Given the hypothetical task of capturing a free country without a civil war, I was thinking about how I might approach the problem.

Something for Nothing

First, I would borrow and print a lot of money. I would use this money to create new government jobs. I would send a message to the public sector unions that strikes would be rewarded and I would engage the intellectual community to talk about the role of public sector unions as one of setting a low water mark for private sector unions.

I would create many new government departments, each devoted to handing out some of the newly borrowed and printed cash. I would hand out cash to the poor, to business, to farmers and to the old. I would make sure that between direct public sector employment and various welfare programs, a large percentage of the population became dependant on my cash.

Before the cash ran out, I would offer free health care (for the children) and old age pensions to everyone. At the same time, I would make it illegal to accept payment for heath care. I would engage the intellectual community to talk about this from an economy of scale economic perspective (and downplay the central planning angle). I would also encourage them to invent a thought framework, grammar and dialog to position the general replacement of individual freedom with regulation in terms of collective fairness. Something like “social justice”.

Thought Control

I would spend some cash on the intellectuals in form of university (for the children) and think tank funding. I would use the funding influence to encourage political science research that demonstrated that my desired economic and social policies were derived using science as opposed to simply being invented out of whole cloth.

I would establish a government office whose sole agenda was to fuse my economic and social agenda with patriotism.

I would establish a government media organization whose sole agenda was to use the output of my intellectuals to counter argue any potential news that might call into question the morality or effectiveness of my plan.

I would continue to hold elections, confident that I control so much of the economy that I can frighten a majority into reelecting me, even if they oppose me in general. After each new win, I would speak of civility and cooperation, and I would hand out some cash to the losers.

Paying for It

As the cash ran low, I would cancel the military. Presumably the intellectuals haven’t found any use for it anyway.

Managing the Private Sector

I would use powerful government bureaucracies like customs, safety and standards to effectively control the market. I would then create winners and losers at will.

I would nationalize key industries like energy and transportation, either overtly or indirectly via taxation and regulation.

As needed, I would use some cash for corporate welfare in the form of job creation programs to keep the unemployment and welfare rate below a socially disastrous level.

Paying for It

Taxes will have to up. Way up.

Lambs to the Slaughter

I would disarm the population. Assuming the plan was going well up to this point, I wouldn’t actually be that concerned with armed revolt. But I would understand that a general sense of powerlessness and freedom from individual responsibility would work in my favor over time.

Keeping It Going

As taxes approached the limit of 100%, inflation precluded running the presses, and people began to want their borrowed money back, I would turn toward regulation as the primary vehicle of control. I would create a climate, using my control of the media, where every tragedy generated outrage requiring me to do something (for the children) to prevent it in the future.

The Golden Goose

Just as the cash was running out, the population aging and shrinking at the same time, the immigrants proving to be stubbornly independent, the heath care system creaking, business innovation declining, unfunded future liabilities exploding, Alberta and Quebec giving me the digit, I’d embrace the new religion of global warming. First, I would retune the intellectual and thought control systems away from progressive socialism and toward environmentalism. I would then generate a sense of guilt and fear to justify sweeping regulation. I would blame any subsequence economic damage, including the damage that I created in the preceding 40 years on saving the planet (for the children).

It might work.

Mike.

Assume that the population of Nova Scotia is 1 million.

Assume that the government forces retailers to replace 250,000, 100 watt incandescent bulbs with florescent bulbs.

At any given moment, assuming they are all on, 25,000 KW is consumed by the current lights.

Government data shows that the average temperature of Nova Scotia hits a high of 65 F in the months of July and Aug. Estimate that for 24 hours in each of July and August, no buildings are being heated (or air conditioned - which I assume is relatively uncommon in Nova Scotia). For the remainder of the year, buildings are being heated to bring them to 70 F. This means that the total number of “non-heating” hours (the only time the bulb change has any effect; see Feeling Good) is 1400 (60 x 24).

The total number of kWh used during the “non-heating” hours used by all these bulbs is 36 million. Assuming that 75% of this can be saved with more efficient bulbs, 27 million kWh would be saved yearly.

This translates into an annual saving of approximately 42 million lbs of CO2 (27M x 1.55), or approximately 42 lbs / person.

In gasoline terms, this would be a savings of 2.16 gals per person per year (19.4 lbs / gal).

If the bulbs were aleready being turned off for 12 hours / day the net gasoline saving per person drops to 1 gal per year.

This should just about offset the extra energy used to manufacture and ship the new bulbs and support the needed bulb police (assuming the public sector unions don't allow the recycle police in Kings Co. to also levy bulb fines).

Perhaps mandatory incandescent bulb recycling will be the next big issue in super green Nova Scotia. A small tax on the new bulbs would easily pay for it.

Mike.

According to Newsweek:

 There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

…    To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

   A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

April 28, 1975.

http://www.igreens.org.uk/world_is_cooling.htm

Perhaps the hype-o-meter (http://mikezintel.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D3612E978A2BDE2B!140.entry) would show a cycle, not unlike IPCC temperature graphs prior to the removal of Some Inconvenient Data.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/nosplit/nwarm05.xml

My predication here is that once the hype-o-meter peeks, the media is going to flip the story into "the data was manipulated, science fails, etc etc".

Unfortunately, lots of freedoms (see previous entry) will have been sacrificed by then.

The news will miss this story.

Mike. 

Newton’s second law teaches us that replacing incandescent with florescent bulbs saves you exactly no energy, assuming a building is being heated to a temperature higher than the outdoor temperature. In fact, it doesn’t make an iota of difference if you replaced all incandescent bulbs with plasma TVs. Almost all energy in a building quickly degenerates into heat.  

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_of_energy

 Nova Scotia, as I remember it , is pretty cold.

 Perhaps a course in physics ought be required to obtain a political science degree.

 http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/02/28/ns-lightbulb.html

 Mike.