I don’t know how I could have missed this story. The president has already killed 23,000 jobs when he banned off shore drilling. Now he’s got his sights set on private fishermen in New England. He and Jane Lubchenko (how apropos that her name sounds like a throwback to the old Soviet Union days), his new head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, want to replace the private fishermen who have fished for years off the coast of New England with licensed fishermen who work for the government:
Since her appointment to head the NOAA by President Obama, Lubchenco, who had been an officer of the Environmental Defense Fund and a leader of the Pew Oceans Commission, has pushed to convert the fisheries into commodities markets under a management system known as catch shares.
In a statement to the Times soon after her confirmation by the Senate, Lubchenco’s office said her goal was to see a “significant fraction of the vessels … removed.”
With the stocks rebuilding strongly, fishermen wonder at the need to reduce the size of the work force.
Mayors Carolyn Kirk of Gloucester and Scott Lang of New Bedford have condemned federal fisheries policies for bringing unnecessary social and economic hardship as a certain price for the uncertain resource management benefits of catch share regulations.
Lubchenco has argued that consolidation, which has consistently followed catch shares, produces fewer but better jobs while giving the government a stronger hand in conservation.
Fewer but better jobs? Better as defined by whom? Certainly not the men and women who actually did those jobs and will be out of those jobs by government diktat. Rather, Lubchenco has taken it upon herself to define for the proletariat what a better job is.
This all goes back to the point I made in my post last night. The president does not want to help the economy; he wants to control the economy. And the only way you can control it is to eliminate the free market and implement a command economy. Lubchenco’s and and Obama’s nationalization of the fisheries in New England will create a command economy in the New England fisheries market that will allow federal government to plan from Washington DC how many fish will be caught off the coast of New England.
One step and a time, folks. He’s putting the US economy under federal command one step at a time.
Update: Elizabeth at The Anchoress wrote about this several days ago when the report first came out:
It just sounds so…
So…
So Soviet, doesn’t it?
It just doesn’t sound like America, at all. No liberty. No freedom of choice. You can choose to work for the government, as they permit, or not work at all.
And there is a weird lack of joy to it all, don’t you think? No fishing because you love it; because it’s in your family, and your blood and your culture and there’s nothing you’d rather do than captain your own boat and work for yourself.
None of that.
No joy, no independence; just the state.
Obama is a cold guy, and he’s putting a chilling government into place.
Bleak, hopeless change. Cold, too.
Indeed. It places a dystopian pall on the once vibrant and optimistic image of America.
