He was one of the mellow, the soft-spoken, the tawny-haired — one who preferred to be left alone.
His name was Mark, a dishwasher at age 45.
He was a drifter, a loner.
He valued his freedom above all; dishwashing jobs he could always find.
Our paths crossed and re-crossed at the Café Claire, where I was tending bar. The Café Claire stood on the outskirts of this industrial town, near the railroad tracks, not far from his temporary home. Sometimes he’d sit at the end of my bar, before his shift or after, and drink black coffee. Sometimes he’d speak to me, but more often not.
He was a tidy man, and orderly; he organized things in an oddly geometrical way. He did not drink, he did not smoke, he did not use drugs. He was clean-living and in good shape, neither depressed nor its opposite.
He was single, without children.
And he was free.
He read a lot – novels and non-fiction – to help endure, perhaps, the knives of lust that so frequently strike. He had the quietude of one who has gone a long time without sex.
His home was an efficiency apartment – a “hutch,” he called it – with good plumbing. This mattered to him. He dealt only in cash and he was good with his money. He saved, he moved on. Sometimes he worked on farms, sometimes he loaded and unloaded freight, sometimes he carried hod. But when I first met him and asked him what he did, he said, “I’m a sudsbuster.”
In the way of things, then, he would come behind my bar when I was busy, and, without asking me, he’d wash my glassware. I loved him for that. He was fast on his feet, and he knew how to work around people, so that nobody was in anybody’s way. Buried in bloody marys and margaritas, I’d glance over and see him plunged to his elbows in suds, his gold-rim specs, which somehow endeared him to me, filled with the burning bar light, his neat goatee damp with perspiration and pied already with coarse skeins of gray.
Two or three times, I saw him outside work, while I was driving in my car. Each time, he was walking alone along the railroad tracks, moving at dusk like some solitary figure carved from the coming dark. This was a grizzled landscape, a prairie desert of Euclidian perfection, full of rings and radii, vast yet traversed by a single road: an isolate highway humming day or night with Mack truck tires. The wind ferried tumbleweeds across the mangy lion’s pelt land. Deadwood everywhere stood silvery-gray, like the moon above, and invariably whenever I saw him – inside work or out – a feeling of melancholy came over me, a melancholy for him, I am not sure why.
This, though, is not about pity or pathos, and Mark was not a person to pitied. This is about one man out of many millions making his way
In the denouement of the Mumbai massacre, it seems well worth pointing out, for those who still don’t know, there are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world today. Of those, a conservatively estimated 10 to 15 percent are radical Muslims, or Muslim extremists, who regard the United States as the Great Satan — by which is meant: the United States should be expunged from the face of the earth, and the Koran should replace our Constitution.
To spare you the math, 15 percent of 1.2 billion is 280 million. That means there are more Muslim extremists in the world than there are people in the United States of America.
These Muslims are spread everywhere across the globe.
It is surmised that the Mumbai terrorists were merely following the instruction manual of al-Qaeda’s erstwhile Saudi Arabian chief — one Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin — who, in 2004, published on the internet an instructional killing essay for jihadists. That essay is entitled “The Targets Inside Cities.”
The text of al-Murqrin’s essay spells out, in no uncertain terms, “the degree of value” placed (by jihadists) upon each group of innocent civilian. Thus, Jews are the number one group on al-Muqrin’s list — American and Israelis Jews first, followed by British Jews. Christians are the next group — American Christians first, again followed by British. Al-Muqrin then subdivides by profession: businessmen first, military next, tourist next, and so on.
Seen in the context of al-Muqrin’s death manual, the massacre in Mumbai may not have been as arbitrary as initially reckoned.
Fact: Radical Islam has declared war on the United States.
Fact: Radical Islam hates anything that’s not itself. In Algeria, radical Islam murdered 100,000 who disagreed with their particular brand of Islam. These were fellow Muslims.
Fact: Political correctness is strangling the United States to death.
Fact: Terrorism is still the biggest external threat facing the United States today.
Fact: The majority of people in the United States are in absolute denial about these facts.
Which is precisely why the biggest internal threat facing this country, as it has been for some time, is the overwhelming political-economic ignorance of our own people.
From the moment oil first made it into the mainstream, peak oil and the imminent depletion of fossil fuels have been vehemently predicted.
A by-no-means exhaustive list of those predictions might run something like this:
“I take this opportunity to express my opinion in the strongest terms, that the amazing exhibition of oil which has characterized the last twenty, and will probably characterize the next ten or twenty years, is nevertheless, not only geologically but historically, a temporary and vanishing phenomenon - one which young men will live to see come to its natural end” (1886, J.P. Lesley, state geologist of Pennsylvania).
“There is little or no chance for more oil in California” (1886, U.S. Geological Survey).
“There is little or no chance for more oil in Kansas and Texas” (1891, U.S. Geological Survey).
“Total future production limit of 5.7 billion barrels of oil, perhaps a ten-year supply” (1914, U.S. Bureau of Mines).
“Reserves to last only thirteen years” (1939, Department of the Interior).
“Reserves to last thirteen years” (1951, Department of the Interior, Oil and Gas Division).
“We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade” (President Jimmy Carter speaking in 1978 to the entire world).
“At the present rate of use, it is estimated that coal reserves will last 200 more years. Petroleum may run out in 20 to 30 years, and natural gas may last only another 70 years” (Ralph M. Feather, Merrill textbook Science Connections Annotated Teacher’s Version, 1990, p. 493).
“At the current rate of consumption, some scientists estimate that the world’s known supplies of oil … will be used up within your lifetime” (1993, The United States and its People).
“The supply of fossil fuels is being used up at an alarming rate. Governments must help save our fossil fuel supply by passing laws limiting their use” (Merrill/Glenco textbook, Biology, An Everyday Experience, 1992).
(Give particular heed to that last sentence.)
Quotes like these could fill a thousand pages easily.
There comes a point, however - and we reached it long ago - when one needs to stop swallowing these scare-mongering scenarios.
There comes a point when one needs to look at the entire history of doomsday predictions and learn something from their long and undistinguished history of incontrovertible failure.
There comes a point, finally, when one needs to question what motivates these people.
To the millions of you who believe the latest round of dire forecasts, I ask you this in all seriousness:
What do you really think - that all the other apocalyptic predictions and predictors, over all the centuries and millennium, were wrong, but people like James Howard Kunstler and Richard Heinberg have at last got it right?
The fact is that anyone can say whatever she wants about anything. But that doesn’t necessarily make it true.
The 1970s book Limits to Growth, for instance, is chock full of reams of “hard data” proving mass famine and the end of the world as we know it - all to occur in a just couple of short decades from when it was written - but none of it came to pass. Not one word of it.
Thomas Malthus’s economic predictions of population-caused famines also failed stupendously, and Malthus himself - a guru of present-day environmentalists - eventually came to reject his early writings. No matter:
This doesn’t stop neo-Malthusians like environmental high priest Lester Brown from forecasting a “2004 or 2005 worldwide famine.”
Or Dr. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University laying “even odds that by the year 2000 Great Britain will no longer exist.”
Neither does it stop any of the endless predictions concerning global warming, species extinction, or forest depletion - for instance, the famous statement made by biologist Norman Myers, which sent environmentalists everywhere scurrying to their soapboxes, that “2 percent of all tropical forest was being destroyed per year,” and that by “2000 we will have lost a third of the world’s tropical forest” (Myers cited in Goudie 1993:46), which flew so far afield it would be laughable were it not so sickening.
(The Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO] puts tropical deforestation in the 1980s at 0.8 percent. In 2001, satellite imagery, which is precise, shows that tropical deforestation had declined to 0.46 percent.)
The history of humankind is replete with false prognostications. It’s time to ask why these predictions are not only always wrong but why they are always so spectacularly wrong.
Here is a crux:
In calculating the amount of natural resources, whether the resource is fossil fuel, crude oil, bauxite, bitumen, gold, or anything else, there is a vital principle at work; it is a principle that doomers of all persuasions have failed to discover and no longer, I think, have the capacity to grasp:
“No matter how closely it is defined, the physical quantity of a resource in the earth is not fully known at any time, because resources are sought and found only as they are needed. Even if the quantities of a particular resource were exactly known, such measurements would not be meaningful, because humans have a near-limitless capacity for developing additional ways to meet our needs: developing fiber optics, for instance, instead of copper wire …” (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2. Emphasis mine.)
The following is another secret about natural resources, which any legitimate graph or study will confirm:
The more a resource is used, the more that the supply of that resource increases.
It will sound counterintuitive, but only at first. Here’s why:
We begin to know about a resource only when we begin to use the resource. Knowing about that resource includes a cursory calculation of its quantity. The more we use of it, the more adept we become at finding it and calculating its quantity, extracting it and refining it. Thus, the more of it we use, the more of it we’re able to find.
The whole history of resource supply-and-demand has followed this exact principle.
Fossil fuel is no exception:
Observe any non-biased chart on the subject, and it will show that over the last century, oil supply has risen significantly, not diminished, as has virtually every other resource, so long as we’ve continued using it.
Quoting Peter Huber and Mark Mills:
Most of what people think they know about energy is so very wrong that their convictions, heartfelt though they may be, lie beyond logical contradiction or refutation….What most of us think about energy supply is wrong. Energy supplies are unlimited; it is energetic order that’s scarce, and the order in energy that’s expensive….Supplies do not ultimately depend on the addition of reserves, the development of new fuels, or the husbanding of known resources. Energy begets more energy; tomorrow’s supply is determined by today’s consumption. The more energy we seize and use, the more adept we become at finding and seizing still more.
What most of us think about energy demand is even more wrong. Our main use of energy isn’t lighting, locomotion, or cooling; what we use energy for, mainly, is to extract, refine, process, and purify energy itself. And the more efficient we become at refining energy in this way, the more we want to use the final product. Thus, more efficient engines, motors, lights, and cars lead to more energy consumption, not less (Peter Huber and Mark Mills, The Bottomless Well).
Some of the real data about fossil fuel is this:
Humanity consumes about 345 Quads of fossil fuel each year. A quad is a quadrillion British Thermal Units.
Of those 345 Quads, the United States consumes approximately 100.
The United States consumes by far the most, but - and here is a fact too often neglected in discussions of U.S. fossil fuel consumption - the United States also produces by far the most.
The inevitable exhaustion of fossil fuels, so strenuously predicted since the 1880’s, is a notion that’s invariably built upon a fraudulent premise: it’s built off the data of what today’s technology makes accessible.
This reasoning, as we touched upon here, is demonstrably flawed.
No one seriously disputes that with better technology, and better power, we could retrieve far more [fossil fuel]. We already know where to find centuries’ worth of coal - global deposits hold 200,000 Quads. Oil shale deposits hold 10 Million Quads; heavy oils are already being extracted by brute force from the Canadian Athabasca deposits, and bioengineered bacteria could make the earth’s vast deposits of these oils economically accessible everywhere within a decade or less. Even more abundant is the energy locked up within uranium and other radioactive elements. The world’s oceans contain over 10 trillion Quads’ worth of deuterium, a fuel that we will in due course learn to unlock with nuclear fusion. And nothing very fundamentally new will be required to unlock it (Ibid).
Energy begets energy.
The more energy we use, the better we become at developing, extracting, and refining ever more.
Stopping or even slowing the use of fossil fuel would not, contrary to what you’ve been told, solve this (non-existent) fossil fuel problem: on the contrary, it would bring progress to a grinding halt; but even more than that, it would do so by shutting down the conceptual mind, which is the uniquely human method of survival.
It would blast us back to the stone age.
Which is precisely what many environmentalists, especially those of the better informed variety, want.
There exists no technology that can survey and measure the total quantity of oil and potential oil beneath all the land and sea, including tar sand and shale oil and the conversion of coal to oil.
So where exactly the doomers get their dire predictions is unclear.
What motivates these doomers is even more obscure.
And more frightening.
A quote from The Wall Street Journal, January 2005:
The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all.
To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that’s trillion - over a century’s worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption.
Please note particularly that last paragraph.
And, while you’re at it, do yourself another big favor:
Ignore all the dire predictions about peak oil and the end of fossil fuels that you’ve been hearing for the last one hundred years.
Ignore the catastrophic scare-mongering that books like The Party’s Over and The Long Emergency propound.
At every point in human history, the individual has been attacked by some government somewhere, on one side of the globe or another, always for the sake of some group or collective.
In this century alone, to cite only a few of the more conspicuous examples, the individual was subordinated in Communist Russia to the proletariat; so too in Communist China, let us forget the millions upon millions of proletarians murdered or imprisoned under these romanticized regimes.
In Nazi Germany, the individual was subordinated to the “superior race.”
In Socialist Europe, in present day Germany and France, “labor” or the masses or The Environment all trump the individual.
In the United States as well claims concerning the environment threaten, as we speak, the individual’s right to her own life and property.
And the scare-mongering only increases: misinformation about fossil fuels has spawned, among a traditionally secular left, such a glut of doomsday predictions that they rival or eclipse any heard from the Religious Right - the only real difference being, instead of telling us to “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” we’re told “learn to conserve and farm, for the end of the industrial society is at hand.”
But whether secular or non-secular, dogma is dogma, oppression is oppression, and the misguided doomsday predictions we hear from environmentalists are ultimately every bit as misbegotten as any doomsday predictions we hear from the Religious Right - and, one might well add, ultimately just as banal.
In one form or another, this propaganda is as old as mankind herself - the only real difference being the agenda.
Which agenda is this: let your big benevolent government regulate and control fossil fuels and all other energy besides, and let this same big benevolent government control your property as well, and thereby your life.
It’s called Environmentalism. But it’s really Neo-Marxism.
And Marxism by any other name is, and always will be, the same plain old discredited Marxism.
Laissez faire means literally “Let do,” but it translates into “Let us do as we please.”
Embellished history has it that the term laissez faire was coined in 1680, during a meeting between Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the French finance minister, and a group of businessmen. Colbert had asked these men how the government could best help the merchants and citizens, to which a wise fellow by the name of Le Gendre responded “Laissez-nous faire.” (”Leave us the hell alone!”)
Laissez-faire politics are not, however, a call for anything-goes hedonism, as is sometimes supposed.
Laissez faire is a call, rather, for a live-and-let-live society. Like all political theory, it rests hierarchically upon an ethical foundation, thus:
Ethics (also known as moral philosophy) is the science of human action.
Politics (also known as the theory of government) is the science of human action in societies.
Governments are those political bodies that have the power to make and implement the laws of the land, and economics, as the great French economist Bastiat said, is the science of production and exchange.
To survive humans must produce.
This latter thing is so because humans evolved neither the balls of bulls, nor the trunks of elephants, nor the claws of bears, nor the necks of giraffes, but the brains of Homo sapiens, with a capacity to think.
Thus property is the precise link between economics and politics.
And here is why:
The fundamental law of economics is supply and demand.
Supply means production; demand means want.
In order to live, humans must produce. This means we must use our environment.
(Just incidentally, the quasi-philosophy of environmentalism — which is nothing more, or less, than “repackaged Marxism,” as the co-founder of Greenpeace accurately expressed it — believes that government, in the form of an elite bureau of centralized planners, are best suited to determine this use, over and above the law of supply and demand.)
In free societies, humans are allowed to trade freely.
Among other things, this means that what you produce, and the action required to produce it, are yours by right.
Property is the crux of freedom; it is also (therefore) the crux of coercion:
You cannot, in any meaningful sense, be said to be free if you are not allowed to use the things you own, including those things necessary to live.
That is why V.I. Lenin was correct when he said “Control the property, control the person.”
It is also why the defining characteristic of socialism, in any of its ugly disguises, is “communal” or governmental ownership of property (both of which amount to the same thing).
Indeed, communal or governmental ownership of property is the only alternative to privately owned property.
Capitalism is fundamentally defined by each and every individual’s inalienable right to private property: it means that you may rightfully and freely produce and trade your property, and you may rightfully and freely dispose of your property.
It is in this way that laissez-faire capitalism, operating upon the principle of free trade and peaceful exchange, systematically bars coercion from human interaction.
Humans, said Adam Smith, “have a natural tendency to truck, barter, and exchange.”
The legal freedom to do that is laissez faire.
Economically, the most important component of laissez faire is the right to property.
Thus if it is freedom you believe in, it is fully protected private property rights you must fight for.
Property — including money — is an extension of person.
Ask yourself this:
Do corporations have the right to become as rich as the market will bear provided that all transactions are voluntary and without coercion?
And do you rightfully own everything that is yours, including your body?
These questions are really the same question, and if your answer to them is yes, then you indeed believe that we each possess the inalienable right to our own life, liberty, and property.
Socialism, on the other hand, just as fascism, feudalism, and all the other forms of statism, answer those questions the other way:
No, you do not own what is yours, and corporations may not grow as rich as the market will bear but may be expropriated from and even shut down.
The blood-soaked history of these regimes, extending as far back as the dawn of humankind — a history of unmitigated poverty, slavery, and killing — is the total testament against them.
There is no such thing as nuclear waste — and that’s just one of the many beautiful things about nuclear energy.
A nuclear reactor is refueled by its waste.
Quoting Dr. Pierre Guelfe, chief engineer of France’s main nuclear facility, in an interview he recently gave with William Tucker, author of a new and excellent book called Terrestrial Energy:
Pierre Guelfe: “When the depleted fuel rods are removed, the reactors are shipped to La Hague for reprocessing. They let it cool down for a few years and then remove the uranium and plutonium. They ship the plutonium here. We take it and mix it with another stream of material, which is the scrap that is left over from uranium enrichment. The U235 content of this is very low … U235 is the fissionable isotope. But the plutonium is much more fissionable than the depleted uranium. So when we mix them together, you get a fuel that is very close to enriched uranium. It’s called ‘Mixed Oxide Fuel’(MOX). We have 20 reactors here in France running on MOX and there are ten more in Germany and two in Switzerland. So we’re pure plutonium, and we scrap uranium together. We use everything. We don’t leave any waste.”
William Tucker: “I’ve read this several times but I want to make absolutely sure: The plutonium that comes out of a commercial reactor, that you separate from the fuel rod, that cannot be used to make a bomb, right?”
Pierre Guelfe: “That’s right. You have four plutonium isotopes: Pu239, Pu240, Pu241 and Pu242. Of the four, only Pu239 can sustain a chain reaction. The others are contaminants. The PU241 is too highly radioactive. It fissiles too fast so you can’t control it to make a bomb. But you can use all of them to sustain fission in a MOX reactor” (source).
And yet on the basis of some colossal misinformation, the United States now has fifty thousand tons of nuclear “waste,” because our government won’t allow nuclear plants to reuse it.
The stated policy of the Department of Energy (DOE) is “not to reprocess” a perfectly reusable by-product — and all for absolutely no good reason.
That, as I’ve mentioned before, is why Yucca Mountain is unnecessarily, and at great cost, being built in southwestern Nevada: to store a nuclear “waste” that could instead be simply and efficiently reused.
Nuclear “waste,” incidentally, is also used for medical isotopes. In fact, over 40 percent of medicine now is nuclear medicine. Currently, we must import all our nuclear isotopes because we’re not allowed to use any of our own.
This is not only truly profligate; it’s a kind of lunacy.
Just for the record: Barack Obama is of course completely opposed to nuclear energy, presumably because it actually works, and is more efficient by far than any other alternative.
In May of 1606, the first American settlers arrived in Jamestown.
The Virginia Tidewater Region, where these original 104 set up their colony, was a breathtakingly fertile chunk of land, and so it was that these first American settlers found more resources than they could at first believe: oceans teeming with seafood; the woodlands alive with turkey and countless other game birds; inexhaustible wild game; fruits and nuts and berries of all different kinds; the black soil that grew everything so easily.
Yet within half a year only 38 of the original 104 settlers were still alive, the rest having succumbed to famine.
Not two years later, 500 more people were sent to refresh the devastated settlers.
Within half a year, the majority of these new arrivals — 440, to be precise — had died of starvation or disease.
Cannibalism was not unheard of.
The resources were still as plentiful and rich as ever before — hardly tapped, in fact — and so what went wrong?
This is an extraordinarily edifying period in America’s history; for as it happens, it provides us with a real-life illustration of collectivism-versus-private property in action.
The original American settlers, you see, had intentionally adopted a socialist policy: specifically, communal ownership of property. As a direct result, most of these people starved to death, or were killed off by disease — the very same problem, it turns out, that has been occurring steadily three centuries later in every communist country that’s collectivized its economy, particularly its agriculture.
As one early Jamestown eyewitness, a man by the name of George Percy, described it (in his antiquated English):
“[The cause of] famine was want of providence, industrie … and not the barennesse and defect of the Countri, as is generally supposed” (Warren M. Billings, George Percy’s Account of the Voyage to Virginia and the Colony’s First Days).
But how could this possibly have been? How could people such as this have “lacked industrie” when many of these people were specifically chosen for having the exact opposite character?
The answer to this question is not esoteric, nor is it particularly difficulty to fathom. On the contrary, it is deceptively simple: the people of Jamestown had no financial stake in their endeavors; indeed, they were little more than indentured servants. Thus everything they produced went into a public pool. Working harder and longer, therefore, did not benefit any one person any more than another. And so these people responded exactly as humans always will in such a situation: they simply didn’t work harder — any of them.
In his book, Mr. Bethel notes what some few insightful economists have been saying for a long time: lack of work and “industrie” goes hand-in-hand with lack of property rights.
Or as Philip Alexander Bruce said, in an article about these very Jamestown settlers:
“[They] did not have even a modified interest in the soil … Everything produced by them went into the [public] store, in which they had no ownership.”
Thus, all grew idle — even those who were known to be “exceptionally motivated and strong-willed” — and most, in the end, refused to work at all.
“The absence of property rights — and of the work-reward nexus that such rights create — completely destroyed the work ethic of the settlers” (Thomas Dilorenzo, How Capitalism Saved America).
Frustrated, flummoxed, flailing, the British government, which had financed the colonization, sent, in 1611, a man named Sir Thomas Dale to serve as “High Marshal of the Virginian Colony.”
Listen closely to what Mr. Dale observed; it is genuinely astounding and yet perfectly predictable:
“Dale noted that although most of the settlers had starved to death, the remaining ones were spending much of their time playing games in the streets, and he immediately identified the problem: the system of communal ownership” (Ibid).
It was then that the High Marshal Sir Thomas Dale gave every man three acres of land for each to own unto himself. He simultaneously did away with pooling into a communal treasury.
Private property, in other words, was officially enacted and public ownership abolished.
Immediately the colony began to prosper.
The notorious “free-rider problem,” endemic to socialism of every strain, vanished as each person became his own master — as each person bore the full brunt of inaction and non-productivity. At the same time, every person had incentive to work harder since harder work meant greater prosperity and a direct benefit to each from that labor.
One of the fundamental flaws of socialism of every stripe is that it assumes that people will work just as hard or harder for others as they will work for themselves. This is untrue.
It’s untrue because it is contrary not only to human nature but also to the nature of life. Jamestown shows us a historical illustration of this writ large.
“As soon as the settlers were thrown upon their own resources,” says historian Mathew Anderson, “and each freeman had acquired the right of owning property, the colonists quickly developed what became the distinguishing characteristic of Americans — and aptitude for all kinds of craftsmanship coupled with an innate genius for experimentation and invention” (The Old Dominion, Vol. 1).
Other propitious things began to happen as well.
“The Jamestown colonists had originally implored the Indians to sell them corn, but the Indians looked down on the settlers because [the settlers] were barely capable of growing corn, thanks to their communistic economics. After the introduction of private property and the resulting transformation, however, the Indians began coming to the colonists to acquire corn in return for furs and other items” (Ibid).
Thus began a friendly system of free-trade.
The division of labor — an absolutely indispensable component of private property, which promotes specialization of labor, insofar as each is no longer forced to produce all his own food since he can now trade specialty items for specialty products others produce — was instantly born.
In addition to this explosion of prosperity, there was also greater peace:
It made no sense now for either side — Indians or settlers — to war with the other, because free-trade was advantageous to each. Whereas, prior to Sir Thomas Dale’s instituting of private property, the settlers used “to steal from the Indians,” and even “beg from them,” a fact which the Indians quite naturally resented.
In Jamestown, the institution of private property changed all this.
But there’s more to the story, much more.
Not many years later, in November of 1620, another group of American settlers — 101 of them, to be exact, this group not financed by the British government — arrived on the good ship Mayflower, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
These Pilgrims, as they were called, moved a short distance away to a place named Plymouth. They were not at all unaware of the early Jamestown disaster, the starvation, the disease, the famine; they were, however, unaware of what had caused it.
Accordingly, they proceeded to make the identical mistake that the settlers of Jamestown had made: namely, collective ownership of land.
And the Pilgrims too paid dearly for it.
Within a few short months, half were dead.
Over the course of the next three years, 100 more settlers arrived from England to Plymouth, all of whom were barely able to feed themselves. As Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford wrote in his famous Of Plymouth Plantation:
“Many [settlers] sold away their clothes and bed coverings [to the Indians]; others (so base were they) became servants of the Indians … and fetch them water for a capful of corn; others fell to plain stealing, both day and night, from the Indians…. In the end, they came to that misery that some starved to and died with cold and hunger. One in gathering shellfish was so weak as he stuck fast in the mud and was found dead in the place.”
But this same William Bradford would soon solve “the ruin and dissolution of his colony,” and he would do it in the exact same way Sir Thomas Dale had saved Jamestown.
Here’s another famous passage from William Bradford’s book:
“After much debate of things … [it was decided that the Pilgrims] should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves … And so assigned to every family a parcel of land, for present use. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”
Bradford came to fully grasp how lack of property rights negates and indeed destroys the work incentive:
“For [men] and men’s wives,” he said, “to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothe, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husband brook it” (Ibid).
“Common course” was abandoned in favor of setting “every man for his own particular,” meaning private property. Instantaneously, those who had been indolent became “very industrious,” so much so that woman and men who had “previously pleaded frailty worked long and hard — once they saw how they and their families could benefit from such hard work.”
William Bradford went on to correctly identify the source of the “disastrous problem” as “that conceit of Plato’s,” who, in direct contrast to Aristotle, advocated collectivism and collective ownership of land, which, as history has now repeatedly proven, is pure poison to any society that implements it. Bradford even wrote later that those who mistakenly believed that communal property could make people “happy and flourishing” imagined themselves “wiser than God.”
Reader, please, the next time you hear Barack Obama, Noam Chomsky, or Howard Zinn, or any of these other Neo-Marxists, propounding that “some” property should be “collectivized,” remember America’s real history.
Remember also how collectivization obliterates the work incentive, the survival instinct, and human industry.
Remember the real-life history of the early United States and the total failure of collectivization, which is actually a failure of lunacy.
Remember that not once in the history of the world has a communistic system ever flourished.
Remember that our lives, each and every one of us, are absolutely and inalienably our own, and by direct extension that means our property is absolutely and inalienably our own. Nobody may rightfully take any of that property from you without your permission, not for any reason, not in any amount, not even for the so-called “common good.”
Remember also that being compelled to serve the collective is a slow painful death to each member of that “collective.”
Finally, remember this:
“The Pilgrims had encountered what is called the free-rider problem, which is difficult to solve without dividing property into individual or family-sized units. And this is the course of action that William Bradford wisely took” (Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph).
Wisely because it set the trend for all that would make America what she would eventually become: a land of independence, industriousness, ingenuity, experimentation, invention, genius, greatness — in a word, a land of liberty.
Freedom and its economic corollary, capitalism, saved us in the beginning.
Early in the 1970’s, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) — which includes Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Venezuela — imposed an oil embargo upon the United States. This precipitated a sharp decrease in U.S. oil supply.
Not to be outdone in terms of sheer hubris and stupidity, the American government got started at about that same time on its steady barrage of environmental regulations, all of which conspired to further reduce the domestic supply of oil and gas.
For example, the vast reserves of oil on the outer continental shelf off the coast of California were put off-limits to drilling for fear of oil spills that would despoil the coastline. In addition, a great deal of the land owned by federal government — a substantial amount, since the government owns more than half of all the land west of the Mississippi River — was placed off-limits to oil exploration for environmental reasons. Meanwhile, the hundreds of new regulations that had been imposed on oil refineries made it much more costly, if not unprofitable altogether to build them (Dilorenzo, How Capitalism Saved America).
Adding insult to injury, then, in 1971, the Nixon administration imposed wage and price controls across a multitude of private industries — nominally to (in their words) “control inflation.” In actuality, though, these controls were meant to bolster support for the 1972 elections. They were from the beginning only meant to be temporary controls, and thus, in 1974, they were mercifully done away with — all, that is, except the most important: petroleum.
Because of the rapidly growing U.S. population, the demand for oil and gas had dramatically increased, which, in collaboration with the regulation-mandated supply restrictions, as well as the price controls, created massive oil and gas shortages. Holding prices below (free)market levels, you see, stimulated consumer demand artificially; simultaneously, it made it less profitable to increase supply: a deadly combination, the end result of which could not have turned out any other way.
These shortages created miles-long lines at gas stations across the country, for all the world to see.
Amazingly, however, only a handful of folks were smart enough to connect the obvious dots: government intervention created the problem in the first place, and government had no business getting involved in private affairs anyway.
Of course, the government responded with its usual cheesy, half-assed “conservation” regulations, which is a little like spitting on a wildfire in order to put the fire out. California even imposed another of its famously fatuous laws, this one being that you could only purchase gas on certain days if your license plate ended with an even number, and on other days if the plate ended with an odd number.
It goes without saying that all this would never have happened if there had been no price controls and no wage controls to begin with.
But it gets worse:
When OPEC began its embargo, driving up the price of oil, domestic oil producers would have had extra incentives to introduce more supply onto the market. At the same time, the higher prices would have signaled consumers that it was prudent to conserve more. A new market equilibrium would have been reached without any shortages or misallocations, and the OPEC cartel would have been broken, as it eventually was, by increased domestic supplies brought on by free-market prices (Ibid).
But letting the free market be free is not in the nature of power-hungry bureaucrats. Thus, the federal government created a new bureaucracy called the Federal Energy Administration, which later became the Department of Energy (DOE), deplorably still with us today.
The DOE forthwith proceeded to institute a whole new line of preposterous price controls and allocation rules, “so that the U.S. energy industry soon rivaled any of the Soviet Union’s centrally planned industries in its complexity — and inefficiency. The head of the new energy department was even given a Russian-sounding title by the media: energy czar.”
But in the words of William E. Simon, our country’s first energy czar:
As for the the centralized allocation process itself, the kindest thing I can say about it is that it was a disaster. Even with a stack of sensible-sounding plans for even-handed allocation all over the country, the system kept falling apart, and chunks of the populace suddenly found themselves without gas. There was no logic to the pattern of failures. In Palm Beach suddenly there was no gas, while 10 miles away gas was plentiful. Parts of New Jersey suddenly went dry, while other parts of New Jersey were well supplied. Every day, in different part of the country, people waited in line for gasoline for two, three, and four hours. The normal market distribution system is so complex, yet so smooth that no government mechanism could simulate it (William E. Simon, A Time for Reflection, 1978).
Everybody reading this who supports Barack Obama and his extreme socialist policies because it makes you feel less guilty about yourself to throw in with “a minority” — without any reference whatsoever to that minority’s so-called political-economic ideas — please hear that.
And please hear this as well:
As the shortages became more erratic and unpredictable, people began to “top off” their tanks. Instead of waiting, as is customary, to refill the tank when it is about one quarter full, all over the country people started buying 50 cents’ worth of gas, a dollar’s worth of gas, using every opportunity to keep their tanks full at all times. And the fiercely compounded the shortages and expanded the queues. The psychology of hysteria took over. Essentially the allocation plan had failed because there had been a ludicrous reliance on a little legion of government lawyers, who drafted regulations in indecipherable language, and bureaucratic technocrats, who imagined that they could simulate the complex free-market processes by pushing computer buttons. In fact, they couldn’t (Ibid).
No. They couldn’t. They couldn’t then, and they still can’t now. It’s an impossible task.
No army imaginable, even one composed of the most brilliant, super-genius planners that ever was, could plan even the most rudimentary aspect of a complex economy.
I overheard two kids talking the other day. One said: “What’s Target?”
The other said: “It’s good. It’s a lot like Wal-Mart, except it’s not Super.”
Obviously, then, Wal-Mart has at last got a few sensible defenders out there — sensible, I say, because Wal-Mart is a great American institution that harkens back to our finest traditions: abundance, wealth, ingenuity, independence, and free-enterprise.
Wal-Mart also, incidentally, saves the average family over $2000.00 per year.
Any mom-and-pops that go belly-up because of it — and there are some, which is in the very nature of capitalism (i.e. creative destruction), though there are not nearly as many as all the liberal propagandists would have you believe — these mom-and-pops are, in economic terms, more than made up for in what Wal-Mart saves the poor and the middle-classes. And since the poor and the middle-classes are ostensibly whom the bleeding hearts are bleeding for, everyone’s happy, n’est-ce pas?
Sam Walton, prior to his Wal-Mart phase, was at one time the manager of a small chain of variety stores called Ben Franklin. While he was there, he pitched his Wal-Mart idea to his Ben Franklin bosses: sell products cheaply and make your money in sheer volume. They thought he was crazy.
And he was crazy: crazy like a fox, that is. So that while Ben Franklin has struggled along for years, Sam Walton, through his ingenuity and wherewithall (and the capital that capitalism generates) grew to billionaire status.
And he deserved every penny. He deserved it because he created it. It was his baby, and he brought it into existence.
In the United States of America, each and every individual, according to the Declaration of Independence, can do whatever he or she wants provided that he or she doesn’t infringe upon the rights of another in so doing. This means, among many other things, that we are all allowed to grow filthy rich.
It means that neither you, nor me, nor government bureaucrats can force anyone to shop in any particular store. It means, moreover, that if someone chooses to shop in your store, and you choose to allow them (which is why you’re in business, after all), you will earn their money.
It’s called a fair trade, an even exchange.
By economists, it’s also known as a tacit contractual agreement.
It’s in this way that capitalism prohibits force from human interaction.
Ultimately, the number one thing that critics hate most about Wal-Mart is the fact that people, in droves, choose to patronize it. Critics of Wal-Mart can’t stand that. They want to force people not to patronize it.
It’s actually a simple economic principle at work here, but the anti-capitalists have striven very hard to make it more complicated than it really is. The principle is this:
In capitalistic (i.e. free) societies, the consumer is king. If consumers don’t patronize a business, that business will fail.
If, therefore, people don’t choose to shop at Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart will simply go away, just as so many businesses do; just as that big bad corporation of the late-seventies is about to do — the Wal-Mart of its time: K-mart.
Anent corporations, activists on both sides of the political spectrum enjoy telling us that “the good of the people” is ultimately whom they’re concerned with, even when the stated goal of both sides is to restrict the choice of these same people with whom they’re so concerned. Thus:
In a recent article, “Always Low Wages,” Brian Bolton declares that Jesus would not shop at Wal-Mart, since the company’s employee pay scale is not up to Sojourners’ standards. Furthermore, he all but declares it a “sin” for Christians to patronize the store because it imports cheap goods made by people who make even less money than Wal-Mart employees. As Bolton writes, “lower prices equal lower wages.”
Nearly all of us would accept higher payment for our services, and Wal-Mart employees are no exception. Yet, that condition alone hardly makes a company’s pay scales illegitimate, as Bolton and other critics contend.
The point is this: payment for services involves mutually agreeable exchanges. They are not manifestations of power, as some would say. No one is forced to work at Wal-Mart; people who choose to work there do so because they prefer employment there to other circumstances (“Does Wal-Mart Destroy Communities?” William L. Anderson).
Workers at Wal-Mart certainly do not look or act like indentured servants, as Wal-Mart critics tell us they are. On the contrary, these folks seem like pretty normal people, despite their chickenshit ponytails, a lot of them.
In order to live, humans must work. That’s an axiom: life requires work. This is so because survival is not guaranteed, nor should it be.
The fundamental flaw of all socialistic, egalitarian, progressive (non)thought is that survival (so say the socialists) should be guaranteed. And those who attain wealth (so say the socialists) should be forced to provide for everyone else. And an elite bureau of centralized planners (so say the socialists) are the ones who have the “right” to carry this process out.
This whole mind-spinning ideology is not only immoral, and it’s not only an absolute destroyer of the work incentive: it’s also sheer madness.
Work may not be fun, but it’s a cold hard fact of life.
For the vast majority of mankind’s short history (approximately 50,000 years) “life was cold, brutish, and short.”
Industrialization changed all this.
Free markets changed it; it took all of about 90 years.
Inventions such as Wal-Mart changed it.
And it is precisely this that the all-pervasive anti-corporate mentality seeks to obliterate: the cleanliness and the abundance and the longer and better lives we all enjoy because we are each Constitutionally guaranteed the inalienable right to life, liberty, property, and the right to grow rich.
Many claim that “Wal-Mart can charge lower prices and still be profitable because it pays its employees less than do other companies.”
The flaw in that so-called argument is as follows:
Economic profit exists because of temporarily underpriced factors of production. Over time, as the owners recognize their position, they will either refuse to sell their factors at current prices and look to other options, or accept the current price because the opportunity costs of selling to other buyers may be higher than they wish to incur. If it is the latter, then one cannot say that these particular factors are even underpriced, as their owners are not able or willing to do what is necessary to gain higher prices for their employment.
Wal-Mart is one of the great shining examples of what a market economy can achieve. If I were to give a tour of the United States to visitors from a socialist country, who are used to experiencing chronic shortages of almost everything, Wal-Mart would be one of the first places I would take them. It is a perfect symbol of one of the most remarkable things that we have — an enormous variety of high quality, low cost products that are available to virtually everyone throughout the United States (Dr. Paul Kirklin).
Quoting Sam Walton himself:
“… we’ll lower the cost of living for everyone, not just in America, but we’ll give the world an opportunity to see what it’s like to save and have a better lifestyle, a better life for all. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished; we’ve just begun.”
Wal-Mart is a company that deserves to be praised and admired for its entrepreneurial acumen.
Instead, it’s demonized and antipathized.
You know you’ve gotten spoiled when instead of worrying about not having clean water, or enough to eat, or not having any work at all, you’re complaining instead about having plenty of jobs and plenty of inexpensive goods. That’s one hell of a sad pass we’ve come to.
Wal-Mart has a massive selection of merchandise.
It has friendly service.
It shows its value through its advertising, and through its promotions.
Its merchandise reflects what the consumers want.
That is capitalism.
The major reason that Wal-Mart has had such a meteoric rise is that it offers its products for consistently lower prices than its competitors. Its motto is “Always Low Prices.” Always…. Poverty in America here isn’t like poverty in the past, or in most other places in the world. Starvation, for example, has been a constant danger for humanity since the dawn of humankind, but it is almost unheard of today in America, even with all our three hundred million occupants. If policies like those advocated by the critics [of Wal-Mart] had been pursued in the past, this economic progress for the poor would never have occurred…. The next generation of ignorant critics will probably complain about the loss of Wal-Mart jobs to more efficient producers(Ibid).
Agreed.
Now please watch Penn & Teller’s devastating argument against all the Wal-Mart critics, layman and government bureaucrat alike (it’s told in three installments):
As you may or may not know, an explicit statist named Rahm Emanuel is who Barack Obama has chosen to be his chief of staff.
Rahm Emanuel, just to be clear, is the same person who, in his poorly written book, penned these chilling words:
“It’s time for a real PATRIOT Act that brings out the patriot in all of us. We propose universal civilian service for every young American. Under this plan, All Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five will be asked to serve their country by going through three months of basic training, civil defense preparation, and community service.”
He goes on to say that “Republicans will squeal about individual freedom,” but I am here to tell you that it is not just republicans who should be squealing.
The sort of language that this man uses is an obvious (and ancient) propaganda device, which is specifically intended to make readers feel out-of-touch if they’re the ones who “squeal.”
Don’t fall for it.
Squeal at the top of your lungs. Squeal and squeal until you can squeal no more.
This pig has absolutely no understanding of what it means to be free, or why it’s important. Nor does he care. He’s an authoritarian bureaucrat, and as such he believes that he has the right and the power to tell people how they can and cannot live their lives. No amount of rhetoric and no rhetorical devices will change that.
The issue, I assure you, is not Republican or Democrat at all. The issue is individual rights versus pure, unadulterated statism. The Obama bandwagon that is rolling over people left and right is the number one thing that’s blinding the world to this painfully obvious fact.
Propaganda is one of the worst evils of bureaucracy and socialism. Propaganda is always the propaganda of lies, fallacies, and superstitions. Truth does not need any propaganda; it holds its own. The characteristic mark of truth is that it is the correct representation of reality, i.e., of a state of affairs that is and works whether or not anybody recognizes it. The recognition and pronouncement of truth is as such a condemnation of everything that is untrue. It carries on by the mere fact of being true.
Therefore let the false prophets go on. Do not try to imitate their policies. Do not try as they do to silence and to outlaw dissenters. The liars must be afraid of truth and are therefore driven to suppress its pronouncement. But the advocates of truth put their hopes upon their own rightness. Veracity does not fear the liars. It can stand their competition. The propagandists may continue to spread their fables and to indoctrinate youth. They will fail lamentably.
Dear Sir: I’ve been asked to write this on behalf of a number of people who, for the past two months, have been reading your articles with a kind of horror. We are troubled, not because what you say doesn’t contain truth — it may or may not — but because your hatred of environmentalism blinds you to the over-arcing point, which is this: the survival of our planet.
As a social movement, environmentalism is perhaps guilty of many of the sins you accuse it of. But we need not throw the baby out with the bath water. Unless action is taken immediately, our civilization will crash upon its greedy head — it may not die off, but it will certainly be turned upside down — all because we never considered another way to live: sustainably. In short, our knowledge, and not our ignorance, will lead to our demise. That is our concern.
There are endless facts and opinions about energy coming from many different sides. People want to choose sides and shout and fight about resources — usually in an effort to protect to the death the system that supports their way of life — but our desire is to push the argument beyond ‘them versus us.’ In thinking abou
