The love of theory is the root of all evil

Afterburner with Bill Whittle: The Train Set - YouTube:

"The love of theory is the root of all evil."  Think about that for a moment and you start to see how powerful a concept it is. The love of theory is the root of all evil. I'm close to a cousin who is an anarchist. Through him, I meet a lot of socialists and communists and they always say that the theory of socialism or communism is sound, it's just never been applied in the right way. Communism killed over one hundred million people in the twentieth century. North Koreans are two inches shorter than South Koreans after three generations of Communism. It takes armed guards and razor wire and gunboats to keep people in communist countries; the Berlin Wall wasn't there to keep people out of East Germany. But Communism is someday going to be implemented perfectly and everyone will be happy and skittles will shoot out of unicorn butts.

Socialism is the perfect system except it doesn't work. Margaret Thatcher once said, "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money." Socialism is wonderful, we are told, because the government runs everything. Name one thing the government does well. Roads? Nope. Education? We spend more money on education than any other country. We're 14 in reading and 19 in math. In California's state university system, there are more administrators than professors; fewer people teach than pass emails and forms around. If you look at large cities in the US, they are generally Democrat enclaves and have been for generations. They vary between the corrupt and incompetent Chicago to the post-apocalyptic and corrupt Detroit. US socialism is an utter failure everywhere it's tried. European socialism is a disaster as the recovery from the 2008 recession has stopped and this week Britain announced they are in a second recession. Most of Europe is broke and there's no one to bail them out. Europe is increasingly run by bureaucrats that were never elected administering regulations through a government that was never voted in.

The love of theory is the root of all evil. Obama and his cronies worship at the altar of Keynesian economics. Keynesian economics says that the government should tax highly and spend money it doesn't have to create economic activity. It's never actually worked, anywhere, ever, but the idea that bureaucrats can direct the world's most complex economic system is a seductive one. Quantitative easing is where the Federal Reserve buys US Treasury bonds with money that doesn't exist before the purchase. What this does is reduce the value of US currency because there's no actual goods or things of value attached to this new money. It's inflation, except the government has changed how it calculates inflation so it doesn't include things like food or energy. This is one of the reasons oil is more expensive; oil is a thing that has value and when money backed by less and less tries to buy it, you need more and more of it to get the same amount.

Billions are spent on 'green jobs' but company after company fold after taking hundreds of millions of dollars each. Green energy will create millions of good jobs except they can't make profits enough to keep going. Wind turbines are expensive to maintain and aren't reliable producers of energy; natural gas-powered electric generators have to be bought and be constantly idling in order to keep the electrical grid from suffering brownouts. In other words, you have to build the fossil-fuel generators as well as the green energy generators.  We're told that we're on the cusp of a solar revolution but there just isn't enough energy in sunlight to make it feasible for large-scale power production. It's also dependent on it being day and is affected by cloud cover so, you guessed it, you have to build other power generation capabilities to make up for the fluctuations. Wind and solar plants are usually out in the middle of nowhere, meaning a lot of the energy created is lost during transmission. In the past month, Obama has touted algae and spinach as ways to create power, but they are also limited by the relative weakness of energy in sunlight. There are ways to produce power with no 'greenhouse gases' but they are disapproved of because they can hurt fish (hydroelectric) or make environmentalists made (nuclear).

There are a lot more theories that don't work but are beloved to the detriment of humanity. I'll go into more detail at a later time.

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