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Obama's bubble car economy
Gerard Jackson
What a genius! What an absolute genius! How could America and the rest of the world be so lucky? Obama — The Anointed One — is going to determine just what sort of car the American consumer needs. As for consumer choice — forget it, pal. Everyone knows that free markets are manipulated by advertising companies to trick those dummies otherwise known as American consumers into buying things they do not need, including four wheel drives that ruin the environment. (What these leftist conspiracy twits never explain is how a huge company like GMC can go out of business when it has zombies for customers).
Someone told The One that though America only has 5 per cent of the world's population it uses 25 per cent of the world's resources, including a lot of oil. Let me make this so simple that even a Harvard graduated can understand it: America does not use 25 per cent of the world's — it produces 25 per cent of the world's output, which is about 50 per cent of what it was in the late 1920s.
If Obama was the genius he is made out to be then — starting today with an index of 100 — he would know, thanks to greedy American consumers, that the world would run out of resources in four years time if in fact the US was currently consuming 25 per cent of the world's resources and maintained its level of physical consumption. It does seem that you really do have to be a hardcore Democrat to be that dumb. The following table will give readers some idea of the real state of the planet's resources.
But as we all know, Obama's real target is the car. According to the Obama myth Americans need to use less oil to prevent the planet from running out of the stuff. Therefore it is necessary for him to legislate for very small and expensive cars that will be much more dangerous to drive than great big petrol guzzlers. And in any case, Americans should be prepared to make sacrifices to save the environment, even if it means ending up in a wheelchair — that'll save petrol — or a wooden suit.
The jet-setting Obama and his pals argue that by raising the price of petrol not only will we reduce the demand for oil we will induce the development of new technologies. In a stroke Obama has made technological progress the function of price. The logic of his argument leads to the conclusion that the way to increase the quantity and quality of goods is to keep loading them up with taxes. . Am I to deduce from this that the only reason the Romans did not invent the car is because their emperors were too stupid to levy a prohibitive tax on horses?
Has anyone pointed out to him and the rest of those clowns he calls advisors that despite the fact that for decades Europeans have had to face the burden of rapacious taxes on petrol they are still using the infernal internal combustion engine. So why didn't these extortionate taxes bring forth a brilliant substitute? Because that is not how it works. Just as the price of stamps did not give us the telegraph and the price of telegrams did not give the telephone and the prices of telephone calls did not give us the radio — and so on — the price of petrol will not give us a new technology.
What critics overlook is that Obama's car idiocy is contradictory. If technology is a function of price and oil is rapidly being depleted then why do we need higher petrol taxes? The more petrol-guzzling cars consume of the world's oil the scarcer it will become and the higher will be its price. The logic is inescapable: subsidise huge petrol-guzzling cars to swiftly drive up the price of oil and all our problems will be solved.
Pollution? Pollution smollution. In the last forty years cars have become incredibly clean. The EPA reports that since 1966 "emission standards for volatile compounds (VOC) and nitrogen oxides (NOx)" have fallen by 99 per cent. Cars are cleaner and more efficient then they have ever been. That didn't stop the genius in the White House from making the stupid statement that the 1908 Model T got better mileage than a typical SUV does today.
There are two things wrong with this statement: 1. It ain't true. Mileage for the Model T ranged 13 to 21 miles per gallon. Pound for pound a SUV us fantastically more efficient than a Model T. 2. This is like comparing a 1932 television set with the latest plasma. There is no comparison and it would be stupid to try and make one — and yes there were televisions in 1932. (The BBC made television broadcasts as early as 1926). Orwell clearly had the moralising likes of Obama and his media mates in mind when he wrote:
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe a thing like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. (George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder, Penguin Books, 1965,
p. 178).
Unfortunately America's public school system does seem to have produced a lot of fools during the last 20 years.
Gerard Jackson is Brookesnews' economics editor
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 25 May 2009
Measures of Mineral Consumption
(in years)
÷Annual Consumption
Copper
45
340
242,000,000
Iron
117
2,657
1,815,000,000
Phosphorus
481
1,601
870,000,000
Molybdenum
65
630
422,000,000
Lead
10
162
85,000,000
Zinc
21
618
409,000,000
Sulphur
30
6,897
NA
Uranium
50
8,455
1,855,000,000
Aluminum
23
68,066
38,500,000,000
Gold
9
102
57,000,000
Source:: Nordhaus (1974, p. 23)
(Strange, isn't it, that when it comes to the environment the likes of Obama suddenly forget all about safety. The same ones who scream bloody murder about soldiers killed in action are incredibly blasé about the numbers of men, women and children that will be killed by Obama's CAFE regulations. But should we really be surprised? This is the same caring and sensitive guy who voted for infants to be left to die. We used to call this barbarism. Thanks to the Democrats it's now called "free to choose").
Although Europeans couldn't dump these sardine tins fast enough they would be right up His Majesty Obama's alley, but only for ordinary Americans