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Al Gore just stepped onstage at Netroots Nation, meaning that I am compelled by my contractual liberalism to post on the environment.
The Wall Street Journal surprisingly opines against carbon-based environmental regulations yesterday. I am also surprisingly wearing shorts and sandals in Austin. And Al Gore is also surprisingly handsome and manly.
The thrust of the argument is that the EPA wants to become some Big Brother regulatory agency that would drastically change how our buildings and vehicles are built and operated, regulating much more of the construction and assembly processes in order to ensure a greener and less damaging economy. Am I the only one who doesn’t see much of a problem with this?
Our economy is, in many critical ways, failing to innovate. And not the we-made-Crystal-Pepsi failing to innovate, but the we-brought-back-old-Coke-as-Coke-classic failing to innovate. It’s affecting every sector of our economy, from automobiles to housing to technology, and our main response to it seems to be to promote tax breaks and incentives that keep said industries from failing rather than encouraging them to succeed and new industries to innovate. If the heavy hand of government needs to come in and shake things up and get us out of this stupor, then so be it - but the fundamental problem with competitiveness in our economy today is that government isn’t doing enough of the right things to shape and focus our economic direction, which has the perverse effect of overloading and even crippling the “free market” with the mandate of government non-intervention.
Posted by
Jesse Taylor on 09:16 AM •
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As widely noted elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page tends to preach ideological purity without regard to the real world, as accurately (so far) portrayed in the news section of the paper .
Well, at least General Motors is slated to make a big announcement on Monday around 4 PM EST…
One thing I don’t get about the “regulation of anything, ever = bad” meme is this. Everything is fucking regulated by the government and/or other forms of laws/rules/standards already. We come up against them every day, probably without ever really thinking about it. There is no appreciable difference between “20 story skyscrapers are required to have working elevators” and “new cars must get X gas mileage”, between “landlords are required to absorb the costs of lead paint and/or asbestos abatement” and “corporations must either use compostable packaging or provide for the recycling or disposal of said packaging”. Well, except the difference where one already exists and is taken for granted, and the other is a new proposition.
Do existing forms of regulation potentially hurt The Hand Of The Free Market? Sure. We just don’t think about it very much, and when we do we usually feel that the cost to the market was worth the benefit to humans’ quality of life.
Bob Herbert today talked about when did America become the “Can’t Do” society, when talking about Al Gore’s proposals. I really think it is simple, and it goes back to how the post-baby boom generation has been taught: We’ve not been taught to think creatively in schools, and it is getting worse. Teaching to the test, all the way through high school, became the norm in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s. Now, this generation of 35-55 year olds are at the point when they should be the most creative in leading new ideas and new innovations, and instead we’re best at rote.
Not to say we’ve not done some amazing things… Just look at the technology behind what makes it possible for us to communicate via this blog… Although the underlying concepts of TCP are older than that, and the web came from a British scientist working in Switzerland.
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As widely noted elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page tends to preach ideological purity without regard to the real world, as accurately (so far) portrayed in the news section of the paper .