What are they smoking?

The tendency of our government and perhaps all governments throughout history is to use a crisis to advance their agenda which would not fly in ordinary times. A few examples:

• In 1857 the Sepoy mutiny allowed the British government to establish its direct rule over all of India.

• The murder of Kirov (Mayor of Leningrad and rival of Stalin) brought on the communist terror in 1934.

• The assassination of Von Rath by Herschel Grenzspan in Paris in 1938 ushered in the officially sanctioned violence against the Jews in Germany.

The US government now in 2008 is on the brink of responding to another crisis in a similar, if not as drastic, way, complicated by the impending change of a government with one agenda, to another with a diametrically opposed one.

The US congress in a fit of self delusion has gotten it into their minds that if only the auto companies had made electric hybrid vehicles instead of SUV's their current problems would not exist. They also insist that the way to stimulate the economy is to pour public money into the development of pie-in-the-sky technologies geared to causing the extinction of carbon emissions. A noble goal perhaps, but one not calculated to doing much more than paying people to produce nothing. At least the New Deal, in its attempt to stimulate the economy, built Grand Coulee Dam and the Tennessee Valley projects thereby putting people to work while at the same time making cheap electricity available to rural communities. The current program is to make expensive electricity available to people who already have cheaper alternatives.

During the last recession, when unemployment became a problem, politicians called for more recycling of glass, plastic and paper residential trash which somehow would solve the nation's unemployment problems. The net benefit from this policy would have turned out to be an increase in sorter jobs, sorting plastic from glass and new paper from used paper, all minimum wage jobs. Create more garbage and we will put the nation to work hauling it away.

I fear that our latest economic crisis will be used to impose an environmentalist agenda upon the nation without creating any economic benefit. The agenda seeks, ultimately, to reverse the industrial progress we have made in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which freed people worldwide from the drudgery of daily chores and increased their well being by providing an abundance of food, medicine and material goods. A reversal will serve to lower economic activity not increase it.

You shall not sacrifice our economy on the altar of tree huggers and animal rights!