Gasoline on a fire
Mark Greathouse
(11/2022) Back in the mid-1800s, ranchers had to decide which market to send their cattle to. Where were the best prices as driven by demand? Herds might be driven to California to provide beef to thousands of Gold Rush miners, but when the mines played out, the herds might be rerouted to the Kansas railheads. Mix in droughts, hostile Indians, rough terrain, flash floods, prairie fires, rustlers, and more, cattle farts were the least of their worries. This was capitalism in the raw. It was about economics and carving out a living. There were families to be fed, a nation to be built. They couldn’t have cared less about climate change except as weather impacted their immediate everyday lives.
Today, we have the highest inflation in 40 years and lowest labor force participation. America has lost its energy independence, interest rates are creeping up, 401Ks are nosediving, national debt skyrocketing, supply chains struggling…the list of economic woes seems endless. We are all affected regardless of political party, race, gender, whatever. The recent genesis of these woes began on January 21, 2021 with executive orders rolling back economy-building initiatives of the previous administration. Each subsequent action has been metaphorically like pouring gasoline on a blazingly destructive fire.
"It’s the economy, stupid?" Back in 1992, Bill Clinton strategist James Carville tossed out the oft-quoted line in leveraging the prevailing recessionary economy at the time to get the 42nd president elected.
Capitalism is driven by supply and demand and the ability to respond efficiently and effectively to those twin economic drivers. When the government artificially controls supply and demand by printing fiat money, raising interest rates, leveling overly-restrictive regulations, directly or indirectly taking over the means of production, impeding supply chains, and limiting labor participation, we achieve stagflation at best. Goods and services become limited, as prices soar out of sight. That’s the inflation part. When this volatile mixture combines with negative economic growth, we have stagflation.
How many times must folks be told, how many times must folks learn through experiencing it, that socialistic, giant, all-controlling governments have never ever succeeded? It’s a failed model. Recall President Reagan’s nine words we never want to hear, "I’m from the government, and I’m here to help."
Big government is painfully bureaucratic, inefficient, and therefore wasteful of citizen’s resources. As government gains power, it will do virtually anything to preserve its power, becoming nearly godlike in its omnipotence. In America, big government doesn’t say, "God doesn’t exist," it seizes upon the concept of "separation of powers" to actually behave like some sort of god. The government even sets the moral standards we live by in its faux-utopia. God has been moved from "Creator" in our founding documents, to being explicitly excluded in our governance. This sets the stage for the sort of panic mentality that promotes solutions by climate change zealots at the expense of American lives and livelihoods. They are free to pour gasoline on the economic conflagration they created.
Since the Biden administration came to power, the average American has lost thousands in annual income due to inflation. Wages are up 5.3 percent while inflation stands at 8.6 percent. Retirees? 401Ks? Investing in the stock market has become like playing financial whack-a-mole. Curiously, there seems to be no genuine concern at the federal level; no pretense of hand-wringing or self-flagellation as our economy disintegrates. Instead, they continue to spend like drunken sailors and feed the fires of economic Armageddon.
Say we put aside leading concerns like public safety, open southern border, rampant illegal drug use, education quality in free fall, free speech limitations, rising healthcare costs, homelessness, tax reform, terrorism, diplomatic disasters, and the like. The 800-pound gorilla in the economy, the stealthy underbelly driving many of our economic problems is energy. I’m talking "Green New Deal." Call it climate change, global warming, sustainability, settled science, or whatever, but the current politics of energy is like a giant taproot at the core of our nation’s economic woes. We suddenly have found ourselves paying for "green dreams." The recent Inflation Reduction Act is actually a reduced "Green New Deal" with $391 billion of its $738 billion going to climate-related projects. It has virtually no impact on inflation other than to raise it by government printing more money, raising our taxes, or creating myriad programs that limit any
of our options involving energy. It’s government "smoke & mirrors;" sleight of hand by any measure.
Gasoline on the fire? While the "greenies" fiddle, America burns. The government’s war against fossil fuels via it’s nascent Green New Deal is pouring gasoline on the fire. Greenies are totally tone deaf as to the national economic reality. Better America goes down the tubes at the altar of the Green New Deal than we flourish in the world community of nations. Better to stoke climate change panic and destroy America’s economy. According to the CIA Fact Book, the land mass of the United States represents 1.927 percent of the Earth’s surface and 6.598 percent of global land mass. America’s size ranks behind Russia, Antarctica, Canada, and China. How vain to think that the Green New Deal initiatives could offset the climate-altering belching from China, India, and Africa. The greenies could care less. They’d rather drive America into economic oblivion.
To effectively negotiate honest solutions to climate concerns, the United States must be economically strong. Strength equates to leverage on the world stage. As a beginning, we must be energy independent. Most folks haven’t a clue as to the lead times and money required for exploration, drilling, refining, and distribution of the hydrocarbon we call oil. And until we have a reliably strong alternative energy infrastructure in place, we shoot ourselves in both feet by limiting our greatest energy resource in any way. Stoking climate change panic with draconian agendas is unconscionable.
As you go to the polls on November 8, please ask yourself, "will this person I’m voting for help lift our nation from the stagflation swamp?" Will you vote for more of what we’ve endured for the past 22 months? Can America afford the prospect of skyrocketing grocery prices, higher gasoline costs, more shuttered businesses, higher unemployment, further reduced labor force, lost careers, higher taxes, increased crime, unchecked border, evaporating retirement investments, greater social welfare dependence, and more? Or will your vote help establish a Congressional blockade to stop the pouring more of the "gasoline" of inflationary, economy-killing liberal agendas on the fire? Will you join in the fight to restore the United States to its greatness at home and on the world stage?
This election is the first salvo in a down-and-dirty, no-holds-barred fight for America’s soul. Ask yourself whether your purpose, your life aim, is to follow some huge, lumbering, all-powerful government? Dare we succumb to its inefficiencies and accept the theoretical dictates of leftist politicians, as they decides our fates and roll us unchecked into eventual oblivion?
Percy Bysshe Shelley in his impactful poem Ozymandias concludes with the epitaph on the arrogant ruler’s crumbled statue, "’My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: look on my works ye mighty and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the long and level sands stretch far away." What will America’s epitaph read?
Those ranchers driving cattle in the old west got it right. We should learn from them.
Just sayin.’
Read past edition of the Tumbleweeds
Read other articles by Mark Greathouse
