Reflect for a moment on the escalating cries by our elite betters for the government to do something, quickly, to significantly increase the cost of gasoline back up to the more desirable four bucks a gallon, panicked by the return for now of more affordable energy prices (due not to anything wise our policymakers did, of course, but to the economic mess they caused).
It took my wife, I admit, to point out something rather familiar about this from Chapter 6 of Red Hot Lies, “Big Government: How Government, Politicians, and Alarmists Abuse Power in the Pursuit of Power”. That is, we’ve seen this before. Very specifically.
So, consider the past as prologue for today’s calls for massive subsidies, mandates (and taxes to pay for them) for “alternative” energy sources (“green jobs”), swift gas price hikes, and so on (citations omitted):
SCARING YOU OUT OF YOUR LIBERTIES, 101
How did we come to this point of shrieking to the heavens about the need to urgently impose a dramatic overhaul of society?
In short, the environment is the latest alleged victim of capitalism to whose defense the Statists rush to offer salvation. Add to this the substantial drop in the 1990s of the decade-long spike in the price of carbon-based fuels — and, therefore, a substantial drop in the justification for billions in subsidies and mandates for the “alternative” energy industry; within five years there was an organized “global warming” movement out of Washington seeking to re-increase the price of carbon-based energy.
Peter Foster of Canada’s Financial Post explains how this began with a series of environmental agreements and initiatives all based on the notion that the world was running out of various resources or, similarly, was on a fast track to permanently despoiling them. The response was “state control over capitalist enterprise on the basis that it is both morally suspect and practically unstable.” “Global cooling,” followed by “warming,” then later “climate change” and now — thanks to Al Gore and his advertising campaign — the “climate crisis,” were simply the ideal vehicles.