked what she intended to do to encourage domestic drilling for fossil fuels, and then offer the nonsensical rejoinder that she had no power to make OPEC increase production. That is all the proof that anyone needs to see that Team Biden favors foreign production over domestic. (That hasn’t stopped Biden and Democratic candidates such as New Hampshire Sen. Maggie Hassan from squealing in indignation that the oil companies against which the Dems are waging a jihad of destruction won’t come to the rescue of Democratic candidates — their would-be executioners — by upping production to lower prices, at least until the election is over.)

The Democrats’ complaints about the presently high profits of American fossil fuel producers show their economic ignorance. All Biden et al. had to do to lower gasoline prices was to make peace with “Big Oil” (and little oil companies, too, since the anti-fossil fuels policies have been wonderfully nondiscriminatory, harming both big and small producers with admirable impartiality). If the Dems had simply let those companies do what they are designed to do — produce fossil fuels — then supplies would be higher and prices necessarily lower. Alas, Dems seem not to understand the law of supply and demand.

Unfortunately, Dems don’t have much of a grasp on the problematic physical, economic, geopolitical, and environmental ramifications of their pro-intermittent energy fixation, either.

First of all, physical reality: as the physicist Mark Mills has shown, the supply of raw materials needed for electric vehicles and other “green” technologies (i.e., lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, rare earth metals, etc.) is simply way too small for production on the scale that greens envision.

Economically, because of these scarcities, the costs of green technologies will soar.

Geopolitically, because most of those desired materials are located outside of the United States, the pursuit of green energy will progressively diminish U.S. energy independence and make us vulnerable to unstable and sometimes hostile governments.

Finally, and most unforgivably, environmentally speaking, the supposedly “green” party is pursuing solar and wind technologies that are by no means “clean” energy sources. The production of the essential raw materials for wind and solar are in many cases highly polluting, as are many “green energy” practices in the U.S. (See Michael Moore’s superb documentary, free on YouTube: “Planet of the Humans.”)

As an aside, let me share an ironic contrast with anti-green “green” technologies: Fossil fuels are the true “green” energy source in terms of their environmental impact. The carbon dioxide that fossil fuels have put into our atmosphere has enriched the growth of crops and plant life. Carbon dioxide, after all, is plant food, and in the last four or five decades, an area equal to twice the size of the continental United States has been transformed from barren to plant-covered. Even the vast Sahara Desert has shrunk by 8 percent; that is, an area nearly the combined area of France and Germany has gone green where the land had been desert.

What are the forces (other than stupidity and ignorance) that are holding Democrats in solidarity with their anti-fossil fuels agenda? I see at least three main pillars in this partisan coalition:

  1. Green Paganism — These are neo-Malthusian misanthropes descended from the late-’60s strain of environmentalism that followed the pied piper, Paul Ehrlich, down the path of “there are too many humans, and that’s bad.” From there, some environmentalists often came to regard humans as a plague or a scum or cancer on the earth.

Few correlations in economic history are more significant than the high correlation between oil consumption and standards of living. It is no exaggeration to state that modern prosperity was powered by oil.

Because the pagan greens think there are too many people, and that people (themselves excluded, of course) don’t deserve modern standards of living, they are, and have been for years, essentially anti-energy. Fossil fuels are their primary, but not their only energy target.

The pagan greens fail to see, even today after a half-century of marked environmental improvements, that more people are an asset, not a liability, and as explained by what economists call the Kuznets curve, when the wealth of a society gets to a certain point, pollution turns downward. These green fanatics repeatedly issue shrill and dire predictions and can’t seem to enjoy the good news that the climate-related death risk has fallen by 99 percent over the last century. What a bunch of humbugs!

2. Good old-fashioned cronyism — There is a lot of money being made due to the climate change cabal’s entrenchment in the Democratic Party. Government-funded scientists have found that lending credence to climate alarmism has been highly profitable for them and their universities, bringing to mind President Eisenhower’s warning in his farewell address: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded” and there is a “danger that public policy could itself become captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Indeed, while there are many fine scientists who have done work for Uncle Sam and the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the structure of the IPCC has empowered political actors to co-opt and misuse scientific research (for example, by issuing scary predictions on the basis of pathetic climate models that cannot be validated by real-world data).

Wall Street, seeing that trillions of dollars are in play, has been all too willing to jump on board the Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) bandwagon and to direct capital away from fossil fuel companies and toward producers of intermittent (sorry, “renewable”) sources of energy — for a fee, of course. Various political cronies and opportunists have been all too willing to dip into the federal treasury for the financing of this or that green boondoggle. Indeed, green energy probably has been responsible for more cronyism and corporate welfare than we’ve ever seen before.

3. Hunger for power — I’ve lost count of all the leaders in the U.S. Government and in the United Nations and various multilateral government-sponsored organizations who have openly stated that the primary goal of the climate change movement has been to effect a radical transformation of society, with socialism being the desired goal. One representative from a senior official of the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change: “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. [One] must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.” The Green New Deal being pushed by Democrats is clearly a socialistic plan for a centrally planned command economy. To this cadre, climate change is the path to amassing immense personal power.

The solution to our energy woes is simple. It is encapsulated in the famous reply that a French business leader named Legendre gave to Louis XIV’s Minister of State, J.B. Colbert, when the latter asked leaders of business how he could help stimulate the economy back then: “Laissez-nous faire” — roughly translated: Leave us alone and conditions will improve. Yes, you enthusiasts for Big Government, get out of the energy business and let the market bring the needed supplies to market. That policy alone will provide us with the kind of energy we most need: the most efficient, reliable, and affordable forms.

Why the Red Wave Never Came Ashore — If Trump’s Followers Cling to His Cult, There Will Be a Civil War Within the Republican Party.

Thirty years ago, during the 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton, Clinton adviser James Carville boiled the primary campaign message down to the simplest terms: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Indeed, that pithy statement is largely considered a truism in politics. Americans can put up with a lot of garbage from their political leaders as long as the economy is functioning well enough to allow John and Susie Voter to prosper more than struggle.

This year, polls showed that economic concerns — particularly the ravages of inflation — were at the top of the list of what voters cared about. Judging by the historical pattern where the sitting president’s party suffers large congressional losses in midterm elections, it seemed like a red wave was inevitable. Oops. Many conservatives were guilty of counting their chickens before they hatched. What happened? What explains the unusual and unexpected outcome that seemed to hold President Joe Biden and his party unaccountable for the obviously negative impact of their policies?

In this case, I would say, “It’s NOT the economy, stupid.” I would attribute the Republicans’ historically weak performance to three factors that are not economically related.

1. The Trump Factor — I don’t mean to pile on because the former president is taking a lot of flak right now, but it is undeniable that the candidates he helped nominate were largely repudiated by voters in many states. Donald Trump is, I believe, one of the tragic figures in American political history. His key policies — tax cuts, deregulation, appointing serious jurists rather than left-wing ideologues to the Supreme Court — helped our country tremendously. Unfortunately, his penchant for un-presidential nastiness — directed as it is toward anyone of either party who seems to get in his way — and his narcissistic obsession with 2020 even as voters have yearned for solutions to the problems of 2022 have alienated a majority of the electorate.

The challenge facing Republicans in 2024 will be how to avoid not mere internecine squabbling, but out-and-out civil war in the party’s ranks. Trump has tens of millions of supporters who are nearly fanatical in their devotion to him. However, there is no indication that the ranks of those supporters can be expanded to comprise a majority of the electorate. The question is whether Trump’s people will be willing to “settle” for an alternate candidate. Trump himself has given every indication that he is unwilling to have anyone other than himself run as the Republican standard-bearer in 2024. How else can one explain his perplexing ridiculing of Ron DeSantis after the Florida governor won reelection in a rout? To insult a Democrat in such a childish and petulant way is off-putting enough, but to lash out at a fellow Republican who is rising in national popularity shows a dangerous monomania.

Trump’s motto seems to be: It’s me or nobody. This is personality cult fanaticism. If his followers cling to that cult and work to undercut all other Republicans, there will be a civil war within the Republican Party. What I hope the Trumpistas will recognize before it is too late is that if they think the United States is so messed up that only Donald Trump can save it, then our country is lost already. There are a lot of decent, likable, highly competent leaders in the party, and millions of patriotic Americans who want to “Make America Great Again.” If Republicans want to have a good chance to win the White House in ’24, they need to refrain from petty personal attacks and unite behind one of their many qualified party members in the presidential race.

2. Abortion Politics — The abortion issue appears to have galvanized Democrats in many states, greatly increasing their motivation to vote even if they were lukewarm about Biden’s weak performance. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision several months ago appears to have been a pyrrhic victory. Constitutionally, Dobbs was the right decision. In terms of practical impact, though, post-Dobbs state laws and amendments point to a possible slowing of the long-term rate of decline in U.S. abortions.

The coming years are going to be very challenging for pro-life Americans. Fearful of substantial restrictions on abortion, many pro-choice Americans will oppose any and all limits, however modest, just because they don’t want to take what they perceive as the first step down the slippery slope to making abortion completely illegal. Pro-lifers will have to make some excruciatingly difficult tactical decisions. While the goal is to save every life, pro-lifers may have to compromise with pro-choicers if they want to accomplish even a small diminution in the number of abortions. More specifically, pro-lifers may have to make a choice between pushing for legislation that would reduce abortions from the around 900,000 performed in the U.S. last year to a few thousand — a measure with no discernible possibility of passing — or aiming for far more modest restrictions that might reduce abortions by, say, 50,000. Which is morally preferable: a law designed to save 900,000 lives that has no chance of passing, or a law that would save around 50,000, but has a chance to pass? Is it better to save 50,000 lives, or to crash and burn and save no lives in the attempt to save 900,000 lives? Tough question.

3. The Democratic Machine — A week before the 2020 election, Newt Gingrich was the speaker at the 15th annual Reagan Lecture at Grove City College. Of his many penetrating observations and astute analyses, one comment that struck me as particularly insightful was his characterization of the Democratic Party as a machine. That makes a lot of sense. Nancy Pelosi has adopted proxy voting in the House. It doesn’t matter who the representative is; what matters is that each Democratic seat represents an automatic vote for the agenda of Pelosi and the elite leadership circle. Same thing in the Senate: It doesn’t matter, for example, if the Democratic candidate is impaired (and let me sincerely wish Pennsylvania’s senator-elect, John Fetterman, a full recovery from his stroke, which is an awful thing to happen to anybody); the key factor is not the individual human being, but his or her status as a reliable vote for the Democrats’ progressive/socialist program. And then there is the president of the United States. I chastised Democrats in March 2020 for deciding upon Joe Biden as the titular head of the Democratic machine because they knew back then that his mental faculties were sliding. The message to the American people is that it doesn’t matter to the Democratic puppet masters that POTUS is impaired. Why? Because the machine doesn’t need a fully competent president in order for the machine to march steadily toward its socialist elitist plan for America.

There was something robotic — machinelike — about voters in 2022 who cast their votes for Democrats in spite of their miserable track record. Could they not connect the dots between Democratic policies and high gas prices? Alas, most of them seem to be on automatic pilot. The cost of living is rising? Well, shucks, Dem voters think, that’s unfortunate, but we know that we are the good guys, and no matter how much we have to suffer now, the important thing is to keep those bad guys — those profit-loving, xenophobic, LGBTQ-shunning Republicans — from getting into office. Certainly, the exit polls showing that a sizable majority of under-30 voters went Democratic indicates that woke education has indoctrinated that cohort into believing that virtue equates to being progressive.

I’m sure there are other factors that contributed to the Democrats’ success in limiting the damage to their party in the 2022 election, but the Trump factor, the abortion issue, and the advanced state of the Democratic machine get my vote for being the top three. I think all three will impact the 2024 elections. They bear monitoring going forward.

ESG Is Evil — More Than Just an Illegitimate Power Grab, It Is Threatening the Global Food and Energy Supply.

The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scoring system is undergoing intense scrutiny. It also has become quite a political football; conservative governors, attorneys general, and other officials are pushing back against the movement while progressive politicians argue that ESG needs to go further.

This political tug-of-war has exposed the evil essence of ESG: It is an attempt by progressives to arm-twist the leaders of investment firms controlling the allocation of over $20 trillion in investment capital away from firms disfavored by progressives, including, most notably, producers of fossil fuels.

The question arises: What gives these custodians of vast amounts of wealth the right to target certain industries for destruction by deliberately choking off their supply of financial oxygen? If such draconian steps, with vast implications for our entire society, are to be taken at all (itself a dubious proposition), those steps should be taken in the relatively open air of democratic politics rather than in the exclusive boardrooms of an unelected financial elite.

Apart from attempting to arrogate power to themselves that they do not rightly have, the perpetrators of the ESG maneuver — that is, the money-management megafirms that have been downgrading firms for the alleged sin of being in the “wrong” business — are behaving in a morally corrupt manner. They have violated their legal fiduciary responsibility to the millions of people who have trusted them with their funds so as to maximize their returns, not to transform society.

In the process of poorly serving their clients’ interests, those pushing the ESG scheme have committed greater evils. One of those has been to jeopardize our national interests. Attempting to stamp out oil and gas production at a time of rising energy prices is an act of aggression against American consumers. When one considers the potential for suffering in Europe this winter due to the cutoff of Russian energy supplies, preventing American companies from producing potentially life-saving energy is perversely inhumane.

When one further considers that ESG scores have rated Chinese companies producing “green energy” equipment more highly than American companies producing fossil fuels, one can detect both geopolitical short-sightedness and the most cynical hypocrisy. Do we really want the United States to become more dependent on an increasingly hostile China for energy? And how dare they bestow passing ESG grades, which are supposed to be sensitive to human rights, to companies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party? The CCP is known to torture and persecute its Muslim Uyghur minority; has stamped out democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, shamelessly jailing good people like Jimmy Lai; employs slave labor; engages in aggressive religious persecution against everyone from Muslims to Christians to adherents of Falun Gong; and is known to kill dissidents by harvesting their organs from them. To pretend that such savage oppressors are better for society and therefore merit a higher ESG score than American oil and gas companies is a moral obscenity.

The evil doesn’t stop there. Another front in the ESG offensive is to reduce food supplies by reducing the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers and farm equipment. After international organizations such as the World Economic Forum and the International Finance Corporation leaned on Sri Lanka to take these steps in spring 2021, food production there fell by half. The result was a painful mixture of food shortages, energy blackouts, and hyperinflation that has led to a social, economic, and political breakdown in that country.

Similar moves to reduce food supplies are afoot in the Netherlands and Canada. This is at a time when the Russian invasion of Ukraine and drought conditions in various parts of the world are precariously reducing the food supply. The Netherlands is the second-biggest food exporter in the world, but already its government’s pursuit of ESG goals has caused thousands of Dutch farmers to go broke. Farmers in both of those developed countries have organized huge protests, and the social fabric of these traditionally stable societies is at risk.

The ESG cabal is proposing to save the world by impoverishing millions of people and possibly starving millions more. No thanks! ESG is evil. It is not just an illegitimate power grab. It is not just an illegal violation of investors’ rights. In deliberately reducing food and energy supplies at a time of critical need, ESG is a crime against humanity.     *

Calendar of Events

Annual Dinner 2023
Thu Oct 19, 2023 @ 6:00PM - 08:00PM
Annual Seminar 2023
Thu Oct 19, 2023 @ 2:30PM - 05:00PM
Annual Dinner 2022
Thu Oct 13, 2022 @ 6:00PM - 08:00PM
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Thu Oct 13, 2022 @ 2:30PM - 05:00PM
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Thu Oct 14, 2021 @ 6:00PM - 08:00PM
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Thu Oct 22, 2020 @ 5:00PM - 08:00PM
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