Dueling Energy Futures

REPUBLICANS believe that we should let the market figure out the future of energy. Will we run out of oil? Can wind and solar make the difference? Is nuclear a viable option? Ultimately, entrepreneurs, inventors, and speculators will tell us. The government’s job is to think seriously about the rules, particularly the environmental rules.

Democrats see the future in more apocalyptic terms. They see the future as a question of saving the planet: from pollution, from Big Oil, from global warming.

So it is healthy that there is a big battle brewing in this election over the energy future. That means that the American people get to choose. Do they want to prepare for a future in which fossil fuels will be absent, and a radical reorientation of the economy will be necessary to stave off disaster? Or can we rely on the price signals of the market?

Right now, both parties are playing politics with energy. With Republicans running a Drill, Drill, Drill campaign, Democrats are willing to let their vulnerable members vote for drilling. They figure they can afford to wait, and then come back next year with a comprehensive energy policy that is long on conservation and wind and solar.

Republicans think that Democrats are just wrong, that all the apocalyptic rhetoric is just wrong. We think that Democrats and politicians are just giving in to their natural instinct to call for the moral equivalent of war.

The thing about the future is that nobody knows nothing. You can do all the predictin’ and prophesyin’ you like. But the future will turn out to be different.

That’s why Republicans prefer to let businessmen and speculators make the bets on the future. If they are wrong, then they get to pay, at least in part, for their mistakes.

In politics it is different. In politics it doesn’t matter if you are wrong, so long as you can successfully point the finger at someone else. If our Democratic and environmentlist friends are wrong about “peak oil” and global warming, it will be the American people that will pay for their mistakes.

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

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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