To this…

This is the best critique of Cap’nTrade I’ve seen – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA6FSy6EKrM

an American friend responded:

Cap and Trade possibly the worst idea anyone ever thought up. It’s always bad when the central government intervenes in the economy, but it’s even worse when it does so to reward bad behavior; and that EXACTLY what Cap and Trade does.

What child really believes businesses will go to the expense, even if they can with available technologies, to significantly reduce carbon emissions in, say, Australia? If I have a company that produces “widgets” and my factories emit, say a million tons of carbon each year, what am I going to do if the government only allows me 500k tons of carbon a year? Well, I’ll probably lay off my Australian workers (who then contribute to the tax revenues collected by the central government to pay for the “carbon tax credits” they’ll have to start giving to businesses!), sell my factories for a tidy sum, open up other factories overseas (probably by invitation and some sort of special consideration either in my tax rate or on property costs) that will emit a million tons of carbon each year, hire the workers in that country to produce my “widgets” (likely at considerably lower wages!), sell them in Australia just like before, and as a bonus for doing nothing good for Australia or the climate I get a nice check from the central government each year in the form of “carbon credits” I no longer need, and can sell to the morons who stayed and tried to run an Australian business under Cap and Trade. Obviously I’d be at a great advantage over any Australian competitor who DIDN’T follow my lead here, and so either they would have to do what I did, and stay in business, or I’d soon be engaging in a hostile takeover of their businesses. Either way there would be more lay offs, less tax revenue to pay for these expensive programs that don’t do anything, even IF AGW happens to have some solid scientific basis that seems more and more to be lacking, and less competition so prices would be higher, and the “bad boys” of the world just get richer with less effort and less risk.

That’s what happens when governments try to run economies. It’s only the hysteria the AGW crowd has managed to whip up in the media that has kept this brain-dead rush to economic ruin and nuclear terrorism going. The developing countries that are balking in Copenhagen because the developed countries don’t want to pony up restitution payments will be getting that money by other means if Australia and other developed economies lose their minds and institute Cap and Trade. They will see an economic boom the likes of which they couldn’t possibly imagine. And, of course, the tin horn dictators who rule about 75% of these under-developed countries will be out shopping aging nuclear stockpiles for warheads to put on their intermediate range missles so they can hold all their neighbor nations within a 500 mile radius hostage to any demand they can think up (sober or drunk!), and then we won’t have to worry about AGW anymore. Problem solved! Hurray for Cap and Trade.

We won’t have to wait for radical Islam to overwhelm Western societies, because we’re going to cut our own throats with wonderful ideas like Cap and Trade!

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