Regulations For Payoff Quotes

Here, courtesy of Dan Rather, anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News, is a prime example of how an editorial edge is woven into your "news": This was President Bush's first day at the office, and he did something to quickly please the right flank of his party: he reinstituted an anti-abortion policy that had been in place during his father's term and the Reagan presidency but was lifted during the Clinton years. Rather is telling you in no uncertain terms that President Bush used this important issue to make a political payoff in his first act as president. Compare that to Rather's characterization of Bill Clinton's first day as president: On the anniversary of Roe versus Wade, President Clinton fulfills a promise, supporting abortion rights . . . Today, with the stroke of a pen, President Clinton delivered on his campaign promise to cancel several anti-abortion regulations of the Reagan-Bush years. A cynical player of partisan politics versus a man fulfilling a promise to voters--two very different ways of characterizing men, each of whom was both appeasing a wing of his party and fulfilling a campaign promise. Although I was personally thrilled with Clinton's decisions on abortion rights, I can't pretend, as Dan Rather chose to do, that it was a matter of pure principle. Spin is that simple, that insidious, and a part of your nightly news.

Nothing in reality demands that one choose between one’s money and one’s life, or between the destruction of one’s business and a payoff to the mafia, or as Rand will argue, between paying a fine and obeying a government regulation.2 By compelling a choice in the face of an artificial, arbitrarily constructed alternative, a coercive threat derails reality-based practical reasoning, which is grounded in the necessity of taking specific kinds of action in order to maintain and nourish one’s life.

Now compare both with the energy industry. First, you have huge capital costs that never go away. If you spend $1 billion building a coal plant, the next plant you build will not be any cheaper. And your investors put up that money with the expectation that the plant will run for 30 years or more. If someone comes along with a better technology 10 years down the road, you’re not going to just shut down your old plant and go build a new one. At least not without a very good reason—like a big financial payoff, or government regulations that force you

First, you have huge capital costs that never go away. If you spend $1 billion building a coal plant, the next plant you build will not be any cheaper. And your investors put up that money with the expectation that the plant will run for 30 years or more. If someone comes along with a better technology 10 years down the road, you’re not going to just shut down your old plant and go build a new one. At least not without a very good reason—like a big financial payoff, or government regulations that force you to.