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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

You Can't Manage Mother Nature, But Supply Can Lower the Cost of Oil

An editorial in Tuesday's Daily Times unintentionally highlights two concepts that the left simply refuse to accept - you can manage neither Mother Nature nor markets. Despite eons of historical evidence to the the contrary, the socialist-minded among us continue to try. A 60 Minutes piece on Sunday highlighted the ridiculous lengths that our federal government employs to manage the salmon population in the Columbia River.

This past year legislature in several states, including Maryland, rushed to place severe limits on the recreational and commercial harvest of blue crabs. If you listened to the environmental left, the blue crab was heading for extinction. This year's harvest appears to be abundant, to say the least. Leftist enviro's want the federal government to destroy dams providing cheap hydroelectric power to industry in our Pacific and Mountain states in order to protect salmon and other species.

With the price of gas over $4.00 per gallon and diesel over $5.00 in some parts of the country these same people refuse to accept the fact that opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the outer continental shelf to oil exploration and drilling could have an immense effect on the price of oil. They claim that it will be a "drop in the bucket" and won't affect prices.

While it is true that it would take several years to get rigs online, new supply will affect price. It's as true today as it was in 1776 when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations or the thousands of years prior when people knew that the market worked, they just didn't have a book explaining how.

When will the left learn a few basic concepts? Markets work. They always have and they always will. Despite innumerable unsuccessful attempts, we can't manage God's creation.

cross posted at Delmarva Dealings and Red Maryland

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the insanely uninformed opinions! I'm wondering how far you got in school, 9th, 10th grade?

G. A. Harrison said...

Interesting. Love the need to use double modifiers.

What exactly is so uninformed about my opinion?

Do you believe that we CAN manage Nature? Note that I said manage, not harm. If so, what is the evidence to your claim?

Do you believe that we can manage markets for any period other than the very short term? If so, I needn't ask for any evidence. Such a belief can only come from a socialist and that ideology has already been thoroughly discredited.

Try again. Arrogant, yes. Uneducated, no.

Anonymous said...

Hey simpleton, can you offer your definition of "Nature," that you oddly capitalize as if it is somehow an entity? I guess anthropomorphing it somehow legitimizes your nonsensical argument?

In any case, you, deregulate all harvests "Nature" can take care of itself, right?

G. A. Harrison said...

Government has been regulating fishing harvests for years and what do we keep hearing? The stocks are in decline.

Except for anadromous species we don't know if they simply moved on to another location. What has the government done to protect anadromous species? Spent billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars with a continued decline in most of the stocks.

You should take 13 minutes and watch that "60 Minutes" video.

I'm sure you would argue that all of that regulation is what brought the Rockfish back to the Bay. You would be wrong. The same government that regulated the harvest was also the one that destroyed its largest single breeding ground by dumping dredge spoil into what is now Hart-Miller Island. The remaining stocks simply had to catch up in their areas.

I am not nearly as opposed to setting harvest limits as I am the ridiculous, and monopolistic, licensing regulations that are put in place. If you have harvest limits, there should still be no barriers to entry.

As for anthropomorphizing (not anthropomorphing, there is no verb "to anthropomorph"), it is a valid point, but not what I am doing. As I am sure you have figured out by now, I am not some sort of tree hugging pantheist. Using the term "Mother Nature" is a common rhetorical device.

You may also believe that conservatives are de facto anti-environment. Not so. I happen to believe in being a good environmental steward in the Goldwater mold.

BTW - your ad hominem attacks not withstanding, are you going to counter my original argument or just continue attacking me? While I do get a certain amount of perverse pleasure out of these types of exchanges, I am truly interested in a counter-argument.