This line makes me curious:

"Manufacturers don't care about quality as long as they can reap huge profits for themselves."

How exactly does a business reap huge profits if they have a reputation for poor quality?

The only way that could happen is if they enjoyed some type of government-protected monopoly status that prevented competitive pressures from forcing the sub-standard producer out of the market.

Also check for copies of the Bill of Rights and make sure they're illiterate and will never be aware of their civil rights so they can be systematically abused by government for the rest of their life as well.

Getalife:

Energy independence is easy to achieve, although it is also unnecessary. The US has abundant petroleum and natural gas reserves. The Dept. of Interior estimates that there are 31.1 billion barrels of onshore oil that is inaccessible due to government restrictions, 115.43 billion barrels of restricted offshore oil, and 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from shale rock. In addition, the US could produce as much energy as it wanted through nuclear power. The biggest barrier is that reprocessing the fuel rods was banned by the Carter administration - forcing us to store the spent rods like retards.

On the other hand, if Americans can import their energy even cheaper than they can produce it, then what's the point? We currently import a large supply of our natural gas from Canada, for instance. The caution I would give is to make energy companies bear the full risks of their own investments - including geopolitical risk. Otherwise, you find yourself in the quagmire of subsidizing private risk with military presence, which is stupid.

"The nation still doesn't understand enough of why recessions occur"

It's called the Austrian business cycle. The Fed makes credit artificially cheap - creating asset bubbles for commodities such as real estate - and, as a result, there appears a misallocation of resources across the economy. It further makes it difficult for financial institutions to accurately judge investment risk because they can't even trust in the value of the dollars being lent. Hence, they go under when the market corrects to adjust to the Fed's failings. It's happened before and it'll likely happen again.

You seriously found someone willing to say that stagflation was a boon to the economy? That statement, more than any other discredits this entire article.

The same force was at work in the 1920s prior to the crash. The government abandoned the gold standard and set the Fed free to print absurd amounts of money - leading to the same misallocation of resources and collapse of financial markets.

Okay. Here's the report that the LVRDA is trying to respond to:

http://npri.org/publications/rolling-the...

Interesting it wasn't mentioned here.

The EPA lowered the ozone standard last year to a level that approaches background levels in many locations - thus making exceedance days almost inevitable. Lengthening the time span over which reporting is required is essentially throwing a bone to those locations. Of course, 3 hours to one year is a big jump...maybe it lowers the EPA's administrative costs or something.

Paying more for bad teachers is just paying more for bad teachers. If you want quality education you have to give teachers an incentive to do better. Under the current structure, bad teaching practices are protected by the union.

If schools were allowed to compete for students and hire teachers on their own terms then teachers would have an incentive to do better - knowing that they could be rewarded for their efforts. True incentive pay is needed and those incentives can't be socialized and turned into across-the-board raises by the union. That does nothing to elevate the quality of education.

John F:

First, John Maynard Keynes's ideas are the reason why we have asset bubbles and boom and bust cycles in the first place. Absent government manipulation, markets continually correct themselves as they allocate resources towards their highest value use. This results in slow and steady economic growth. Keynesianism manipulates the money supply to create artificial liquidity leading to short, poignant growth spurts. The flip side is that it causes interest rates to get out of line and resources to be misallocated over time - resulting in crises like we have now.

Second, you can't transport electricity over that far of a distance. That's the reason we have regional grids to begin with. The farther you transport electricity, the more is lost due to friction. Transporting it cross-country would mean that there is next to nothing left which would raise the cost to absurd levels. The laws of physics can't be abrogated in this regard. The only way to reduce friction is to transport electricity using a more conductive medium - like gold or platinum. There's not enough gold and platinum in the world to do this and, if we were to use those metals for grid construction, the lines would just be chopped down and stolen.

Third, there is no infrastructure in the national parks - that's the entire point.

This discussion reminds me of a funny quote from Nathan Lewis of Caltech's Powering the Planet project:

"We already have electricity coming out of everybody's wall socket. This is not a new function we're seeking. It's a substitution.

It's not like NASA sending a man to the moon. It's like finding a new way to send a man to the moon when Southwest Airlines is already flying there every hour handing out peanuts."

While the cost of coal-generated electricity could theoretically eclipse the cost of wind or solar power thanks to increased regulatory costs, it is highly unlikely that wind or solar will ever be competitive with other clean energy sources such as nuclear or hydropower. Not only do these resources enjoy a significant cost advantage, they also are reliable and dispatchable resources.

Even if utility-scale storage technology is developed at some future date, this will impose yet an additional cost to wind and solar power. Wind and solar power hold little real value for meeting electricity needs. They have much more potential to fill political needs.

If there was truly an intention to move toward non-emitting energy sources, nuclear power would be the major baseload source and hydropower would serve for peak load. Of course, this will happen anyway as neither wind nor solar is suitable for either of these roles. But we will pay extra for duplicative energy generated by wind and solar power. As happens in Denmark, this electricity will mostly not reach the end user, it will simply be dumped off of the grid in order to prevent surges.