National Review has a terrific reminder about Ronald Reagan’s conservatism. I think it’s meme-worthy. NR’s “The Week” (subscription required) observed that his success as a leader was not simply because of the conservative principles in which he believed, but the fresh ways he applied them to the most urgent concerns of the time:
“Everyone remembers that Reagan, in his first inaugural address, said that government is not the solution; everyone forgets his modifier, ‘in this present crisis.’ We no longer face double-digit inflation, 70 percent tax rates or an enemy that could wipe out the human race. We need to apply old principles to new circumstances,” wrote National Review, “to think anew, as Reagan did, as successful conservatives always do.”
The need for new energy development gives conservatives just such an opportunity to “apply old principles to new circumstances.” Market-based policies with a light regulatory touch, not higher taxes and government subsidies. What do you think The Gipper would say about these issues?
This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Alternative Energy Technology, Politics/Government . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:01 am
The Gipper would do what he did when he killed Carter’s wasteful spending on synfuels. The Gipper would oppose cap and trade to the death and he would end subsidies for alternative energy such as coal to liquids (he did just that as President), wind power, ethanol, etc. The Gipper understood that people should control the economy through markets, not governments through pervasive regulation such as cap and trade.
May 22nd, 2007 at 3:51 pm
thanks for the feedback, but don’t confuse anything I’m favoring with synfuels. That’s a government-chosen, Carter style subsidy. Here’s why my approach is more Reaganesque: the best part of cap & trade: it’s a market based approach. First, it does require government to say, “let’s limit carbon by these amounts” but then it’s turned over to the marketplace — innovators and profit-makers — to figure out the most efficient solutions. Many conservatives don’t know that the Reagan-roots of cap & trade. Let me turn it over to AEI’s Bill Tucker, who wrote:
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.18821/article_detail.asp
>>In a 1977 Harper’s article, George Schultz, who became Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, argued that the EPA ought to consider two economic strategies. First, it might tax pollution. This would give companies a financial incentive to clean up, since it would be cheaper to clean up rather than pay the tax.
Second and more intriguing, the government could sell the rights to pollute. Place an imaginary bubble over a city, Schultz said. The government could pick a tolerable level of emissions and then sell rights to pollute for that amount. Companies would buy and sell among themselves to decide who got to pollute, and who had to clean up. By pursuing economies, polluters would discover the cheapest way to clean up. Now there would be a reward for developing new technology. Companies could go beyond some arbitrary requirement and sell their leftover rights to someone else.
Environmentalists were horrified. A right to pollute! Buying and selling pollutants? This smacked of crass commercialism, whereas environmentalism was about nature and purity. Gradually, however, some of them came around.
The turning point came with the Clean Air Act of 1990, when a Democratic Congress and Republican President Bush compromised on a “cap-and-trade” system for reducing sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain. With cap-and-trade, the EPA simply sets a limit and then allows emitters to trade “marketable rights to pollute.” Before the compromise, the EPA was predicting cleanup would cost $10 billion a year and take 20 years to put into effect. Instead, the system worked beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Sulfur emissions have been cut in half since 1990 at a cost of only $1 billion per year.