I have to admit, I have been inconsolable recently. The loss of Bob Herbert hit me a lot harder than I thought it would. I desperately miss the vacant platitudes, the meandering logic, the confused sentence structure, the ever-present threat of a comma splice, and the general preoccupation with dismay that permeated every word.
There was something special about that guy’s particular breed of idiocy. I dare say that I will never again find anyone so disappointingly dense, so cravenly illogical, so colossally underqualified for their job…
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Let There Be Light Bulbs
By GAIL COLLINS
Why hello there.
Of all the controversies now raging in Washington
We all prefer that our political discourse hinges on cuteness.
is the fight over federal regulation of light bulb efficiency.
“Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy,” complained Representative Michele Bachmann
Who is both lean and smart, if I can say that without sounding mildly creepy.
in her Tea Party response to the president’s State of the Union address.
Bachmann has strong opinions on this matter. She is the author of the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act, which would repeal a federal requirement that the typical 100-watt bulb become 25 percent more energy efficient by 2012.
Repealing nuisance federal regulations? What’s not to love?
Bachmann hateshateshates that sort of thing, as you would expect from a woman whose Earth Day speech in 2009 was an ode to carbon dioxide. (“It’s a part of the regular life cycle of the earth.”)
I’m sorry; I’m not getting it. Is the implication of this particular sneer that carbon dioxide is not part of the regular life cycle of the earth, or that Michelle Bachman was pointing out an obvious and indisputable fact?
Hysteria over the government taking away our right to buy inefficient light bulbs has been sweeping through certain segments of the Republican Party.
That’s mostly because efficiency is a feature determined by the market, not by the federal government. The nuisance of regulations on spending behaviors is compounded greatly by the symbolic relevance of a light bulb. Children see it in cartoons represent the very existence of an idea. Ayn Rand’s Anthem, is centered around the protagonist’s rebirth when he re-invents the light bulb in an oppressive totalitarian society. It is the very nature of humanity evinced with a single filament: where once there was darkness, now there is light.
This isn’t about losing an important symbol; it’s about having an important symbol usurped for a message that is clearly contradictory to everything that it represents. It wasn’t the government that created the light bulb. It was man. Specifically, it was a man. There was beauty in the nuance, because the time, effort, and colossal scientific intelligence that went into the product demanded precision, sobriety, and perseverance. It wasn’t poured so generously into the project for government, the common good, or even personal profit. It was done because it could be done. It is an enduring symbol of the possible. We are now being told that it is impossible to buy.
So while Gail Collins regards these impingements on personal liberty with the flippant nonchalance that permeates every word she writes, you and I know that when you raze the symbols of human greatness in favor of the mediocrity of the common man, you have inverted the incentives of an entire society to suppress the special and revolutionary.
Representative Joe Barton of Texas, sponsor of the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act, says we’re about to lose the bulb that “has been turning back the night ever since Thomas Edison ended the era of a world lit only by fire in 1879.”
The point isn’t that the light bulb must never be improved. The point is that it’s up to consumers what constitutes an improvement.
Barton’s vision of the standard 100-watt incandescent is so heroic, you’d think it would be getting its own television series.
“When Congress dictates which light bulbs folks in South Carolina must buy, it’s clear the ‘nanny state’ mentality has gotten out of control in Washington,” said Senator Jim DeMint, one of 27 co-sponsors of a Senate bill calling for repeal of the new efficiency standards.
The great thing about this battle, which has spawned predictions of widespread light-bulb-hoarding,
This isn’t complicated. The laws of supply and demand dictate that when you implement a quota (in this case, zero), the marginal cost of production falls, the price rises, and there is increased deadweight loss. The question, of course, is whether consumers are readily willing to transition to the new lightbulb, a substitute good, on their own. Since they’ve been on the market for years, and the transition isn’t complete (largely because the bulbs are more expensive) one would believe that the two types of light bulbs are not perfect substitutes. (For example, I have a lamp that will not fit one of those newfangled coiled light bulbs. I need the old ones.) So the short answer is yes, there will be hoarding.
is that it will take your mind off Libya , Afghanistan , Iraq
That’s great? This woman is beyond helping.
It’s a little like the Donald Trump presidential candidacy, only less irritating.
With Bob Herbert and Frank Rich out, it won’t take Donald Trump for the words “you’re fired” to creep into your future if you keep writing shit like this, Gail.
Opponents of the law claim that the newer, more energy-efficient and cost-saving breeds of bulb give a less pleasing light,
No. That’s what some consumers say. Their opinions matter, after all, since it is their money buying the light bulbs.
although that doesn’t seem to have dissuaded the American consumers from moving away from the incandescents in droves.
We don’t purchase items democratically; this is precisely why the market exists. We don’t mandate beef because over 50% of the population bought it last week. Nor do we outlaw yachts because the industry only pertains to 0.05% of the population. In our fragmented consumer market, items are being increasingly customized. Whether your hobby is extreme daguerreotyping or free-style parcheesi, there are products and producers that have been tailored specifically to suit your needs. That’s why the market exists.
The National Electrical Manufacturers Association says demand for the allegedly beloved old bulbs has dropped 50 percent over the last five years.
Demand for the Windows XP operating system has dropped precipitously as well. Should we outlaw that too?
A terribly cynical mind might suspect the whole hubbub was just for political show.
Yes, but you don’t have a terribly cynical mind. You have a lazy mind, filled with nothing but regrets and cat-related fantasies.
Jeff Bingaman, the chairman of the energy committee, said he had not actually been accosted by any of his fellow senators begging him to help get angry light bulb aficionados off their backs.
“I heard the statements at the committee hearing, but nobody’s walking the halls lobbying me about this,” he said.
When Gail Collins timidly asserts an argument, her support generally buttresses the counterargument. For a “political show” to work, it needs to gain support from prospective voters. Prospective voters don’t even know about it. If Republicans thought this was a political winner, they would be lobbying. Instead, it’s probably a political wash. That means that their interest is a matter of principle, which is precisely the opposite of a political show.
That was the famous
Famous is a bit of a stretch.
hearing during which Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky
Seriously, there’s an entire King of the Hill episode about this.
“You busybodies always want to tell us how we can live our lives better,” he said passionately. “I’ve been waiting for 20 years to talk about how bad these toilets are.”
Low-flow is bullshit.
If Paul has been stewing about his bathroom fixtures since 1991, it may go a long way toward explaining his rather gloomy worldview.
Paul’s world view is gloomy? The man’s a libertarian. He just wants you to stop telling him what to do/buy.
But the crux of his argument came at a different point, when he demanded to know whether Kathleen Hogan, a Department of Energy official, was “pro-choice.”
“I’m pro-choice on light bulbs,” Hogan said cannily.
Wow. She is crafty. What a deft rhetorical parry/riposte! Dare I say, she has a rapier wit.
::mockingly highbrow laugh::
Paul, not to be dissuaded, claimed that Obamaites favored “a woman’s right to an abortion, but you don’t favor a woman’s or a man’s right to choose what kind of light bulb.”
A cogent point. After all, a choice is a choice.
The proper comparison here would really be between the energy-efficiency regulations and the government rules that set minimum standards for sanitation and medical care when an abortion is performed.
That’s not an appropriate comparison at all. Consumer choice between light bulbs runs absolutely no risk of death or major bodily harm anyone, and the facts about the different bulbs are readily available to consumers. Moreover, slightly inefficient choices are punished by slightly impactful financial repercussions. If you choose incandescent when you should have picked that coily shit, you’re going to pay more on your next electric bill; probably about 2.1933 cents more. (Did you really expect me to have done the research on this?)
Inversely, when choosing a hospital for a certain procedure, the consumer has no way of knowing the sanitation conditions of the operating rooms, the effects of which could kill him or her. These safety requirements are designed to prevent catastrophic ramifications (e.g. death) in instances where consumers make reasonable decisions based on available criteria. The difference is the incongruence between the choice and the market’s punishment of that choice.
If you were willing to overlook the fact that any attempt whatsoever to equate abortions and light bulbs is completely nuts.
Freedom is freedom; we are losing our liberty in pin-pricks, not amputations.
It’s a classic Tea Party herd of straw horses. Paul managed to lump the light bulb regulations with things his supporters hate (abortions/federal government telling me what to do) while ignoring the fact that the rules are much closer to things they like, such as standards that guarantee that if they go to a hospital or clinic, the place will be clean and staffed by qualified personnel.
Actually, hospital standards are absolutely not a proper comparison, but I’ve already explained that. Does this constitute a straw-man argument of accusing the opposition of using straw-man arguments?
Although the Rand Paul crowd is blaming the light bulb regulations on Obama, the rules were actually signed into law in 2007 by George W. Bush.
Yes, yes. We’ve been over this. Bush’s non-tax-related domestic policies ranged from inconsequential to obnoxious.
And as Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado , Boulder , wrote in a Times Op-Ed article recently, Washington
There’s a difference between standardizing the measurement of an ohm (which manufacturers can choose to ignore if they have a different unit of measurement they prefer) and mandating that certain light bulbs be used—a light bulb, by the way, that was pioneered by one of Obama’s chief advisors. Seriously, GE is some shady shit, and it didn’t get mentioned once this article?
All of this is not to mention that the purpose of this standardization is not safety, or to improve the market’s efficiency by guiding producers to easily replicable standards. It is a scalp for Democrats to throw the green movement. It also has the desirable side-effects of entrenching GE’s monopolistic grasp on the market share of light bulbs and increasing barriers to entry for new firms.
Please, just stop fucking around with the market.
You have to wonder if, back in 1894, there was a general outcry against the federal government trying to tell an American citizen how big his ohm should be.
I’ll count myself lucky. At least she didn’t veer over to school bullying, childhood obesity, or ten thousand other things I don’t care about. She stayed on the straight and narrow of being predictably wrong. Hooray!!!
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