Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Smack-down!

Peter Foster executes a masterful smack-down of Post columnist Dan Gardner who recently penned this loopy column accusing the Harper government of being "communists" because they reject the GHG emissions cap-and-trade approach:

... claims Mr. Gardner, their proposals to deal with the problem by regulation represent a level of economic ignorance unseen outside the University of Havana!
... Mr. Gardner claims that “pricing” carbon via cap-and-trade is “efficient because it isn’t some bureaucrat in Ottawa who decides who will reduce emissions and how they will do it.”
Has he been vacationing off the planet?
... I had never come across anybody before Mr. Gardner who dared to suggest that it was a “free market” solution. In fact, cap and trade is to free markets what Sophie’s Choice was to free choice. It corresponds to the Stalinist definition of initiative: finding the best way to carry out an order.
... Cap and trade’s “market” is entirely artificial, based on government-created scarcity. It isn’t a market in freely traded goods, but in bureaucratically regulated “bads.” ... At whatever level of regulation, however, cap and trade promotes the sleaziest of mixed-economic concoctions, supported by officials who would do the capping, and the private-sector operatives who would do the trading, and/or reap the benefits of a system that is doomed to be rigged.
... Meanwhile, the main issue remains whether there is a climate crisis in the first place. Mr. Gardner devoutly believes so, but one can’t help wondering if his grasp of science is as dodgy as his grasp of ­economics.
Classic Foster.

Update: Joanne at BLY caught Gardner's Tweet which promises a reply to Foster.  Heh, can't wait.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dan Gardner...why I won't purchase the NatPost...comparable to Travers at the Star, something else I will not buy

UsualSuspect said...

I am growing weary of all the over-the-top dramatics from columnists like Gardner and Mallick. We live in a country governed, for the most part, within a very narrow band around the centre. At the end of the day, it is pretty good government despite who happens to be tinkering around the edges any given year.

There isn't any circumstance warranting all of the extreme comparisons. Does anyone really believe a Stalin, Hitler or Mubarek comparison is even remotely relevent to anything happening in Ottawa right now?

People should cool it. It's embarrassing.

UsualSuspect said...

But yeah, awesome smackdown by Foster on lefty voodoo economics. heh

Anonymous said...

Thank you for your excellent comments "Unusual Suspect." Why can't journalists do more research and stick with facts?

Alain said...

I concur with UsualSuspect. The hysteria of these thinking impaired "journalists" is astounding. PMSH has gone from being accused of another Hitler to now communist.

Of course for those hoping to make big and fast bucks from the "carbon trade" scam as in Europe, this is not to their liking.

JR said...

Check out Joanne's post re Gardner's "venom".