“[D]emagogues and bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of the immediate effect of a proposed policy or its effect upon a single group…. [The correction is] showing that the proposed policy would also have longer and less desirable effects, or that it could benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups.”
– Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, p. 6.
There are many analyses of the President’s address to the nation last night. As last year, Obama has opened himself up to ridicule and parody (see what MasterResource did).
For this year, in what could well be his last such speech, MasterResource presents timeless logic to unmask the fallacies spewed by our quick-fix, anti-market commander-in-chief.
“Green jobs’? The government-created ones for industrial windpower and for on-grid solar power?…
George Will, the masterful voice of intellectual conservatism (and almost libertarianism), turned to energy in a recent Washington Post column. In Ringing in a Conservative Year (December 30), Will considered the underlying economic reality that will help shape 2012 politics. Obama or not, Will sees technological/economic trends as powerful if not controlling.
Will’s essay draws upon a startling fact: “In 2011, for the first time in 62 years, America was a net exporter of petroleum products.”
He continues with a play off of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto:
…For the indefinite future, a specter is haunting progressivism, the specter of abundance. Because progressivism exists to justify a few people bossing around most people and because progressives believe that only government’s energy should flow unimpeded, they crave energy scarcities as an excuse for rationing — by them — that produces ever-more-minute government supervision of Americans’ behavior.
Minerals cannot be synthetically reproduced in human time frames. But in the world of human action, neither crude oil, nor natural gas, nor coal exists in one, total, known form to start a depletion clock.
Erich Zimmermann warned against the fallacy of importing the physical science concept of fixity to the real-world process of mineral development. “If petroleum resources were in their entirety available from the beginning and could not increase but only decrease through use, it might be correct to advocate ‘sparing use so as to delay inevitable exhaustion’,” he explained.
…But if petroleum resources are dynamic entities that are unfolded only gradually in response to human efforts and cultural impacts, it would seem that the living might do more for posterity by creating a climate in which these resource-making forces thrive and, thriving, permit the full unfolding of petroleum reserves than by urging premature restraint in use long before the resources have been fully developed.