In good economic times or bad, Thanksgiving is when Americans gather with their families and friends and enjoy the most special meal of the year. The event remembers those early Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the uncharted ocean from Europe to make a new start in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
What is less appreciated is that Thanksgiving also is a celebration of the birth of free enterprise in America.
The English Puritans, who left Great Britain and sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, were not only escaping from religious persecution in their homeland. They also wanted to turn their back on what they viewed as the materialistic and greedy corruption of the Old World.
In the New World, they wanted to erect a New Jerusalem that would not only be religiously devout, but be built on a new foundation of communal sharing and social altruism.…
Continue ReadingThe Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations who are interested in improving national. state and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that: 1) we do have energy and environmental issues, and 2) these technical matters should be resolved by using genuine science.
Instead our energy and environmental policies have essentially being written by those who stand to economically or politically profit from them. As a result of our current methodology, anything genuinely science-based in these policies is usually inadvertent and accidental.
A key element of AWED’s efforts is to educate the public. Towards that end we send out a newsletter every 2-3 weeks, and this attempts to put some balance into what the mainstream media is conveying about energy and environmental matters.…
Continue Reading“AWEA says that Congress should provide a tax credit for high-income earners to pay less than their “fair share,” while middle-class taxpayers borrow $12+ billion from China to subsidize an expensive, unreliable, environmentally destructive, alternative energy source, based on unsubstantiated claims, that will actually result in net job losses! Exactly why is that a good idea?”
Last week, head wind lobbyist, Denise Bode (AWEA), waxed eloquently about why extending the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC) is a splendid scheme that some of our legislators are supposedly supporting.
This immediately brings to mind Upton Sinclair’s insightful observation: “A man cannot be expected to understand something when his income depends on his not understanding it.”
Put another way, when a salesperson says their product is the cat’s meow, be careful that you don’t get caught in the claws.…
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