This past Thursday was Independence day, and that means 248 years ago the founding father delegates of the Second Continental Congress declared that the 13 colonies were no longer subject and subordinate to the monarch of Britain, King George III, and that these colonies were free and independent states and aligned in a confederation to be known as the United States of America.
I’m intensely patriotic; the United States is the best country ever.
We have been a productive and innovative people, producing the bulk of the world’s food on less than a single digit-percentage of the planet.
Most of the technology you use every day originated here, because we created the most fertile environment for innovation and invention. All the things you can’t do in Europe, Africa or Asia get done here, because we are not afraid to try new things, and it’s acceptable to fail.
Happy Birthday to these United States!
So, what have we learned in nearly a quarter of a millenni?
That what they do in the “old country” is a sure-fire recipe for failure. They have managed to ferment two brutal world wars in the past 125 years, and we had to intervene and bail them out of both of them.
I would like to think we learned that our freedoms and liberties are the reasons we succeed.
“We have learned that we are not perfect, but we are consistently better than the rest of the world, present or past. “
We are not nearly as regulated as the rest of the world, and that allows us to do big things. Very big things. Elon Musk’s SpaceX could have never happened anywhere else in the world because big government can’t stand the competition, and government lacks the core competency to get it done.
Bear in mind that gigantic corporations are functionally no different than government; big, cumbersome plodding, incompetent restrictive organizations, more interested in getting to their pension than they are in doing the right thing or doing it right.
Just ask the astronauts who are currently stranded on the International Space Station how their NASA designed (and built by Boeing) space capsule is working out for them. Many forget that 121 years ago, the newspapers were all excited about heavier-than-air flight, and their hive mind just knew that Samuel Langley was going to succeed. He had the endorsement of the government, and over $3 million in government money.
Langley didn’t fly. A couple of bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio did. The Wright brothers. They came out of their own pockets to make it happen. They had a small fraction of Langley’s money.
The lesson I hoped we learned is that government does an awful job of picking winners and does very well “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory” through regulation.
We were working toward energy independence (after the oil embargo) in the 1970s when the elected officials decided they knew it all and effectively squashed nuclear power. They also enacted minimum fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, effectively knee-capping an important industry, and putting so many workers on the bread line.
We saw the same thing with coal – politicians whose sole qualification for making science decisions is that they are a community organizer, putting hundreds of thousands of good men and women out of work because they don’t like a particular industry like coal.
Now the agriculture business is saying the decline is CO2 is going to impact food production, and they want to know what developing nation we are going to be starving to death in 10 years.
But in the meantime, government officials keep trying to scare us into technologies that they know nothing about that have huge price tags and which will most negatively affect those among us least able to afford it. Nearly 20 years ago an attorney who was appointed to be Vice President, went on a campaign to educate Americans about “Global Warming,” a subject for which he had no qualifications.
There were numerous studies cited in his book with amazingly detailed forecasts. Parts of Florida were supposed to be under water by 2020. The global temperature was forecast to increase massively, and the list goes on and on.
Of course, they never mention our sun, and they don’t because they have not figured a way to tax it into submission. The last large peak in sunspot cycles was in the 1930s, and you really should look at the temperatures recorded at that time. When you compare the forecasts from 20 years ago to what actually happened, it’s painfully obvious we are getting scammed and our bureaucrats are reaching into our pockets and making our lives poorer.
The problem is going to be compounded, though, with the government funding research into “Climate Change.” You get the result for which you fund. Besides, much like the “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion” push on Wall Street was a poorly disguised ploy to create jobs for recent graduates with largely worthless degrees, you can depend on exactly the same thing happening with the myriad of “Climate Studies” degrees.
They must create a sense of dread in order to keep their gravy train running. The funds for all of it come from you and me.
I saw a new television commentator saying it was the warmest it’s been in 50 years. What she didn’t mention is that it was much cooler than average over the last 90 years. The climate charlatans keep moving the timeframe window to make their case. They accuse the data from a century ago as being of poor quality, but the last time I looked into it we have been making highly accurate temperature measurements for a couple of centuries now.
We let “science” take the wheel of our country for a very brief period during the pandemic. I think we universally agree that “science” got it wrong, and that science hurt us and our children. That we would have been better off keeping “science” from intervening in our lives and our economy. Our bureaucrats stifled conversation and challenges to this “science,” just as they are trying to do with the “Global Warming” science.
Moving forward depends on having an in-depth discussion, one that must be uncomfortable by design.
So, what have we learned as a nation in the past 248 years? When Europe heads in one direction, we go the other, and that “Big Government” and “Big Science” generally get it wrong and that we shouldn’t allow the scientists to choose our direction.
We have learned that we are not perfect, but we are consistently better than the rest of the world, present or past. We have learned the founders had special wisdom, and that we achieve the best outcomes when we follow the recipe outlined by them 248 years ago.
Happy Independence Day … we’re the best since 1776.
