Energy And Freedom

WHEN SINGER Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers in Los Angeles got a chance to audition for the Tommy Dorsey big band in New York, they piled into a car and drove across the nation—in 1939. No doubt it was cheaper than taking the train.

When Jack Kerouac went On the Road in the late 1940s he went in a car. It wouldn’t have been quite the same if he’d taken the bus.

Cars have been useful to ordinary people too. When Americans have looked to buy a home they have often traded price for commute time. They decide how big of a home they want, and then start driving out of town knowing that the longer the commute, the lower the price.

Cars are freedom. Even back in the 1840s Thomas Cook could see that. Of course, in those days there weren’t any cars, but he arranged for a special train to carry him and 500 other temperance campaigners to a meeting eleven miles out of town.

As the Duke of Wellington complained, railways encouraged the poor to travel around needlessly.

Sooner or later, the powerful were going to try to put a stop to all this needlessness. It was a question of saving the planet. Rich, powerful people would travel around the planet on executive jets exhorting people to stay home and use mass transit. And if that didn’t work they had a old-fashioned backup plan: prophecy. Oil, the major transportation fuel, was running out, they preached. So it didn’t make any sense to look for it, since it was running out anyway.

This campaign worked like a champ for a while, for people naturally defer to their superiors, especially when they talk in a confident, superior way from a media pulpit. People decided it would be good to “go green,” especially if it meant buying a vanity car like the Toyota Prius.

But when gasoline reaches $4.50 per gallon then “going green” doesn’t do it. If you are a young singer, maybe you can’t afford to drive to that breakthrough audition. If you are a dental assistant, it means giving up your dream of a little acreage and a horse. What’s a few acres compared to saving the planet?

In his Farewell to Alms Gregory Clark reminds us that underneath all the innovation and the freedom of the modern capitalist world is one rather simple concept. It is the energy input from non-biological production. In the old days there was a limit to the energy that could be deployed for human use. It was limited to the output from organic agriculture.

Today things are different. We can mine and drill for energy instead of grow on farms. Remove that energy and we would still be better off than 200 years ago, but not much. There is a limit to a world fueled entirely by animal power and agriculture.

It is the concentration of energy in oil and in coal and, even more so, in uranium that enables us the ordinary Wal-Mart worker to enjoy luxuries hardly dreamed of by Egyptian pharaohs. So when planet-saving priests urge us to abandon highly concentrated energy that has transformed our lives and return to low-concentration energy sources like biofuels and wind power we may well believe that they are flying us up a box canyon.

When a pilot realizes he is flying up a box canyon with nothing but a rock wall ahead, he understands that he must abandon his natural precautionary principle—there are old pilots, bold pilots, but no old, bold, pilots—and take a big risk for once.

In the summer of Drill, Drill, Drill, the American consumer finds himself in a similar situation. He finds that the natural instinct of the powerful to increase their power by reducing his access to energy has him flying up a box canyon.

In Congress the high priests of carbon footprints and peak oil are still celebrating the Mass of global warming with its liturgy of carbon taxes, cap and trade, and wind and solar. But they are worried by the mob outside the door baying Drill, Drill, Drill. Are you afraid, Wolf Blitzer asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week?

PELOSI: You know, I mean, the point is, is we are putting forth the alternatives that we need to put forth, and that is, drill, use it or lose it. …

BLITZER: So let me get — will you allow this issue, offshore oil drilling, to come up for a vote on the floor of the House?

PELOSI: We’re going to exhaust our other remedies in terms of increasing supply in America by…

BLITZER: So the answer is no?

PELOSI: I have no plans to do so.

The text doesn’t quite communicate an embarrassed Speaker stumbling over her talking points and finally admitting that she has no intention of getting the ordinary people in America out of the energy box canyon.

But don’t lose hope America. It took six months of dithering before the Democratic Congress threw the trial lawyers under the bus and passed the update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. How long will it take for Democrats in Congress to throw the environmentalists under the bus?

After all there is something more important than saving the planet. It is winning the next election.

Some people think that there is something more important than winning elections. It is an America where Jo Stafford and the Pied Pipers can still pile into a car and drive across the continent to audition for the Tommy Dorsey band. Because if freedom means anything it means an America where people don’t have to live in a liberal-approved townhouse and commute to work on a liberal-approved mass-transit system.

An America that is still strong and free would be an America where a dental assistant can aspire to a little acreage and a horse or two.

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

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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

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

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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

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

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

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

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

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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