An Experiment in Scotch

Tyler at Mar­ginal Rev­o­lu­tion chan­nels Matt Ygle­sias one of the more odi­ous por­tions of the Waxman-Markey bill recently passed in the House, specif­i­cally the threat of tar­iffs on coun­tries who don’t play along with our unse­ri­ous cli­mate change game. Even Obama says trade pro­tec­tions are a bad idea in this lit­tle game.

For those not scor­ing along at home, a last minute mid­dle of the night amend­ment was added to the 1000 odd pages of Waxman-Markey that seeks to impose tar­iffs on coun­tries who don’t bat­tle global warm­ing emis­sions. Leav­ing aside the impli­ca­tions of a 1000 page bill hav­ing amend­ments added to it in the mid­dle of the night on Rep­re­sen­ta­tives actu­ally read­ing the bill and leav­ing aside the fact that it took the NY Times 17 para­graphs to detail that in an arti­cle pre­sum­ably about exactly that, the very fact that we have Rep­re­sen­ta­tives so igno­rant of his­tory to think that threat­en­ing coun­tries like China, India and Brazil with tar­iffs in order to bully our beliefs onto them shows us the sad, sad state our leg­isla­tive process is in. The last time we tried a stunt like that, Smoot-Hawley brought about the Great Depres­sion and we all know how that turned out. This will be no dif­fer­ent if we try to impose tar­iffs on China. We are not in a posi­tion of power. If China wants to play that game, they can just stop buy­ing Trea­suries, in effect pre­vent­ing indebted Amer­ica from get­ting cheap credit and throw­ing our econ­omy into a tail­spin far worse than what we saw last fall.

This bill is a eco­nomic and polit­i­cal dis­as­ter thrown upon us by short-sighted super­fi­cial politi­cians aim­ing to get re-elected in 2010 at the expense of our future. It’s the log­i­cal result of a polit­i­cal class who once elected do every­thing in their power to stay elected which in turn focuses their sight­lines on the very near hori­zon and never on the future and well-being of their con­stituents or the coun­try. Until we do sen­si­ble things like ensure that all our politi­cians read and under­stand the leg­is­la­tion they are pass­ing, we’ll keep get­ting ruled by the incom­pe­tent and power hun­gry. None of the Rep­re­sen­ta­tives could have pos­si­bly read much less under­stood this bill given that amend­ments were being added as late as 3 hours before the vote. It’s a dis­grace to our democracy.