Who knew? The nuclear lobby sleeping with the global warming crowd.

Last night I drove a family home from the airport. The father worked for our local utility company and is the lead planner on its most recent nuclear reactor plant. It is at least three years away from bringing in the bulldozers. He also said that at the moment coal powered plants are too cheap (they are already running and producing) and so a return on the nuclear plant investment was decades out. What we needed, he said, was a carbon tax to drive the price of energy up so that it would make the new nuclear plant more lucrative more quickly. Corporate profits through taxation.

You know I wonder whether if this isn’t really suggestive in its way. The bigger government gets, the more business interests feel like they have to pay to have a place there. Pay lobbyists to guide and craft regulation — raise barriers to competition and so on. A self-fulfilling problem. Who was it, Rick Perry I think who pointed out that the area around Washington DC is booming. Lots of shovel ready projects I bet around there. Plenty of stimulus destination.

Fr. Hans, those ‘leaders’ who would have you believe their choices are truncated have you fooled. Their choices are wide and varied, they simply choose to not make those that would upset their donating supporters.

People live longer than they once did. The older outnumber the younger. The retirement age must go up, the ‘from 100% full hours to 0% employment’ nature of retirement must be more gradual over more years, and the notion that statistically one might be paid a pension for more years than one worked must change. Anything else is coloring around the edges of the problem.

Maybe they find themselves overmatched somehow, they do not tackle the problem but instead ‘kick the can down the road’ for ‘someone else’ to deal with. Eventually some adult steps into the room and they defacto give him authority while complaining quite loudly about him/them.

This, over against folk who accept when elected their job is to choose the best from the available alternatives, create alternatives, give the smartest people in an area their goals and let them go do what they studied for.

The ‘converse’ of the above thing whose name I can’t quite reach, these same folk in leadership spend extensively and value education and educational facilities. From them comes widespread literacy and specialty and expertise never before seen so broadly in the population. Anyone who can use a smart phone would make a fair typist 40 years ago when one in a dozen if that could manage a keyboard. So with all this historically unprecedented widespread education and expertise— nevertheless these same education-education-education folk favor and create government structures and regulation that limits expert-on-the-ground choices beyond all recognition.

For example, I went to a routine annual medical checkup. The doctor’s nurse reads off a screen questions she’s to ask and record the answers. Now she went to school for many years to be a nurse. The computer she was typing upon that had spaces for only what they had spaces for wasn’t able to look at me, evaluate use training and so forth. She read the question, I gave the answer, she went on to the next one. I worry that the answers made less difference than the same experience you have when at an airline ticket counter checking in. Finally I had about enough, she asked “Do you use illegal drugs?”. I said “no”, then I asked her, “Seriously, in what universe does anybody answer ‘yes’ to that?'” She said, coloring slightly, “Well we have to ask because it is on the computer, we get points and are scored you see”. Oh, well, you know, if it’s on the computer. Same general experience with the doctor, the computer program he used wasn’t an aide to his profession, it was a leash that discredited his training and professional judgement. Someone, somewhere deemed themselves wiser than a highly trained person actually in the presence of the patient. They wrote a program, and imposed it on people with more subject area training than they in the medical field. So, why do the doctors allow it? That’s what I don’t get. They know their stuff, trained for years, and they submit to an impersonal leash and collar in the form of a program running on a laptop that can’t see the patient, but they somehow have to keep happy lest they not get paid.

I can just about imagine all these folk who create vastish regulations embodied in the form of a computer program imposed upon doctors. They collect the various answers and they produce a report which does what most of them do, declare limited success which could have been better had there been more extensive regulation (needing extensive funding) requiring the doctor to click ‘no’ on lots and lots more boxes until they finally list everything so the doctor can click ‘yes’ after 40,000 ‘not this illegal drug, not that illegal drug, not this disease, not that symptom’.

http://www.isi.org/lectures/lectures.aspx?SBy=search&SSub=speaker&SFor=scruton

I don’t think so.