Smack-down!

Peter Foster executes a masterful smack-down of Post columnist Dan Gardner who recently penned this loopy column accusing the Harper government of being "communists" because they reject the GHG emissions cap-and-trade approach:

... claims Mr. Gardner, their proposals to deal with the problem by regulation represent a level of economic ignorance unseen outside the University of Havana!

... Mr. Gardner claims that “pricing” carbon via cap-and-trade is “efficient because it isn’t some bureaucrat in Ottawa who decides who will reduce emissions and how they will do it.”

Has he been vacationing off the planet?

... I had never come across anybody before Mr. Gardner who dared to suggest that it was a “free market” solution. In fact, cap and trade is to free markets what Sophie’s Choice was to free choice. It corresponds to the Stalinist definition of initiative: finding the best way to carry out an order.

... Cap and trade’s “market” is entirely artificial, based on government-created scarcity. It isn’t a market in freely traded goods, but in bureaucratically regulated “bads.” ... At whatever level of regulation, however, cap and trade promotes the sleaziest of mixed-economic concoctions, supported by officials who would do the capping, and the private-sector operatives who would do the trading, and/or reap the benefits of a system that is doomed to be rigged.

... Meanwhile, the main issue remains whether there is a climate crisis in the first place. Mr. Gardner devoutly believes so, but one can’t help wondering if his grasp of science is as dodgy as his grasp of ­economics.

Classic Foster.

Update: Joanne at BLY caught Gardner's Tweet which promises a reply to Foster.  Heh, can't wait.