A Patriots Manifest/ April 30 2007
William White
Much, even most, of politics has involved obscuring costs and magnifying benefits. This technique has been getting politicians in ever more trouble as the costs of obtaining and processing data and information has been going down throughout recorded history. It gets politicians in trouble in several ways. Rather than a laundry list of different problems just consider nuclear power.
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Legitimate and verifiable objections to nuclear power involve the fact that virtually all costs of a nuclear power plant are paid up front. Whatever changes in energy technology that occur during the 30 year life span of the power plant costs do not change much, if at all. In fact the minimum cost point appears to be a number of power plants including slow and fast breeder reactors that takes the waste products of one type of reactor as the input of a different type of reactor and the power from all of the reactors are distributed from a central point as in point failure writ large. Call it 1-5 trillion dollars paid upfront as a bet on what will happen over the next 30 years in energy technology.
The key problem with such a bet is that bond and stock investors would have to be insane to believe in a federal guarantee of anything given that very basic economic data such as inflation, money supply and probably unemployment have had the truth and reality cooked out of them. (Ron Paul got most of his campaign funds as a result of internet videos including his attacks on the lack of verifiable money supply data from the fed. Current inflation data tries to exclude food and fuel prices. Unemployment data has a very long list of exclusions and inclusions from the definitions of both labor force and unemployment that are at best debatable.) Considering that the investment would have to come primarily from overseas sources the money for optimal nuclear power is not obtainable. Here’s the question: have you heard the nuclear debate framed in this way?
The real problems with nuclear power are not safety but rather a lack of transparency in government data, a lack of accountability and decades of lunatic economic policies. Social Security was designed to be insolvent and that assertion was made at the time of its passage but the situation was made worse with each passing decade. Similar problems exist with the private/public partnership that is the Federal Reserve System that caused the 1930s depression and seems to be getting ready to do so again. The income tax both personal and corporate is the worst of all possible worlds in that indirect taxation steals from the poor and direct taxation encourages capital flight by the rich plus forcing outsourcing of jobs. Nobody outside the US is going to lend any money they can’t afford to lose to the federal government. That means that federal debt is quickly losing out to used toilet tissue in the paper quality sweepstakes .
So how did anybody get themselves into this kind of mess? Well for thousands of years politicians have gotten enormous returns through dual use better infrastructure and better information. Roman roads, aqueducts, sewers, millruns and port improvements are still in use in much of Europe, north Africa and Southwest Asia. Most of it has been improved and/or replaced but still a lot of it is in use although rarely for its original purpose of transporting and supplying legions. Now in much of Africa where Rome never reached roads, water treatment plants, sewers, factories and ports that are light years beyond what was available in imperial Rome can be found. Pulling a Rome by marching troops into some Neolithic boondock, adding infrastructure and taking a cut from the resulting economic boom is not as easy as it used to be. Among other things Neolithic boondocks are becoming a bit rare. The reason they are rare is that cybercafés in Africa and Mongolia tell the former barbarians how to get what they need cheap, cheap, cheap. So with very few exceptions they don’t stay barbarians for very long. The low hanging fruit of government services are gone. Governments worldwide are competing for the skills they need and cover-ups are getting difficult to pull off. In the US the realization that DC is incompetent to handle Somalia or a homeless billionaire who was based in Afghanistan is sinking in.
The views expressed by William White are his and his alone and may not be the views expressed by A Patriots Manifest. Thank you .... Michael Roller...