Posted 8:50 am Monday, January 23, 2012
Cowan Lecture Speaks Truth To Punchline
As part of the UT-Tyler Cowan Center’s outstanding “Distinguished Lecture” series, political satirist, author and journalist P.J. O’Rourke told an East Texas audience pretty much everything they need to know about free enterprise — all within a one-hour lecture last week.
Quoting from his most recent book, O’Rourke says “The free market is not a creed or an ideology that political conservatives, libertarians, and Ayn Rand acolytes want Americans to take on faith. The free market is simply a measurement. The free market tells us what people are willing to pay for a given thing at a given moment. That’s all the free market does. The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can.”
As he so often does, O’Rourke has pithily summed up the Obama administration’s biggest failure to understand real-world economics.
One example can be found in President Barack Obama’s rejection of the Keystone pipeline project. That action won’t do a darn thing to help the environment. It will only serve to force the U.S, to become even more dependent on Middle East oil.
One example can be found in President Barack Obama’s rejection of the Keystone pipeline project. That action won’t do a darn thing to help the environment. It will only serve to force the U.S, to become even more dependent on Middle East oil.
“President Barack Obama’s decision yesterday to reject a permit for TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL oil pipeline may prompt Canada to turn to China for oil exports,” the Bloomberg news service reported. “Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in a telephone call yesterday, told Obama ‘Canada will continue to work to diversify its energy exports,’ according to details provided by Harper’s office.”
Obama’s move is strategically short-sighted.
Obama’s move is strategically short-sighted.
“Canada accounts for more than 90 percent of all proven reserves outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, according to data compiled in the BP Statistical Review of World Energy,” Bloomberg explained. “Most of Canada’s crude is produced from oil-sands deposits in the landlocked province of Alberta, where output is expected to double over the next eight years, according to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.”
In other words, if Americans won’t buy Canadian oil, other countries will. And as our own wells dry up (because of Obama’s regulatory policy; not because we’re out of oil), Canada’s reserves will become more and more important.
It’s going to be argued that Americans shouldn’t want Canadian oil — or any oil at all, for that matter. Instead, we should all be using clean, green, renewable energy.
But that’s exactly like trying to pass a law making ourselves weigh 165.
In the first place, the green energy simply isn’t there. It doesn’t exist, at least not in the quantities Americans require to get to work every day, to heat their homes and to power the economy. Solar? Ask those Solyndra executives how that’s going; they seem to have plenty of time on their hands. Wind power? T. Boone Pickens has stopped gassing on so much about wind energy and is now touting the clean, abundant, common-sense solution: American natural gas.
And ethanol? The Obama administration is going to bizarre lengths to ignore reality.
“When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law,” the New York Times reported last week. “But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.”
As O’Rourke points out, the left may believe it can overrule the free market and even reality with the stroke of a pen. But the Chinese are laughing, as they drive away in cars fueled by oil that should be in our tanks.
In other words, if Americans won’t buy Canadian oil, other countries will. And as our own wells dry up (because of Obama’s regulatory policy; not because we’re out of oil), Canada’s reserves will become more and more important.
It’s going to be argued that Americans shouldn’t want Canadian oil — or any oil at all, for that matter. Instead, we should all be using clean, green, renewable energy.
But that’s exactly like trying to pass a law making ourselves weigh 165.
In the first place, the green energy simply isn’t there. It doesn’t exist, at least not in the quantities Americans require to get to work every day, to heat their homes and to power the economy. Solar? Ask those Solyndra executives how that’s going; they seem to have plenty of time on their hands. Wind power? T. Boone Pickens has stopped gassing on so much about wind energy and is now touting the clean, abundant, common-sense solution: American natural gas.
And ethanol? The Obama administration is going to bizarre lengths to ignore reality.
“When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law,” the New York Times reported last week. “But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.”
As O’Rourke points out, the left may believe it can overrule the free market and even reality with the stroke of a pen. But the Chinese are laughing, as they drive away in cars fueled by oil that should be in our tanks.
