Category Archives: News commentary

The environmental movement has lost its way, argues a Montana filmmaker, who is using Kickstart to raise funds for his film about the movement. J.D. King isn’t anti-environmentalist, but he is skeptical about where the movement is going.

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Ironically, the pitch above opens on my friend, Dave Foreman, giving a speech. Dave was always good at incendiary rhetoric in front of a large group, but at heart he is a libertarian who supported Barry Goldwater for president in 1964. It would be interesting to see what Foreman would say if King interviewed him for the movie.

Advocates of smart growth–density and transit–are either consummate liars or complete idiots. Those are the only explanations for many of the statements that come out of their mouths. The latest is the claim that Superstorm Sandy proves we need to spend more on transit.

What Superstorm Sandy proved was that concentrating a lot of people in one place and making them dependent on an easily floodable, centralized transportation system is a bad idea. Spending more money on New York’s subways prior to the storm just would have meant more money lost to storm damage.

We heard the same nonsense when Katrina hit New Orleans, which just happens to be the nation’s second-most transit-dependent city after New York. The people who had automobiles got out before the flooding; the people who depended on transit did not, either because the transit system was incompetently run or because the people didn’t trust the transit system to take them where they wanted to go. Yet some planners seriously argued that the problems resulting from Katrina–including more than 1,100 deaths–were because New Orleans was too “auto dependent.”

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Without a doubt, yesterday’s election was the most important one held in America at least since 2010, and possibly even 2008. Der Spiegel, the German magazine, argues that the election campaign is evidence that the United States is a nation in decline. Certainly the political system is having its problems, but Der Spiegel‘s prescription of going further into debt to build high-speed trains and other European follies is a dubious way to fix those problems.

The real decline is in the Republican Party, which couldn’t manage to capture the White House or the Senate despite high unemployment and other economic problems. Republicans began shooting themselves in their collective feet early in the last decade when they made immigration a big issue, thus earning the enmity of Latinos, the nation’s fastest-growing and second-most important ethnic group.

Unfortunately, our two-party system too often limits voters to a choice between a social & fiscal liberal vs. a social & fiscal conservative (or, worse, a social & fiscal liberal vs. a social conservative & fiscal liberal). A large percentage of potential voters don’t feel comfortable in either party, and the libertarian side of me thinks, or hopes, that many of those “independents” are socially liberal but fiscally conservative.

By focusing on fiscal issues, the tea parties seemed to provide an alternate route, one that set social issues (few of which are really decided at the federal level anyway) aside. But too many Republican candidates made social issues a major part of their campaigns, thus alienating both Democrats and independents. Romney didn’t help by offering an inconsistent message, as often criticizing the president for cutting budgets, such as medicare and defense, as for spending money.

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Ninety-two percent of respondents to an on-line poll on World Net Daily believes that the so-called Frankenstorm is a sign that God is angry with the United States for its stance on Israel. It is just slightly possible that the people who voted in this poll were not an accurate cross-section of Americans.

But what do you make of the “progressive” web site, Common Dreams, arguing that Frankenstorm is nature’s “revenge” on the presidential campaigns for “ignoring climate change”? Is progressivism as much a religion as fundamentalist Christianity?

As a believer in the separation of church and state, the Antiplanner ordinarily does not comment on someone’s religion. But I make an exception when that religion disguises itself as a political philosophy that is, in fact, just as anti-science as the most extreme fundamentalists.

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