McCain's Soviet-style Approach to Climate Tax

The WSJ (sub'n may be required) has an editorial today about John McCain's "cap-and-trade" approach to managing "climate change." The more one thinks about how this works, the more worried one becomes. Forget about McCain's rhetoric about "free market principles;" the truth could not be further off. In essence, the system would require a massive Soviet-style central planning group in charge of understanding, monitoring, imposing, regulating and litigating everything about our industrial businesses in this country that relates in any way to pollution. Even if it's a service business, we would need a PolitBureau to determine that this business has a zero-emissions mandate, with appropriate monitors.

Let's forget for a second that returning U.S. emissions to the 1990 level within 12 years would self-impose massive obstacles to our economy while China, India and the rest of the world continue their growth unabated. In fact, very few if any of the countries that adopted the Kyoto Protocol are even close to their promised emissions targets today. Even if we believe this is all very possible without any detrimental effects to our economy, in essence, McCain's plan could make Hillarycare look like child's play compared to the new bureaucracy this would create.