{"id":1908,"date":"2010-06-10T07:00:04","date_gmt":"2010-06-10T12:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=1908"},"modified":"2010-06-10T07:00:43","modified_gmt":"2010-06-10T12:00:43","slug":"statism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=1908","title":{"rendered":"Statism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The caricature of the Tea Party type holds a sign and calls every single government action "communist."  Please tell me how this caricature<\/a> is not on display here:<\/p>\n

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Today's evidence suggesting sluggish job creation might give pause to a less confident person than Obama. But pauses are not in his repertoire of governance. Instead, yielding to what must be a metabolic urge toward statism<\/strong>, he says the Gulf of Mexico oil spill<\/font><\/a> is yet another reason for yet another explosion of government's control of economic life.<\/strong> The spill supposedly makes it urgent to adopt a large tax increase in the form of cap-and-trade energy legislation, which also is climate legislation, the primary purpose of which is, or once was, to combat global warming, such as it is.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For the uninitiated, "statism" means "any increase in government activity."  That is a charitable interpretation (on my part).  Because the other one would be "communism," which wouldn't make this any different from the average Tea Party screed about health care or guns. <\/p>\n

So let's get this straight. <\/p>\n

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  1. An under-regulated and unmonistored private industry, which enjoys by the way subsidies of all sorts (highways, etc.) incentivizing its products, caused what appears to be a calamity affecting the economy and ecology of entire region, if not the world.<\/li>\n
  2. One contributing factor to the disaster was lax oversight.<\/li>\n
  3. Therefore, this is not an argument for government regulation. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    That's really silly I think.  If we have an argument for effective government regulation, even if it requires "statism" (God is that term dumb), then this is it. <\/p>\n

    On the other point in the paragraph, by the way, oil is dirty in the procuring (seeMexico, Gulf of) and dirty in the using (see Warming, Global).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The caricature of the Tea Party type holds a sign and calls every single government action "communist."  Please tell me how this caricature is not on display here: Today's evidence suggesting sluggish job creation might give pause to a less confident person than Obama. But pauses are not in his repertoire of governance. Instead, yielding … Continue reading Statism<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[129,675,235],"class_list":["post-1908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-will","tag-george-will","tag-gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill","tag-non-sequitur"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}