Billy makes a great point [1] this morning:
I don’t know why people keep referring to what’s going on with energy as a “market” while it’s stepped on by government every mile of the way from the field to your tank, and from the generator to your AC outlets, ad infinitum. And it’s supposed to be evidence of markets working because people are being priced out of what’s being called a “market”… almost as if it’s a good thing or something.
If The New York Times had run a Walter Duranty headline in 1931 that went, “Reports are that peasants appear to be consuming less wheat as a result of eating less,” what might have Americans thought of it, or of an economy manifest so? What might have been the right thing to think of it?
He’s nailed it, folks, on several levels. First to my mind is the amount of damage that we’ve done to ourselves by allowing government to intrude in this process to the degree that we have. I’m telling you right now; the problems we have with supply and price at the moment are all…and I mean all, government created. All of it.
My god, the lapse of ethics and politics in economics is just rotten. All over the place you’ll see people equating the applications and results of force with voluntary exchanges of values, up and down long production chains from raw materials to finished products, with arbitrary coercive interventions everywhere along the way. I don’t know why people don’t or can’t keep track of the crucial political difference between force and trade, but they just don’t. I suppose it’s because something useful to consumers is eventually squeezed out the ass-end of the thing after every government shark along the way has had its bite.
Well, there is that, coupled with the idea that for several generations, that’s all they’ve known. They don’t know how much problem the government is causing because i has never BEEN any other way in their eyes. Of course, the educational system has never taught them anything else either… and it’s mostly government run too, of course. It’s to the point now where this monstrosity of ethanol subsidy gets tossed into the mix with not even a smidge of discussion. The results are clearly not good, and yet we see no move away from the monster. And that’s just an example of supposed ‘energy policy’, and it’s consequences.
And let’s remember that all of this was to lower the amount of pollution i the air. THe whole thing of using corn in the tank instead of oil was because of the government fed… and to a large degree government mandated myth of ‘global warming’, which has since been disproved. And of course we now know that ethanol is a larger polluter than oil. Yep Whole thing sounds like a government operation to ME.
Of course, Energy policy isn’t the only place these governmentally enforced screwups interfere with our lives, our livelihoods and the well-being of the country and the world. They just happen to be the most visible, at the moment.
Can you say ‘healthcare’? Can you say ‘welfare’? Can you say ‘Social Security’? Can you say ‘Education’? There can be no more argument; everything government touches ends up in the same sewer. And yet we keep looking to government for solutions.
Make sense to you?