by Linda Morgan
As goes Energy, so goes the country.
“The worse, the better,†Vladimir Lenin is said to have observed. What Lenin meant was that the worse social conditions became in Russia, the more likely he and the Bolsheviks could foment a communist revolution. President Barrack Obama’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently updated Lenin’s maxim, saying, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.â€Last Friday, the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives took those maxims to heart when they pushed through their 1,200-page American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act by a vote 219 to 212. The bill is supposed to address the twin crises of economic recession and climate change by creating millions of new “green†jobs. Instead of an old-fashioned Soviet-style five-year plan, ACES can be thought of as 50-year plan to radically transform how Americans produce and use energy.
…Well, look, Ron Bailey, this entire administration seems to me to emulate the tactics of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, in all things, not just energy… and in my view we’ve not seen nearly the worst of it yet. (A Depressing thought as we come to July 4th, isn’t it?)
So why should Energy be any different? Energy, after all, is the key to our country and it’s prosperity. Which of course was why I raised such holy hell when the first thing Obama did upon being sworn in was to reverse President Bush’s sign off on offshore drilling. That action is the major reason oil prices have better than doubled in the last 6 months.
The question that Ron asks, though, seems to me pertinent:
Will Americans tolerate such sweeping interventions into their lives and workplaces?
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The 1994 mid-term election became a referendum on [...]
