A left-coast writer named Mark Morford thinks that gas prices falling to $2 a gallon would be the worst thing to happen to America. After all, he says, the wrong people would profit: oil companies (why would oil companies profit from lower gas prices?), auto makers, and internet retailers like Amazon that offer free shipping.
If falling gas prices are the worst for America, then the best, Morford goes on to say, would be to raise gas taxes by $6 a gallon and dedicate all of the revenue to boondoggles “alternative energy and transport, environmental protections, our busted educational system, our multi-trillion debt.” After all, government has proven itself so capable of finding the most cost-effective solutions to any problem in the past, and there’s no better way to reduce the debt than to tax the economy to death.
Morford is right in line with progressives like Naomi Klein, who thinks climate change is a grand opportunity to make war on capitalism. Despite doubts cast by other leftists, Klein insists that “responding to climate change could be the catalyst for a positive social and economic transformation”–by which she means government control of transportation, housing, and just about everything else.
These advocates of central planning remind me of University of Washington international studies professor Daniel Chirot assessment of the fall of the Soviet empire. From the time of Lenin, noted Chirot, soviet planners considered western industrial systems of the late nineteenth century their model for an ideal economy. By the 1980s, after decades of hard work, they had developed “the most advanced industries of the late 19th and early 20th centuries–polluting, wasteful, energy intensive, massive, inflexible–in short, giant rust belts.”
Morford and Klein want to do the same to the United States, using climate change as their excuse, and the golden age they wish to return to is around 1920, when streetcars and intercity passenger trains were at their peak (not counting the WWII era). Sure, there were cars, but only a few compared with today.
What they don’t understand is that, even at their peak, intercity passenger trains carried the average American only about 900 miles a year, while streetcars and other urban transit carried the average American about 700 miles a year. Moreover, nearly all of this travel was by the top 25 or 30 percent: until that evil capitalist Henry Ford made his mass produced automobile available at affordable prices, the working class people that progressives claim to care about were no more mobile than Americans had been a hundred years before.
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Thanks to profiteering automakers and greedy oil companies, the average American today travels by car nearly 15,000 miles a year, close to 10 times the total per capita urban and intercity rail travel of 1920. Morford and Klein, of course, think less travel would be a good thing, since it would result (says Morford) in “people shopping more locally and patronizing small businesses again.” Yet there’s no guarantee of that. Higher gas prices could also lead to people shopping on Amazon or seeking out WalMart’s “always” low prices even more than they do today.
Are Morford, Klein, and their allies ignorant of the facts, economically naive, or do they just object to the choices other people make? It always seems like demagoguery to say that opponents are afraid of freedom, but it’s a natural conclusion for progressives like Morford and Klein.
When they say, “shop locally,” what they mean is, “pay more for inferior goods.” When they say, “don’t reward the oil companies,” what they mean is, “most people shouldn’t be allowed to travel as much as they like.” When they say, “capitalism is bad,” what they mean is, “you shouldn’t allowed to buy things that other people make because they might earn a profit from it.” When they say, “a planet of suburbs is a terrible idea,” what they mean is, “everyone should live like I do.”
In reality, low gas prices mean increased mobility which in turn should promote the economic recovery that has been stalled for six years by Obama’s central planning. Cars are getting more fuel efficient no matter what oil and gas prices are, and even if that is partly because of government fiat, it is also a lot more cost-effective than trying to change everyone’s lifestyles.
Freedom means allowing people to make choices you wouldn’t make for yourself. Moreover, it means allowing people to make choices you may not agree with for anyone because in a democracy we agree that no one person has all the answers for everyone else. Ultimately, freedom means understanding that the alternative, no matter how good it sounds on paper, always leads to tyranny and oppression.
If you really care about certain values, and some technologies seem to run counter to those values, then you need to figure out ways to make your values more attractive, not try to tax or regulate those technologies to death. If the price of freedom is a slightly warmer world–and I’m not convinced that it is–then we are better off learning to live with it than having to live under the yoke of well-intentioned but ignorant planners who don’t understand such basic concepts as cost effectiveness or supply and demand.
Let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater, here. Sometimes freedom is about using the power of government to prevent others from doing things against our values. For example, developers often want to build stack-and-pack, high density housing in single-family neighborhoods, catering to one or more of their preferred clientele groups: urban thugs, yuppies, or brew pub customers. This is a case were we can use use the government to stop them with zoning regulations or legal action, thus maintaining a high level of the total quantity of freedom in our neighborhood. These undesirables, of course, are free to live somewhere else – just nowhere close to us.
Lower gas prices help the less-affluent part of the populace the most. Cheaper to drive to work, cheaper to heat the house/apartment, lower electricity costs, etc. Since these needs are a high percentage of the cost of living for poorer people, the drop in price is huge.
But progressives don’t like that because it lowers the dependence of people on government controlled by progressives.
John1000:
How well do electricity prices follow oil prices? Most homes aren’t heated by heating oil. How close to natural gas prices hew to the price of oil?
I certainly have enjoyed the cheaper gasoline. Hadn’t been to see my friends and old home in Southern Oregon and Northern California in five years. With discount at Fred Meyer, I was able to score gas at $2.35 a gallon and drove 1200 miles, which is more than I drive in half a year.
“in a democracy we agree that no one person has all the answers for everyone else”
In a democracy, we agree that 51% of registered voters have the answers for 49% of registered voters—and everyone else.
Frank:
“In a democracy, we agree that 51% of registered voters have the answers for 49% of registered voters—and everyone else.”
Change that to voters who show up.
“Change that to voters who show up.”
Indeed. In a political democracy, oligarchs rule, and the plebes who realize the dice are loaded—or whose state indoctrination and programming to participate in the mindless genuflection that is voting—don’t participate in the charade. Democracy—a term that can be found nowhere in the founding charter—should not be used as a synonym for freedom. Political democracy—especially in a welfare/warfare system of wealth redistribution—is oppressive.
Economic democracy, where the productive vote daily with their money and economic decisions, is far more egalitarian than political democracy.
Frank, but economic democracy doesn’t leave “important” decisions, such as funneling money to corrupt political cronies, to Those Who Know Best. We simply cannot have that!
“developers often want to build stack-and-pack, high density housing in single-family neighborhoods,”
No, no, no, we always do. And now we often can. Thanks to government planning and zoning, which can be changed by the effective use on city councils of pressure, bullshit, small scale bribery (golf games, fine meals, junkets, use of luxury vacation homes), large scale bribery (bags full of cash), threats, flattery and so on.
In the bad old days of voluntary contractual restrictive covenants, we couldn’t. Those damn covenants were pretty much unbreakable.
The Antiplanner wrote:
Morford and Klein want to do the same to the United States, using climate change as their excuse, and the golden age they wish to return to is around 1920, when streetcars and intercity passenger trains were at their peak (not counting the WWII era). Sure, there were cars, but only a few compared with today.
I do believe that many individuals and groups that can be counted as belonging to the “anti-auto vanguard” (as Professor Emeritus James Dunn, Jr. of Rutgers University-Camden put it) do want to “roll back the clock” to the 1920’s (or maybe earlier).
Are Morford, Klein, and their allies ignorant of the facts, economically naive, or do they just object to the choices other people make? It always seems like demagoguery to say that opponents are afraid of freedom, but it’s a natural conclusion for progressives like Morford and Klein.
And as long as the modes of transportation that individuals like Morford and Klein are utterly dependent on tax subsidies from those nasty automobiles that they dislike so much, perhaps they should reconsider what they are asking for?
Fred_Z, those were the good old days! Back in the 50s, before the progressives took over, there were neighborhood covenants that specifically prohibited selling your house to urban thugs (that is what we call them now, there are other words for them, but you understand who we are talking about).
If falling gas prices are the worst for America, then the best, Morford goes on to say, would be to raise gas taxes by $6 a gallon and dedicate all of the revenue to boondoggles “alternative energy and transport, environmental protections, our busted educational system, our multi-trillion debt.”
$6 per gallon? Why? What is the rationale for setting such an arbitrarily high tax? Because some European countries do it? Well, here’s a little secret: they’re just using the tax as a cash cow, not as an externality tax. Of course, that seems to be what Morford has in mind, too.
Our education system is in some sense “busted”, but not in the sense that it is starved for cash. The US spends as much per child as virtually every other developed country, yet that spending does not seem to have translated into superior results. Kind of like our forays into “alternative transport” or energy.
The ironic part of all this is that just a few years ago, the Morfords and Kleins of the world were telling us that we needed to spend money on alternative energy and transport because of the threat of rising fuel prices. That is, if we didn’t do it then we would be forced into it later by a big wave of scarcity. Now that prices have gone in the opposite direction, they have failed to change their tune. Well, they may be dullards, but at least they’re consistent.
Absolutely correct MJ. I keep waiting for a certain planner (he who must not be named) to appear and repeat his failed prediction of peak oil and gas at $6 a gallon.
This is too charitable. What they really mean is “communism is better because under communism I’d be an upper level apparatchik and shop in special stores and would no longer have to rub elbows with the stupid proletariat.”
Really. That’s what they want. They’re incensed that they are stuck in the role of lowly journalists when they’re convinced that they’re the country’s best and brightest and gosh darn it they should be making policy, not the ignorant masses voting for unbelievably horrible Republicans.
Regular Unleaded at Costco today was $2.30/gallon – Hurray!
Typical of liberals and planners to decry lower prices for consumers.