If government pays farmers to sell corn for energy, even a modestly intelligent liberal should be able to comprehend that this will affect food prices.
Liberal-progressives are enthralled with imposing collectivist regulation to satisfy their religion's "feel-good" agendas.
But the cost of liberal-progressive worship of collectivist abstractions is great. Diverting limited economic resources into less important or less effective uses, inherent in the straitjacket of government regulation, impoverishes the world with lower output. It also results in the loss of innovation inherent in the liberty of millions of individuals to experiment and discover the most effective and least costly ways to solve problems. Liberal-progressive-socialism's claim that government bureaucrats are better at administering the economy than "greedy" individual workers and private businessmen is repeatedly belied by experience.
A front-page article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal highlights the latest fiasco engendered by liberal-progressivism. Under the headline "Food Inflation, Riots Spark Worries for World Leaders," the Journal reports:
Surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83% in the past three years, according to the World Bank — putting huge stress on some of the world's poorest nations. Even as the ministers met, Haiti's Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was resigning after a week in which that tiny country's capital was racked by rioting over higher prices for staples like rice and beans.
Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields and warehouses. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned in a recent speech that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. Those could include Indonesia, Yemen, Ghana, Uzbekistan and the Philippines. In countries where buying food requires half to three-quarters of a poor person's income, "there is no margin for survival," he said.
Many policy makers at the weekend meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank agreed that the problem is severe. Among other targets, they singled out U.S. policies pushing corn-based ethanol and other biofuels as deepening the woes.
"When millions of people are going hungry, it's a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels," said India's finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, in an interview. Turkey's finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, said the use of food for biofuels is "appalling."
Let's acknowledge that Congressional "feel good" environmental regulations mandating and subsidizing increased use of ethanol are not the sole cause of higher food prices around the world. But those enactments are a major contributor.
Diverting agricultural production into growing corn for ethanol has reduced other food supplies, with the inevitability of higher prices for lesser amounts of foods grown on the reduced acreage not devoted to ethanol production. In addition, every gallon of ethanol produced requires the use of almost two gallons of gasoline. Rather than reducing our dependence upon oil, ethanol production sharply increases the use of petroleum, adding upward pressure on the price of the world's major energy source, increasing food prices still more.
This counterproductive effect is typical of liberal-progressivism, which inherently is limited to a one-dimensional view of political and economic society. Liberal-progressivism is prone to the quick, grand, symbolic gesture, without careful consideration of the manifold effects of imposed policies. Liberal-progressivism is a religion that finds its trade-mark expression in mindlessness mob demonstrations in the streets, calculated to rush legislative bodies into quick-fix enactments.
Above all, liberal-progressivism is a religion that abhors the idea of individual responsibility and the vastly greater wisdom inherent in the independent actions of tens of millions of individuals planning and reacting to events where the rubber meets the road.
As former liberal-progressive Senator Bill Bradley said, liberals always prefer the bureaucrat whom they know to the individual whom they can't control.
In the case of world food prices, ivory-tower liberal-progressive intellectuals and politicians have, in smug satisfaction, starved the world's poor to gratify their own self-importance. Worshipping their philosophically materialist goddess of Reason, they are delighted to behold in self-admiration their own images each day in the mirror, believing themselves to be the saviors of abstract intellectual conceits called "humanity" and "the planet."
viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Read more articles by Thomas E. Brewton
Actually, progressives who are paying attention will probably use their much maligned powers of reason to absorb this new information and change their minds! Indeed, the best talking point I've heard is that the energy and resources that go into a tank of corn-based fuel could feed a family for a year (next time you fill up that SUV with ethanol while mindlessly staring at your "sanctity of life" bumper sticker, perhaps this stat will resonate). The energy equation - and not cruelty to animals - was the primary reason for me to become a vegetarian 20 years ago, so of course I readily understand how burning food in our cars means less food, and a much accelerated carbon burn. I used logic and reason - and so did you - to make these connections.
The problem, of course, is that it has been "conservatives" who have spent the last 30 years actively mis-informing the public about the consequences of our wasteful lifestyles. Perhaps if the party controlling the political discourse had spent more time educating with reason we wouldn't have gone down this path in the first place.
Comment by Chasm | April 15, 2008
I thought “liberal-progressive” was a redundant term.
Chasm:
“Perhaps if the party controlling the political discourse had spent more time educating with reason we wouldn't have gone down this path in the first place.”
What makes you believe that politicians would think the masses respond to reason?
Comment by sedonaman | April 15, 2008
Whether masses 'respond' is not really the issue. Mr Brewton is absolutely correct that bio-fuel is a waste of resources, and without knowing the history of the farm legislation that made it possible (and Mr Brewton offers no insight here) I don't really know who to blame, frankly. But were I to try and solve the problem, I would begin by looking at ag policy, not pointing fingers at liberals. True, I have a few friends who rushed to convert their cars to bio-fuels, and I consider them dunces, but the real culprit is an economy that depends almost exclusively on BURNING THINGS. And, in the free market, when faced with selling corn for food at $x, or selling for fuel at $2x, guess which price the logical mass of farmers is going to sell at?
Mr. Woronko, in the previous article on this blog, quite rightly points to government policy, not straw-men liberals, as the fulcrum for bad energy policy.
Beyond that, for the right to harp to the masses for 20+ years that global climate change is a myth, and then to concern troll attempts to mitigate the consequences is disingenuous, to say the least. Woronko, for all his carbon-burning loving ways, is at least honest in his assessment that government intervention is a necessary preclusion to solving the energy/environmental crisis. This author offers nothing but straw men and obfuscation.
Comment by Chasm | April 15, 2008
Chasm:
“Whether masses 'respond' is not really the issue.”
Then what was your point in saying, “Perhaps if the party controlling the political discourse had spent more time educating with reason we wouldn't have gone down this path in the first place.”?
“But were I to try and solve the problem, I would begin by looking at ag policy, not pointing fingers at liberals. … Mr. Woronko, in the previous article on this blog, quite rightly points to government policy, not straw-men liberals, as the fulcrum for bad energy policy.”
This is like saying, “People aren’t inherently evil; it’s society that makes them evil.” [When all along society is nothing but, guess what, people!] This is not to mention that it’s liberals who are constantly pushing environmental legislation. In fact, they take credit for it.
“… the real culprit is an economy that depends almost exclusively on BURNING THINGS.”
Do you know of any other way to do work besides heat transfer? [This is a physics question.] Up to this point, “burning things” [namely oil] is the most cost-efficient means currently available. As soon as burning oil becomes economically infeasible, it will be replaced.
“This author offers nothing but straw men and obfuscation.”
I think his point is that millions of individuals working in a free market solve economic [and most other] problems better and more efficiently than a few bureaucrats because no matter how smart bureaucrats are, they can’t know everything [such as everyone’s needs and wants] about every transaction that has to take place; and besides that, bureaucrats don’t respond to market forces, they respond to political considerations. I heard George Soros once say, “Government doesn’t give to benefit the recipient; it gives to benefit the giver. [Must have been before he became a liberal.]
If you doubt the ability of the free market, here http://www.bkmarcus.com/cache/POW is a short article, “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp” that explains how the individual and overall well-being of a POW camp is raised by a system of free trade. “Very soon after capture, people realized that it was both undesirable and unnecessary, in view of the limited size and the equality of supplies, to give away or to accept gifts of cigarettes or food. ‘Goodwill’ developed into trading as a more equitable means of maximizing individual satisfaction.”
After reading that article, ask yourself what would happen if a modern liberal with lungpower were to be injected into the camp.
Comment by sedonaman | April 15, 2008
The point of my comment was buried in my answer, and it's interesting you missed it, because it references the exact free market you are claiming I'm ignoring. To put it more explicitly, if big oil, along with their conservative and political allies hadn't spent the last 20 years hiding the TRUE COST of oil while simultaneously providing obscene tax breaks so the masses would buy 9MPG SUV's, we wouldn't be in quite the bad shape we are in now. If gasoline was $5-a-gallon in 2000 (like it was in Europe), you, like many of the masses, would probably be driving more Prius's and taking public transport right now.
Free markets are only sustainable if ALL of the costs are factored in. If some costs are left out, eventually the imbalance will bite you in the ass. In the case of fossil fuels, the costs of global climate change and the associated costs in famine and resource shortages have never been factored in, and now it's biting us in the ass. Assessing and levying the true costs of our decisions is exactly what government is for - do you really expect the oil companies to do it?
Oh, and explain again how it is that the liberals, who have not been in charge federally for some time, and whose state-level initiatives have been shot down by this administration are to blame for bad energy policy?
As for your last question, no, there is no other way to do work besides heat transfer, but as it happens, there is a huge ball of fire in the sky which seems to do little else but transfer heat… I have a feeling that were we to honestly asses the costs of burning fossil fuels, than turning to solar generated power would be more than cheap enough (after all, it's almost there now, even without that honest assessment).
Comment by Chasm | April 15, 2008
But here's the contradiction in your argument regarding free markets, as they stand now. Free, as in not taxing carbons to account for the residual costs of oil and coal, markets are what got us into this. Farmer's wouldn't sell corn for fuel if they couldn't get a better price for it at market. But this causes famine, and is this immoral, and is so unsustainable that a third grader could understand it. Therefore, since market forces clearly have caused the problem, it is the moral responsibility of the government to step in and declare food grain off limits to fuel production. This is an argument for MORE government regulation, not less, to solve this problem.
Comment by Chasm | April 15, 2008
But to finally shut down Mr. Brewton's thesis, that liberal "feel good" legislation is to blame for ethanol production, let's roll some tape. From (emphasis mine)
http://www.news.com/Fuels-industry-seeks-its-ethanol-2.0/2100-11395_3-6153349.html
we get, "Although he didn't use the word "cellulosic" in his State of the Union address, President George Bush's call for increased RENEWABLE (note: as opposed to wind/thermal/solar) fuels on Wednesday turned the spotlight on an emerging form of ethanol technology," and "To achieve the PRESIDENT'S GOAL of producing 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels a year by 2017, experts say production of so-called cellulosic ethanol–made from woody substances, such as straw or wood chips–would need to be brought on line at a large scale" and that "The Renewable Fuels Association–the main ethanol lobbying group in the United States–lauded Bush's stepped-up energy target,"
All of this was part of The Energy Policy Act of 2005, a broad measure that nonetheless failed to raise mileage standards in cars and trucks.
So, to recap, contrary to Mr Brewton's assertions, the only people who "feel good" about ethanol subsidies are the industry lobbyists who wrote the legislation and the companies they work for, as well as Tom Delay and Bush, who proudly heralded its inception. Progressives and environmentalists have been critical of idea since the beginning, and are even more so now.
So tell me, Mr Brewton, are you ready to lobby that known liberal Bush to lose the ethanol tax credits?
Comment by Chasm | April 15, 2008
And to actually try and logic this out, while of course doing the most moral thing possible (I know, heads explode thinking a progressive could think both logically and morally), let's scheme this out.
Using food crops for fuel, especially when the immediate and clear result of such practice is food scarcity and famine, is immoral.
Leaving aside who pushed for the idea (BUSH), or who benefits from the tax subsidies (farmers, ethanol refineries, the gas industry, alot of it in Texas) or who got played on the benefit of the scheme (the masses), the end result is, as Mr Brewton implies and I (a progressive-liberal for those keeping score) agree that the practice is immoral.
So, what is the remedy? Here is a case where both conservatives and progressives seem to agree that it is in fact governments duty to step in and regulate for the sake of morality, if nothing else. Perhaps we should rescind the tax cuts and ban the use of food grain in fuel, as well as the use of food producing arable land for any non-food plant. And perhaps we should encourage international support for such bans.
Clearly, this may mean the destruction of an entire sector of the energy industry, unless an alternate cellulose crop is used, but that is clearly the moral thing to do. I understand hemp is very good for this sort of thing, so perhaps that could take the place of corn.
The first step is for moral conservatives like Mr Brewton to join with, rather than demonize, scientists and progressives who recognize the immorality of food for fuel, and oppose President Bush, the Republicans in congress and their friends in the energy business in continuing down this wasteful path.
Comment by Chasm | April 15, 2008
Chasm,
You're suffering from "history started when I woke up this morning" syndrome. Don't worry, it's common to your breed. Ethanol has been subsidized for years before that evil Bushy took office. It was mandated as an additive to gasoline to boost octane ratings when lead in gasoline was reduced, and eventually outlawed, in the ancient times. Like, 30 years ago. Like, before Clinton took office even. And why did we switch to unleaded gasoline and increase ethanol additives? It certainly wasn't because "Big Oil" wanted it that way. I'll give you a hint: it had something to do with environmentalism.
Additionally, you're suffering from partisan hack syndrome. You view George Bush as the uber-conservative, and consequently view anyone who identifies themselves as conservative as sharing identical viewpoints to his. However, many conservatives do indeed loathe George Bush because he is too - get this now - liberal! For some people, it is possible to separate political ideology from a particular politician. Most conservatives don't have "Our presidential candidate is the Messiah" syndrome. The "your guy's a baddie" argument doesn't really fly for people who don't view George Bush as "their guy", and fully concur that he is a "baddie".
Finally, you're suffering from misplaced blame syndrome. This is a perfectly normal side effect of "History started when I woke up this morning" syndrome. Failing to take history older than the Bush administration into account, you fail to observe significant amounts of relevant information that would be inconvenient to your worldview. This makes it easy to blame Bush, the free market, conservatives, "Big Oil" baddies, and, most strangely, lack of government intervention, for 35 years of US energy policy, but is good for little else outside of your Daily Kos social circles.
In the interest of saving us both time and energy (oooh, ironic), in lieu of any further responses I will defer to the following argument: "I know you are, but what am I!"
Comment by Patrick Mulligan | April 15, 2008
Um, jeez. Talk about derangement syndromes: two-thirds of your post is an ad hominum attack on me! In the first instance, I believe I mentioned how long we've been using ethanol, and I'm sure it has at least as long and glorious a history as MTBE. But that isn't the issue. The issue isn't how long we've been subsidizing food ethanol, nor who the blame belongs too - it's what to do about it. Chime in when you have something constructive to say.
On the second point, I don't believe I demonized Your Hero as much as pointed out that the current tax subsidies that he championed at the behest of the industry that feeds him are at least as much to blame for the current situation as the Dirty F***ing Hippies.
On the third point… no, wait, is there even a point there besides Librul Derangement Syndrome?
Comment by Chasm | April 16, 2008
Chasm
Patrick's attack was not ad hominum. You suck! Get out of here you stupid idiot! Doesn't this list have have a way to ban fools like this that take up all the bandwidth?
Comment by Ivan Ivanovich | April 16, 2008
Chasm:
Just because globe makers benefit by people believing the world is round doesn't mean there is a cabal keeping flat-earthers out of the map market.
Comment by sedonaman | April 16, 2008
Chasm,
"The "your guy's a baddie" argument doesn't really fly for people who don't view George Bush as "their guy", and fully concur that he is a "baddie"."
"you're suffering from misplaced blame syndrome. This is a perfectly normal side effect of "History started when I woke up this morning" syndrome. Failing to take history older than the Bush administration into account, you fail to observe significant amounts of relevant information that would be inconvenient to your worldview."
""I know you are, but what am I!""
Thank you for playing!
Comment by Patrick Mulligan | April 16, 2008