Understanding the Cost of Energy

Chris de Morsella, writing for The Green Economy Post:

When I hear anyone mention that nuclear or coal electricity is cheap they are ignoring the catastrophic potential costs that are associated with each of these energy systems. Just because our society chooses to try to ignore these costs and to sweep them under the carpet does not mean that they go away and cease to be a factor in reality. ... These costs should be factored into the price of this energy. ... Why can the nuclear sector as well as the coal, oil and gas sectors offload these costs onto our backs and force us to bear them while they continue to pocket the products from their artificially less expensive energy products? Shouldn’t the producer pay the true cost of the product that they produce?

It frustrates me to see such an important viewpoint argued pretty poorly. The article reads like a stream-of-consciousness high school essay. Nevertheless, Chris is exactly right. The answer to a more sustainable energy economy is not for government to pick winners and losers or to set up artificial incentives and barriers. The answer is for each industry to pay its own way. Their customers will choose among them based on their respective costs.

Recognizing Marriage When We See It

When I was a kid, our church took up a collection to pay for the marriage of a young woman from Sierra Leone. She had lived faithfully with a man for many years, they had a child together, and they had always wanted to get married. But the government of that country used marriage as a tool to control its people, and the price of a marriage license -- worth several months' income -- was beyond the reach of many poor families.

Many years later, in the United States, I would celebrate my own wedding. My wife and I have talked about this on more than one occasion: that our wedding was a wonderful opportunity to receive the blessings of our family and friends and to celebrate with them. But we had felt ourselves to be married before that. We lived together, I had asked her, and she said yes. We had made the commitment in our hearts, we had voiced it out loud to each other, and we were living it every day.

A government does not have the ability to control the love and commitment that are in the hearts and minds of its people. It does not have the ability to create or prohibit families. It has only the ability to recognize them -- or not. If it does not, there is "hard" a price to pay by the families affected. (Taxes, child custody, hospital visitation, and inheritance are just a few examples.) There is also a "soft" price to pay by the broader society, which experiences the degradation of a critical social contract and a split between private and public, personal and civic morality.

This coming November, Minnesota will become the latest state in which a majority votes on the marriage rights of a minority. (In this case, marriage between gays is already denied in law, but so great is the fear of the deniers that they want to move the ban into the state constitution.) Minnesota is as powerful and as powerless as Sierra Leone in this matter. To any Minnesotans reading this: do the right thing in November. Recognize Minnesota families. Vote no on the constitutional marriage ban.

Protecting the Dignity of Women

Now, back to that letter Piroska Nagy [who accused Dominic Strauss-Kahn, her boss, of coercing her into an affair] sent to the independent law firm in charge of investigating the affair. She says, in substance, that DSK may not be ideally suited to manage a company with female workers, hinting at a certain degree of harassment on his part. She also said she was ill-prepared to reject his advances. So he was pushy, which is reprehensible since he was her boss, and she was weak, which is human. ... I guess the Hungarian economist felt ill-prepared because she probably never worked in France, or she would have recognised DSK as a typical French womaniser who wouldn't abide by strict American behaviour regulations in the workplace. Any woman who has worked in France knows his type by heart, and has suffered their endless soliciting. But French men too have to sometimes endure the advances of a female colleague. For better and for worse, this attitude belongs to French culture....

-- Agnès Poirier in The Guardian, writing about Dominic Strauss-Kahn in 2009

It seems that our friend DSK has quite a long history as a ladies' man. Boys will be boys, no?

Meanwhile, the French seem so preoccupied by what women wear on their heads. How unfortunate it would be if these women were oppressed or manipulated by the men in their lives.