Hostile Government Take-Over Bid
By Thomas E. Brewton
The just-stalled Senate bill to reduce greenhouse gas emissions reflects a basic doctrine of the socialist religion: government bureaucrats are smarter and more effective managers than businessmen and should be empowered to set the rules for running private business.
The attitudes and energies underlying the proposed Senate legislation to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases accord with the basic conception of the first organized synthesizer of socialist doctrine, Henri de Saint-Simon. Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology in France, wrote that the basis of Saint-Simon’s entire theory of the socialist religion was that science should exercise hegemony over mankind.
Saint-Simon’s presumption was that private businessmen and individuals lacked competence to understand and to apply scientific principles to socialized (i.e., controlled by government for the public benefit) management of business. Only trained bureaucrats, either in government bureaus or placed in charge of business management, had the required knowledge to make business fully efficient and therefore productive of the greatest degree of benefit to the socialized political society.
Unfortunately, what passes for science today is a very weak reed for bureaucrats to lean upon. It is too often junk science, concocted by self-interested hot shots gunning for large research grants to fuel personal fame and fortune. Prominent among today’s junk science gambits is the man-made global warming hoax. Placing too much reliance upon unproved computer models with global implications is a dangerous policy, but precisely what Al Gore and his acolytes propose to do. One example of worldwide damage inflicted by Congressional dabbling in “science” is the idiocy of government mandating and subsidizing ethanol production.
Carbon emissions control will be far more destabilizing and will sharply reduce the nation’s wealth and reduce available goods and services.
In addition to the specific damage to be inflicted upon society by measures such as the Senate greenhouse gas legislation, there is a more pervasive and equally ominous effect: government intervention retards the advance of knowledge.
A Senate bill introduced by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.), Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.), and John Warner (R., Va.) to control carbon emissions ultimately would allow the Federal government to decide which of today’s private businesses will be allowed to survive. It doesn’t go that far now, but it would be difficult to find any regulatory salient that has not led to hundreds or thousands of supplemental regulations expanding the scope and authority of the initial regulatory action. This legislation is the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent.
Of it, the Wall Street Journal observed:
For those unfamiliar with the 1930s as a baseline reference, that is the era of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which imposed a socialist regime upon our nation for the first time in its history.
As a foretaste, reflect upon Congresswoman Maxine Waters’s threat to oil company executives to nationalize the petroleum industry.
But the basic fact remains: this legislation puts the Federal government on the road to regulating all businesses that use any form of energy, which is to say, every business.
Terence Corcoran, Financial Post, 22 May 2008.
Make no mistake about it. A carbon emissions control program, once enacted, will metastasize like a virulent cancer.
So too in regulating greenhouse gasses. The government will gradually be compelled to assert full control over all carbon emissions, and the cost will be borne by the little guy, the lower-income groups.
