…. is from Alex Epstein’s forthcoming book “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels“:

The cheap, plentiful, reliable energy we get from fossil fuels, combined with human ingenuity, gives us the ability to transform the world around us into a place that is far safer from any health hazards (man-made or natural), far safer from any climate change (man-made or natural), and far richer in resources now and in the future.

Fossil fuel technology transforms nature to improve human life on an epic scale. It is the only energy technology that can currently meet the energy needs of all 7+ billion people on this planet. While there are some truly exciting supplemental technologies that may rise to dominance in some distant future decade, that does not diminish the greatness or immense value of fossil fuel technology.

Ultimately, the moral case for fossil fuels is not about fossil fuels; its’ the moral case for using cheap, plentiful, reliable energy to amplify our abilities to make the world a better place – a better place for human beings.

The unpopular but moral case of our time is fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are easy to misunderstand and demonize, but they are absolutely good to use. And they absolutely need to be championed. Mankind’s use of fossil fuels is supremely virtuous – because human life is the standard of value, and because using fossil fuels transforms our environment to make it wonderful for human life.

From my new The Week column:

Now you can add Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen to the list of policy-makers fretting about the gap between the rich and everybody else. “The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me,” she said last week. “I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with…the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.”

Let me answer Yellen’s question: So far, yes, rising inequality seems to fit just fine with an American society that puts great importance on improving your lot in life through smarts and hard work. A highly regarded study earlier this year found, after examining millions of tax records, that children entering the job market today have the same chance of climbing the income ladder as children born in the 1970s — that despite rising inequality. Indeed, the economists found little correlation between income mobility and high-end income inequality between the 1 percent and 99 percent.

The rich getting richer isn’t what keeps people from climbing the success ladder. In fact, having lots of super-rich people can create more opportunity for everybody. Well, at least the right kind of super-rich. Not so much old money scions or CEOs with lucrative stock options. But entrepreneurs are a different breed of billionaire. We want risk-takers creating new businesses that offer innovative and amazing new goods and services. And we want those start-ups to grow and grow and hire lots of people.

MIT Technology Review’s David Talbot offers some helpful perspective on that Lockheed Martin announcement of a breakthrough in nuclear fusion. The company says it’s on track to sell a small, very powerful reactor within a decade. Not surprisingly, the piece gives room to the skeptics to make their case, although they don’t have much info on the details of what Lockheed is doing:

Ian Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and one of the principal investigators at the MIT fusion research reactor, says the type of confinement described by Lockheed had long been studied without much success.Hutchinson says he was only able to comment on what Lockheed has released—some pictures, diagrams, and commentary, which can be found here. “Based on that, as far as I can tell, they aren’t paying attention to the basic physics of magnetic-confinement fusion energy. And so I’m highly skeptical that they have anything interesting to offer,” he says. “It seems purely speculative, as if someone has drawn a cartoon and said they are going to fly to Mars with it.”

But it’s not just Lockheed on the case, by the way:

Lockheed joins a number of other companies working on smaller and cheaper types of fusion reactors. These include Tri-Alpha, a company based near Irvine, California, that is testing a linear-shaped reactor; Helion Energy of Redmond, Washington, which is developing a system that attempts to use a combination of compression and magnetic confinement of plasma; and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in Middlesex, New Jersey, which is working on a reactor design that uses what’s known as a “dense plasma focus.”

Another startup, General Fusion, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, tries to control plasma using pistons to compress a swirling mass of molten lead and lithium that also acts as a coolant, absorbing heat from fusion reactions and circulating it through conventional steam generators to spin turbines (see “A New Approach to Fusion”).

And as I have written before, Silicon Valley has a growing interest in the technology.

The economic impact of the minimum wage is one of the most studied public-policy topics I’ve run across. But sometimes these analyses have an air of unreality about them. At an AEI event earlier this year, Heidi Shierholz — then an EPI think tanker, now the US Labor Department’s chief economist – argued in favor of President Obama’s plan to raise the minimum wage. Shierholz also said she was “not so worried” about the possibility that dramatically raising the minimum wage might worsen the competitive position of low-skill humans versus machines. “It’s an unknown,” she added, what will happen in the future.

Well, perhaps the future is here. Here is an interesting tidbit from McDonald’s earning conference call yesterday (via The Wall Street Journal):

By the third quarter of next year, McDonald’s also plans to fully roll out new technology in some markets to make it easier for customers to order and pay digitally and to give people the ability to customize their orders, part of what the company terms the “McDonald’s Experience of the Future” initiative.

As a WSJ editorial put it, ” … consumers better get used to the idea of ordering their Big Macs on a touchscreen.” Now McDonald’s has been frequently attacked by minimum wage proponents. Although CEO Don Thompson has suggested the company would support Obama’s call for a $10.10 wage, that’s not good enough for advocates who want the minimum set at $15 an hour.

But there is a better way to help low-skill workers, at least over the near term: expand the Earned Income Tax Credit or tack on some other sort of new wage subsidy. As AEI economist Michael Strain has put it:

Liberals, in supporting minimum-wage increases, implicitly argue that the employers of low-skill workers, together with consumers of the products and services the workers help provide, should bear the burden of ensuring that low-skill workers don’t live in poverty. Conservatives should reject this argument, insisting that all of society is responsible for helping the working poor — to escape poverty, to earn their own success, to flourish.

Follow James Pethokoukis on Twitter at @JimPethokoukis, and AEIdeas at @AEIdeas.

Barack Obama in 2004: There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

Barack Obama in 2014 discussing racial profiling and affirmative discrimination in college admissions: If the University of Michigan or California decides that there is a value in making sure that folks with different experiences in a classroom will enhance the educational experience of the students, and they do it in a careful way, the practice should be allowed.

Conclusion: Apparently when it comes to college applicants, there are black applicants and white applicants and Latino American applicants and Asian American applicants in Obama’s world, as Jennifer Gratz points out.

The chart above shows a most amazing economic phenomenon: Since December 2007 when the Great Recession started, Texas civilian employment has increased by 12% and by more than 1.32 million jobs, from just over 11 million jobs in December 2007 to 12.32 million in September of this year (see blue line in chart). In contrast, civilian employment in the other 49 states without Texas is still 0.73% and almost one million jobs below the December 2007 level (see red line in chart) – 134.27 million non-Texas jobs in September vs. 135.26 million in December 2007.

It’s also important to note that while job growth in Texas slowed considerably in 2008 and 2009 due to the recession, the level of civilian employment in Texas never fell below its pre-recessionary, December 2007 level. Also, while Texas was able to actually increase jobs slightly even during the depths of the recession in 2008 and 2009, the US labor market minus Texas experienced a stunning loss of 8.374 million jobs (a percentage drop of 6.2%) in the two year period between December 2007 and December 2009.

In another job-related milestone for Texas, the BLS reported today that annual payroll employment in Texas increased in September by more than 400,000 jobs from a year ago for the second straight month, and established a new all-time state record for job growth over a 12-month period with a 413,700 gain from September 2013. Over the last year, Texas has added almost 1,600 new jobs every business day – a hiring rate of almost 200 jobs every hour! Also, Texas’s annual job gain of 413,700 through September represented 15.7% of the country’s 2.635 million increase in nonfarm payroll employment over that period, even though Texas’s population is only 8.4% of the US total. In percentage terms, Texas payrolls increased by 3.7% over the last 12 months, almost double the 1.9% growth in US payroll employment.

The chart and data tell a powerful and remarkable story of job creation in the Lone Star State of more than 1.32 million new jobs added since the start of the Great Recession, compared to a net deficit of almost one million jobs for the other 49 states combined. Much of the economic success of Texas in recent years that has fueled job creation in the state is a direct result of the shale oil and gas boom taking place in areas like the Permian Basin in west Texas (1.8 million barrels of oil per day) and the Eagle Ford in south central Texas (1.6 million barrels per day). Texas is now producing more than 36% of America’s total crude oil production, and as a separate country would be the world’s 8th largest oil-producer. Further, Texas has done a great job of attracting businesses like Toyota because of the state’s “employer-friendly combination of low taxes, fair courts, smart regulations and world-class workforce.”

Bottom Line: The country, the president, and all of us individually owe a huge debt of gratitude to the state of Texas and to the oil and gas industry for helping support the US economy during and after the Great Recession. Without the energy-driven economic stimulus from the fracking revolution, and without the gusher of jobs in the state of Texas, there’s no question that the Great Recession would have been much worse and lasted much longer, and the jobs picture today would be much bleaker. The chart above helps to illustrate how important the state of “Saudi Texas” is to the US labor market and economy – thanks largely to the Lone State State, the US has finally gained back all of the jobs lost during the Great Recession – September was actually the first month that employment in the US surpassed the pre-recession jobs peak. God Bless Texas.

…. is from the introduction of Radley Balko’s book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces:

How did we evolve from a country whose founding statesmen were adamant about the dangers of armed, standing government forces — a country that enshrined the Fourth Amendment in the Bill of Rights and revered and protected the age-old notion that the home is a place of privacy and sanctuary — to a country where it has become acceptable for armed government agents dressed in battle garb to storm private homes in the middle of the night — not to apprehend violent fugitives or thwart terrorist attacks, but to enforce laws against nonviolent, consensual activities?

And from a recent review of Radley Balko’s book by Aaron Tao:

After reading through “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” if there be a single lesson we should grasp, it is that police militarization and the War on Drugs are intimately tied. The former cannot be reversed unless the latter is ended. Thanks to the War on Drugs, the Castle Doctrine crumbled, the United States ended up with the largest incarcerated population in world history, and the Officer Friendlies of yesteryear have been replaced by a de-facto standing army clothed like Darth Vader.

HT: Warren Smith

From a New York Times editorial on October 18 “A Rate Cap for All Consumers“:

Poor and working-class people across the country are being driven into poverty and default by deceptively packaged, usuriously priced loans. The obvious solution is a national standard for consumer lending. Both the House and Senate have bills pending that would adopt the 36 percent standard for all consumer transactions, including those involving payday loans, mortgages, car loans, credit cards, overdraft loans and so on.

Thomas Sowell responds in his column today “Predatory Journalism“:

The New York Times is again on the warpath against what it calls “predatory lending.”

Just what is predatory lending? It is lending that charges a higher interest rate than people like those at the New York Times approve of. According to such thinking — or lack of thinking — the answer is to have the government set an interest rate ceiling at a level that will be acceptable to third parties like the New York Times.

Low-income people often get short-terms loans when they run out of money to meet some exigency of the moment. The interest rates charged on such unsecured loans to people with low credit scores are usually higher than on loans to people whose higher incomes and better credit histories make them less of a risk.

Crusaders against such loans often make the interest rate charged seem even higher by quoting these interest rates in annual terms, even when the loan is actually repayable in a matter of weeks. It is like saying that a $100 a night hotel room costs $36,500 a year, when virtually nobody rents a hotel room for a year.

Because those who make unsecured short-term loans are usually poor and often ill-educated, the political left can cast the high interest rates as unconscionably taking advantage of vulnerable people.

Editorial demagoguery against “predatory” lending might well be called predatory journalism — taking advantage of other people’s ignorance of economics to score ideological points, and promote still more expansion of government powers that limit the options of poor people especially, who have few options already.

Update: Thanks to Gene Hayward (high school econ teacher and econ econ blogger) in the comment section for a link to the article “The Real Reason the Poor Go Without Bank Accounts,” written by Lisa Servon, a professor of urban policy at the New School. She who went “undercover” and spent four months working full-time last year as a teller at RiteCheck, a check cashing and financial services center located in the South Bronx. As Gene commented, Professor Servon came back with a story that would surprise the NY Times editorial board…. but not the people who use these services willingly and voluntarily. Here’s an excerpt of the article:

The primary critique of check cashers is that they are expensive. Sitting in my New School office eight miles south of Mott Haven, I had believed that, too. When I interviewed my customers, however, I learned that for many lower income people, commercial banks are ultimately more expensive. The rapidly increasing cost of bounced checked fees and late payment penalties has driven many customers away from banks, particularly those who live close to the edge, like many of my RiteCheck customers. A single overdraft can result in cascading bad checks and hundreds of dollars in charges.

Many factors—cost, transparency, convenience—go into the choice consumers make between a bank and a check casher.  Atmosphere and the attitudes of the staff are only one component, but this piece of the puzzle may be more important than we thought. Like the famous TV song goes, “You want to go where everyone knows your name.” If policy efforts to move the unbanked to banks are to be successful in the long run, banks need to remember they are a service industry involved in one of society’s most important and basic relationships.

On October 21, 1994, the United States and North Korea signed the Agreed Framework, hailed by the White House at the time as an important breakthrough and a triumph of diplomacy. Fast forward 20 years, and it’s clear that it was an unmitigated disaster. After all, North Korea began cheating almost immediately and, 20 years later, the Hermit Kingdom has achieved all the aims the agreement was meant to forestall, in addition to billions of dollars in additional aid.

So how should the Agreed Framework be assessed by historians and what lessons might the Obama administration learn before making the same mistakes with regard to its Iran nuclear negotiations? Over at Commentary, I explain.

Follow AEIdeas on Twitter at @AEIdeas.

Les Gelb, former chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Carter administration diplomat, recently revived a debate he and then-Senator Joe Biden began almost a decade ago when they suggested dividing Iraq along ethnic and sectarian lines. While I have no problem with Kurdish independence should they so choose (for Kurdish leaders like Barzani, however, nationalism has always been more a rhetorical tool than a sincerely held belief), the Gelb plan to divide Iraq into Shi‘ite Arab, Sunni Arab, and Kurdish zones is as bad an idea now as it was then. It will create a host of new problems, all the while failing to resolve the old ones.

That does not mean, however, that federalism isn’t the solution. As I wrote yesterday in Commentary, not all federalisms are the same. Just as I wrote in The New York Times back in 2002 and in a book chapter from the same year, the way forward is decentralization along administrative lines. That doesn’t disempower the Kurds—they can still form their own grouping and enjoy the same autonomy—but it does mean an Iraq of 15 or 18 regions rather than just three. Just as in the United States, decentralization and investing power in states can be a path to liberty and a defense against the tyranny of the center.

While it will take military action to defeat the Islamic State, in the aftermath of any future victory, it will be necessary to renegotiate the Iraqi compact. And as I continue to travel to Iraq to talk with Shi‘ites, Kurds, Sunnis and Sunni insurgents (the latter in Jordan), it seems that decentralizing and diluting the power of the central government –limiting it largely to foreign affairs, supervision of national resources like oil, and defense–and instead investing that power in the sub-districts, districts, or provinces is not only the way forward, but a formula which can restore stability.

Follow AEIdeas on Twitter at @AEIdeas.