{"id":4619,"date":"2009-04-20T12:37:02","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T17:37:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4619"},"modified":"2009-04-20T12:37:02","modified_gmt":"2009-04-20T17:37:02","slug":"unintended-consequences-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4619","title":{"rendered":"Unintended Consequences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Government (or pseudogovernmental) actions have unintended consequences; these consequences are often worse than the original problem.<\/p>\n

History is full of such examples. Peter Huber in City Journal Bdemonstrates how Obama’s “Green Economy” is going to screw up the ecology<\/a> even faster than whatever’s happening now.<\/p>\n

Snip:<\/p>\n

Ten countries ruled by nasty people control 80 percent of the planet\u2019s oil reserves\u2014about 1 trillion barrels, currently worth about $40 trillion. If $40 trillion worth of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to leave the wealth buried. They can lift most of their oil at a cost well under $10 a barrel. They will drill. They will pump. And they will find buyers. Oil is all they\u2019ve got.Poor countries all around the planet are sitting on a second, even bigger source of carbon\u2014almost a trillion tons of cheap, easily accessible coal. They also control most of the planet\u2019s third great carbon reservoir\u2014the rain forests and soil. They will keep squeezing the carbon out of cheap coal, and cheap forest, and cheap soil, because that\u2019s all they\u2019ve got. Unless they can find something even cheaper. But they won\u2019t\u2014not any time in the foreseeable future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing; it’s Economics 300, which to be fair seems to be about 200 farther than the Administration ever got.<\/p>\n

in unrelated-yet-germane news, Charles Gasparino at the NYPost looks into the role Elliot Spitzer’s “investigation” (which, according to the story, was mostly a repackaging of AIG’s own internal probe) played in turning a former pillar of good, sober management into financial chum and a not-so-funny punchline of the current economic crisis.<\/p>\n

Conclusion:<\/p>\n

THE former AIG executives I’ve been interviewing lately say many people deserve blame for the tragedy that is AIG: Sullivan, for taking his eye off the growing exposure; Greenberg, for hanging onto power as CEO even in his 80s and for creating the financial-products group without grooming a competent successor — and, of course, the guys who directly ran the credit-default-swap business.<\/p>\n

But they save their harshest criticism and contempt for Eliot Spitzer for how his investigation, as trivial as it was, so consumed AIG’s management at possibly the most important time in its history — and for nothing more than a few cheap headlines.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The whole thing <\/a>is worth a read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Government (or pseudogovernmental) actions have unintended consequences; these consequences are often worse than the original problem. History is full of such examples. Peter Huber in City Journal Bdemonstrates how Obama’s “Green Economy” is going to screw up the ecology even faster than whatever’s happening now. Snip: Ten countries ruled by nasty people control 80 percent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,69,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-socialism","category-the-great-recession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}