Defeating hope at every turn

Wherever there's hope, there's Myron Ebell trying to kill it:

Statement by Myron Ebell, CEI Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy

The Waxman-Markey draft "Clean Energy and Security Act" released today should be dead on arrival. We will work to see that it dies as quickly as possible. Waxman and Markey blithely set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions without any serious analysis or even awareness of the colossal costs of energy rationing to American consumers, workers, and industry.

If enacted, the bill's cap-and-trade scheme would be a governor on the economy that would permanently limit economic growth at best and produce perpetual stagnation and decline at worst. Other major provisions of the bill would compound the economic damage.

Representatives Waxman and Markey's draft bill would raise energy prices through the roof and hurt poorer Americans the most. It would destroy tens of millions of good-paying jobs. Beyond these enormous economic costs, Waxman-Markey would put big government in charge of how much energy people can use. It would be the biggest government intervention in people’s lives since the Second World War, which was the last time people had to have rationing coupons in order to buy a gallon of gas.

This is a complete joke on the level of ignorance we have come to expect from this toe-nail eater who should never ever be quoted in any sort of journalism because his job is to make you stupid.

The so-called free market is a system of rationing according to price: you can only use as much as you can pay for, and prices can rise into the realm of unaffordability in order to compensate for shortages and limit your consumption.

What Myron Ebell doesn't like is non-price rationing, because it infringes on the rights of the rich to get whatever they want in whatever quantity they desire, while the price excludes everyone else out of the deal.

Rationing does not raise prices (except on the black market) because its purpose is specifically to make the essentials available to the poorer members of society at a price they can afford.

Ration coupons are nothing more than a secondary currency whose distribution is determined much more directly in order to obtain policy goals such as not causing the population to starve and riot and generally invade and burn down the houses of the rich, which is something they will do when they find out that you have completely screwed things up for them.

Money, on the other hand, is distributed according to birthright, luck, corruption, pen-pushing and the ability to blithely inject flagrant lies into the body politic to benefit self-serving coal executives who don't care if the next generation dies like flies in an oven.

Look to the future, Myron. You know what it's going to be like. You've read the predictions. It's not going to be as easy as it is today. This sort of misinformation, and attempts to destroy any social construct that might possibly make life less painful, is just unbearable to think about. How much more of this blood-sucking misery do we have to put up with? It's like listening to broadcasts from Lord Haw-Haw. But at least with him, he had a home in Nazi Germany. Who's side are you on Myron? The horsemen of the apocolypse?