The Conscience Of A Left-Libertarian/Anarco-Sindicalista/Spanish-Speaking Jewish Panamanian Resident Gambling And Finance Guy: WHY THE “CAP-N-CRUNCH” PROVISION IN ACEASA OF 2009 (Obama’s environmental thing) IS FUCKED

Hello, Rednecks! Que hay mis panas y panaches estadunidoenses del Sur? I principally blog at EDITORIALS FROM HELL’S LEADING NEWSPAPER but I’ll be cross-posting a lot of material for as long as BuelahMan and Lynda want me to. HELL is covering the Sarah Palin resignation in detail, so this will be the first piece I’ve written in a long while which will appear somewhere else first. Quite simply, they’ve been following the doings of Sarah Palin on a daily basis and have tons and tons of info and interpretation of the woman and the phenomenon. Also, the following is kind of an adapatation of some comments I’d left on Torrance Stephens’s RawDawgBuffalo site in response to his take-down of The American Clean Energy and Security Act.

Yes, another week brings yet another Multi-Trillion USD expansion of the US government, with its trusty sidekicks, the contraction of the social sector of US government spening, and the expansion of the Plutocratic rights of the pillars of the Friendly Fascist United States Of America.

A confession off the top which is probably not necessary for anyone who’s read me here, on THE DAILY PITCHFORK, and/or heard me with Dr Stephens and Lovebabz each Thursday night at 11pm Eastern on the RawDawg Buffalo Radio Show: My views are not classifiable into any familiar ideology box. I am a capitalist. I believe in free markets. I have an MBA in finance and applied mathematics from UCLA. I’ve been a founding partner of three off-shore hedge funds and an entrepreneur who’s started a number of entrepreneurial ventures in the U.S. and Latin America. That said, I hold the pillars of the Friendly and Unfriendly variants of American BushBaManuel Fascism infuriating and my orientation will always be to peace, personal freedom, social justice, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, cooperation, and steady economic growth. I there’s every right with the IDEA of capitalism and much of its practice. I also have found much to like in most serious economic philosophy, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx to David Ricardo to John Maynard Keynes to Emma Goldman to Samuel Gompers to Irving Fisher to Leon Trotsky to Thorstein Veblen to Herbert Marcuse to Milton Friedman to Ronald Coase to Harry Markowitz to Noam Chomsky & Ed Herman to Black & Scholes to Von Neumann & Morganstern to Modigliani & Miller to Eugene Fama to Angela Davis to Paul Krugman to Gary Becker to Richard Posner to John Meriwether to Paul Krugman to Barry Goldwater to Malcolm X to Hugo Chavez to Kenneth Clarke to Alberto Carrasquilla Barrera to Eduardo Schwartz to Barr Rosenberg and so on….I’m open-minded. All love good thinkers and find pearls of wisdom everywhere but I have no sacred cows, the two least sacred being the Salesmen-In-Chief George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama. That infuriates a lot of people. There are times I’m going to seem like the world’s most hard-hearted capitalist and times you’re going to be sure I’m a REAL SOCIALIST. Because I am. Both. Free-market, fiscally and monetarily conservative, low-tax favoring, capitalist. And socially and class conscious “big government” socialist…you get the picture…

Let’s take up the “Cap-And-Trade” provision of HR 2454, American Clean Energy and Security Act, basically as I lamented to Torrance Stephens.

TORRANCE: Isn’t it funny that two libertarians like you and I oppose Cap-N-Crunch? We’re “supposed” to be in favor of market-based solutions to “negative social externalities,” si o no?

Well, like, you, I say in this case “NO!” I say it, though, with a theoretical understanding of the concept behind Cap-N-Crunch: THE (RONALD) COASE MECHANISM.

This is very dense stuff but worth a glance if anyone’s really into the philosophy of it:

Externalities and the Coase Theorm: Hypothesis or Result

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=kDX7SiDfOK0C&oi=fnd&pg=PA291&dq=%22Schweizer%22+%22Externalities+and+the+Coase+Theorem:+Hypothesis+or+Result%3F%22+&ots=4vf4Pjpx8i&sig=6zuGcgHq6TokX5AAsUb2iJJ3iFU

The problem here is that Coase was writing in a GLASS-STEGALL, pre-NEW CFTC world. With the total deregulation (YET NOT A TOTAL LIBERTARIAN DISPERSION OF FUNGIBILY THROUGHOUT SOCIETY) of derivative instruments, Cap-N-Crunch is bound to fail.

I’ll use the naive case. They say that the number of CO2 emissions credits would be reduced by some amount at the end of each year by not replacing some number of settled or expired contracts.

Great. But it’s total bullshit. If I sell you one put-option on the right to prevent the expulsion of so much CO2 particulate over such a period of time with such a strike price, interest rate, and premium…THEN, I buy from you a call-option on the right TO POLLUTE in such a manner by such a date with the same characteristics as the other contract, WE HAVE CREATED A SYNTHETIC RIGHT TO POLLUTE THAT DIDN’T EXIST BEFORE, OVER-THE-COUNTER AND UN-REGULATED, YET WHOLLY LEGAL AND BINDING WITH THE FORCE OF LAW ANYWHERE IN THE USA. YES, WE’VE CREATED RIGHTS TO CAUSE NEGATIVE SOCIAL EXTERNALITIES IN POOR NEIGHBORHOODS JUST BY A LITTLE HAND WAVING!

Cap-N-Crunch is therefore a fraud and a lie and all it does is set into law the right to pollute as much as possible. The man who first started discussing this idea is also the man who is the majority shareholder in the company that will make, design and HELP THE FED SUPERVISE the CO2-EMISSIONS MARKETS.

That man’s name is (drum roll please)………AL GORE, JR.

I also write in opposition to the measure and to the same ignorance among the Sheople in the American political class, MSM and greater voting and non-voting populace.

I posted Dennis Kucinich’s speech against the Air Thingy on my Facebook page and I got bombed with the same commentary.

“Come on. It’s a start.”

“You’re just like Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh.”

“It’s fine for you in Panama. What about us?”

“The SIERRA CLUB is for it”

“Al Gore is for it”

And so on…I really don’t know why it falls to me so often to be critiquing bad policy. Well, in this case, I do know why. Because in addition to having studied Ronald Coase’s work in grad school, I AM A COMPLEX SYNTHETIC O-T-C DERIVATIVES TRADER. My job isn’t to save the world. My job is to make good money from bad. I can see the flaws in the legislation because that’s how I’ve made my living, by catching errors of construction of markets and errors in pricing of markets.

I know a lot of people just like me — people who are comfortable making money in the anonymity of portfolio trading, but who oppose tyranny, oppression, subjugation, war,pollutants,the criminal IN-justice SLAVERY SYSTEM,etc.

There are even famous libertarian and progressive finance thinker practioners like John Meriwether and Barr Rosenberg whose examples I follow on this. I thought Dennis Kucinich’s speech covered the problems in more down to earth way than I did, employing progressive critiques of the physical damage to people, especially poor, and libertarian critiques of vesting ever-more social control to the government.

Yet, when I start speaking or writing about LOOT AS LOOT AS LOOT, I am assumed to be some kind of right-wing Nazi thug. Last I checked, I just used what I know from my training and practice to show why the Obama measure is PROMOTIVE OF POLLUTION NOT PREVENTATIVE OF IT.

The unsurprising thing was when I asked Obama-luvvers if they’d read even an executive summary of the legislation, NONE HAD.

Kelso’s Nuts love you