We Should Thank The Socialists

DEAR OLD lefty Guardian columnist George Monbiot has suddenly woken up to an international nightmare of injustice. It’s lefty-trendy “biofuels,” fuels made from crops like sugar cane, corn, and even, in Swaziland, cassava. But all is not well in the Brave New World of Swazi biofuels.

Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava.

Well bust my buttons. Nobody, but nobody could have seen that coming. Why the Guardian never warned us. The mainstream media never put it on the nightly news. Maybe if good old Mike Wallace were still in his prime he could go on 60 Minutes and say: “You mean to say...”

Let’s not get into the prediction that to convert the whole economy to biofuels we’d have to convert all the cropland in the world to fuel production.

While we are all rocking back in shock, let’s look at another brewing crisis. Oil.

Did you know that most of the oil reserves in the world are owned by government-owned oil companies? You didn’t? Richard W. Rahn thought so.

Most people do not realize that about 90 percent of the world’s liquid oil reserves are controlled by governments or state-owned companies.

Little old Exxon Mobil only owns 1.08 percent of world reserves.

And, of course the government-owned oil companies are badly run. Mexico’s Pemex is corrupt and inefficient. Venezuela’s dictator Chavez has completely bollixed up his national oil company.

Well, don’t despair. There is plenty of oil in the world. And a lot of it is in Canadian tar sands and Colorado oil shale. And with oil prices way above $30 to $40 per barrel, they are becoming economic.

That means that they will be competing with the government oil companies and bringing prices down.

So the socialists always help us in the end. They screw things up so badly that their foolish plans always end in disaster.

The sooner government gets separated from business and enterprise the better for the people.

Maybe the sensitive George Monbiot will eventually come to realize that government-owned oil companies, like government-owned biofuels, make people poorer.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Sphere: Related Content |

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

TAGS

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Socialism equals Animism

Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Sacrifice

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Racial Discrimination

[T]he way �to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,� Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300�301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Physics, Religion, and Psychology

Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”

Pentecostalism

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

mysql close 0