So in lieu of an original post I offer the following two blogs that clearly address two issues that are plaguing our country. I hope you enjoy them!
Teach California
While one plays host to a modern-day Gold Rush, the other shuns evil fossil fuels and wallows in debt.
By STEPHEN MOORE (WSJ))
Williston, N.D.
In his speech last week responding to high gas prices, President Barack Obama insisted that "we can't just drill our way out of" our energy woes. Actually, we can—and if the president wants proof, he should travel to boomtown USA: Williston, North Dakota.
Williston sits atop the Bakken Shale, which will later this year be producing more oil than any other site in the country, surpassing even Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, the longtime leader in domestic output. This once-sleepy town is what the Gold Rush might have looked like had it happened in the time of McDonald's, Wal-Mart and Home Depot. And the oil rush is making Dakotans rich in a hurry, with farmers and other landowners becoming overnight millionaires from lucrative royalties and leases. One retired farmer tells me that, thanks to oil rigs churning on his property, he suddenly has a net worth north of $30 million.
When I ask how many people live in Williston, which had a population of 12,000 in 2005, longtime residents shrug and offer different answers: 20,000? 25,000? 30,000? Every night, hundreds of workers sleep in the hulls of their trucks or in temporary housing encampments like soldiers in a war zone. New homes are popping up at breakneck speed. McDonald's is offering workers $18 an hour plus a "signing bonus." In Williston, certainly, America remains the land of opportunity.
All this is thanks to the technological leap forward represented by hydraulic fracking, a process that allows drillers to blast through underground shale rock and pump out oil and natural gas. Projections of how much oil is here seem to grow every year.
In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated 150 million "technically recoverable barrels of oil" from the Bakken Shale. In April 2008 that number was up to about four billion barrels, and in 2010 geologists at Continental Resources (the major drilling operation in North Dakota) put it at eight billion. This week, given the discovery of a lower shelf of oil, they announced 24 billion barrels. Current technology allows for the extraction of only about 6% of the oil trapped one to two miles beneath the earth's surface, so as the technology advances recoverable oil could eventually exceed 500 billion barrels.
Now contrast this bonanza with what's going on in another energy-rich state: California. While North Dakota's oil production has tripled since 2007 (to more than 150 million barrels in 2011), the Golden State's oil production has fallen by a third in the past 20 years, to 201 million barrels last year from 320 million in 1990. The problem isn't that California is running out of oil: In 2008, when the USGS estimated four million barrels of recoverable oil from the Bakken, it estimated closer to 15 million barrels in California's vast Monterey Shale.
Rather, California's problem is politicians—at the behest of their green-energy allies—deciding to wall off the state from developing evil fossil fuels. With its prohibitive environmental regulations, state cap-and-trade law, costly renewable energy mandates and 40 years of prohibitions on almost all offshore drilling, California ranks worst in the country and 91st in the world in its hostility to drilling, according to the Fraser Institute's 2011 Global Petroleum Survey. This month, according to North Dakota's Department of Mineral Resources, California is no longer America's third-largest energy-producing state—leapfrogged by North Dakota.
The Census finds that North Dakota led the nation in job and income growth in 2011. It has the nation's lowest unemployment rate, at 3.3% (California's is 11.1%), and it saw a huge 38.5% increase in its number of millionaires between 2009 and 2010, according to state tax return data. California, by contrast, lost nearly 50,000—or almost one-third—of its high-income residents ($500,000 and above) between 2007 and 2009, according to the Sacramento Bee.
North Dakota is also flush with cash and a budget reserve of at least $1 billion, out of a $3.5 billion biennial budget. The state has already cut income taxes, and it is building thousands of miles of "shovel ready" infrastructure projects—roads, bridges, railroads, pipelines—without almost any of Uncle Sam's funny money. Bismarck may be the only state capital in the country that debates what to do with all its tax riches.
Perhaps they could send it as foreign aid to Sacramento. California's budget analysts just announced their fifth straight year of fiscal plague, with up to $6 billion of red ink for 2012-13. Budgets for schools, transportation, health care, libraries and museums are being cut, even though the state already has one of the nation's highest income and sales taxes. Gov. Jerry Brown is sponsoring a ballot initiative this year to raise those taxes yet again.
He'd be better off leading a fact-finding delegation to North Dakota to learn how to pay bills, create tens of thousands of jobs, and balance a budget. The short answer: Drill, baby, drill. Mr. Obama might want to come on that trip too.
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MOMENT OF CLARITY
Church And State
Posted: 08 Mar 2012 05:17 PM PST
A few hundred years into the Christian era, the merger of the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church blurred the lines between church and state; it corrupted both, injured one and killed the other. Thomas Jefferson didn’t have to be genius to figure this one out; he just needed to be moderately well read.
The consequence of secularizing the Church while sanctifying the State back in those three-digit years plunged the world into a millennium of misery, ignorance, and oppression – the Dark Ages. I often wonder how far advanced our medical technologies would be today if we had not hit the pause button on science for a thousand years. The medical miracles of 3012 would have been with us today – just think about that for a moment. How sad.
The Church/state monopoly on authority was broken in 1517 when Martin Luther’s theological differences with the Roman Catholic Church caused him to leave it. He did not lobby the State to force the Church to conform to his beliefs, he simply confessed his own faith and left it to individual conscience and belief to follow him or not. Was Luther the first libertarian? Perhaps – his notion of Free Will is indistinguishable from our idea of Volition, save for Divine authorship.
Luther’s protest in Wittenberg ignited the Protestant Reformation, which introduced choice and competition to the practice of faith, revolutionized Western thought, and lifted the world out of the Dark Ages. As it turns out, choice and competition even makes religion better, although my Roman Catholic friends may not agree with me on that.
The Protestants gave us our modern understandings of free will, work ethic, commerce, equal individual rights, and self-evident truths. They also gave us universal literacy, accessible books, the industrial revolution, democracy, private property, private charity, the abolitionist movement, and this great nation we all love.
And this great nation’s first important contribution to the development of civilization was the separation of church and state, the thing that allowed all other freedoms to flourish. Freedom of religion - specifically freedom from government regulation of religion - is the very reason our nation exists. The Pilgrims did not come here for the benefits; they came to free their religion from their state.
The wisdom of separating church and state seems obvious - government is a collective enterprise, while salvation is a personal relationship. The need for both church and state seems obvious too; one without the other has proven to be extremely hazardous to humans.
In the last century, the communists thought religion to be the “opiate of the masses” and banned religious practice outright when they seized power. Wherever it was practiced, atheistic communism imposed localized Dark Ages upon its own people before it started killing them by the millions.
At the other extreme, theocracies like the Iranian clerics and the Taliban banned secular government when they seized power, and the oppression they delivered in the name of God was every bit as harsh as that meted out by the communists who denied His existence.
Humans thrive when secular authority and spiritual authority both exist but are separated from each other; render under Caesar and all that. The President’s decision to regulate the Catholic Church, no matter what other words he uses to disguise his intent, ignores the lessons of history and imperils our liberties unnecessarily. The dispute over contraceptive “rights” is a contrivance intended to divert attention from the Constitutional challenge he has (again) laid down.
Libertarians are purists who believe in complete freedom of choice and complete responsibility for the consequences of those choices. Conservatives balk at the former and liberals gasp at the latter; that’s how you can tell us all apart. We are also purists when it comes to Constitutional constraints and the separation of powers that keeps us free.
We don’t apologize for those “extreme” positions. The big lie of the progressive century is that group entitlements and group consequences have made us a better people then we were when we were individually free and personally responsible – i.e. when the libertarian dinosaurs still roamed the nation in large herds.
We are not better; we are less giving, we are more violent, we are less tolerant, we less educated, and are weaker of mind and lower of character. We have denied spiritual truth and then demanded government fill the void we created for ourselves. Our attempts to sanctify the state have only proven that righteousness cannot be legislated and that government is an inadequate substitute for virtue.
It is consequence - not law - that moderates the human appetite for self-destructive excess. Socializing consequence invites destructive choices, whether personal, economic, moral, or political. If I could force you to share my bar tabs, I would probably still be drinking; if I could force you to share my hangovers, I know I would.
I’m not a Catholic, so it is not my place to tell Catholics what to believe, how to practice their faith, or how to run their charitable institutions. That is the difference between libertarians and liberals – we lack that gene that incites random acts of tyranny passed off as humanitarian do-goodery by people who coo and purr and admire themselves for telling someone else what to do.
But I am a citizen, so it is my place to tell my elected representatives to back off. Government has no authority to regulate church teachings or practice; it is the only duty of government to uphold the Constitution and defend our individual rights. Fix a bridge and go lay by your dish…and leave those Catholics alone.
There are over 600 identified religions, denominations, and sects in this country; the U.S. Government is not one of them. If the Catholics want President Obama to be their Pope and tell them how to run their schools and hospitals, they know where to find him. And he should be available to report for work in less than a year.
But in those few months that he has left, the President should stick to running the government and let the Pope run his Church. And leave the rest of us out of it.
“Moment Of Clarity” is a weekly commentary by Libertarian writer and speaker Tim Nerenz, Ph.D. Visit Tim’s website www.timnerenz.com to find your moment and order Tim’s new book, “BRING IT!”
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