The wise man smiled and proclaimed that government should use "regulatory steps" as well as market forces to intervene in the power generation sector. The man also told his UC Berkeley audience that government should set higher targets for non-fossil-fuel-based energy production and penalize producers that don't comply. The issuer of these decrees was John Bryson, who at the time just happened to be CEO of Edison International, a company whose fortunes would increase under alternative energy mandates. Bryson now happens to be President Obama's nominee to head the Commerce Department. Just another day in Barack Obama's crony capitalist paradise.

Mr. Bryson is a progressive, a member of that species of critter that favors government intervention to force "society" to adhere to policies that know-it-alls deem best. In textbook progressive style, as a prescription for stopping people in undeveloped countries from clearing forests, Bryson proclaimed to a 2009 UN energy conference that "we've got to... find ways to map out the affected lands, to develop plans for addressing them, find economic models in which the people who are driven to do these things to try to raise the livelihoods of their families, find alternative means." [Awkward wording reproduced as is.]

Global wealth redistribution, pure and simple.

Who are the "we" in "we've got to" stop people from cutting down trees? Who will take on the omniscient central planning role, the duty to "find economic models" for lifting the world's poor out of poverty? Asking such questions is no longer even necessary. The answers are always the same. Bryson sees himself as a member of a higher echelon of humans, the world's elite thinkers, people whom economist-philosopher Thomas Sowell calls "the anointed."[i]

Bryson is a perfectly natural pick to run Commerce for a Barack Obama whose worldview epitomizes the vision of the anointed. No one in human history has made the socialistic central planning model work. Every time the socioeconomic visions of anointed ones have been tried, misery has been the result. But Barrack will change all that.

The UN, "renewable energy" companies like Edison, people like Bryson, and Bryson's champion, Barack Obama, lay claim to the all-knowingness required to buck the trend, beat the odds, and make the impossible possible. Using methods that have repeatedly built living hells, the Obamas, Brysons, and other elitist-corporatist-clueless visionaries of the new reality will fashion a wind-powered, emerald-forested, chicken-in-every-pot utopian paradise.

A writer, physicist, former high tech executive, and Cajun, Chuck Rogér invites you to sign up to receive his "Clear Thinking" blog posts by email at http://www.chuckroger.com/. Contact Chuck at swampcactus@chuckroger.com