No Carrier's Comments

Energy - and Economy - Politics May 2008

The topic on everyone mind is the seemingly ever increasing price of oil and the raising cost of food.
So much so, that every news report seems to start out with a chart of the cost of gallon of gas and the ticker of the price of oil per barrel, followed by what airlines are doing to deal with this issue, and what car manufacturers are being forced to change their "focus" to.

I am beginning to wonder if this is yet another example of the government using the media to push the public into an hysteria which will be solved by yet another government solution.

The sort of fear and uneasiness we are all feeling is surly going to get everyone to think in terms that our government with it power should be able work out a solution to this trouble and get our economy and energy issues taking care of. There is already talk about Government to take back control of the airlines, back to the levels before deregulation.

A slippery slope that would be but I am reminded of a truth which I read a few years ago, by Dr Ravi Batra. That is people tend to not make the same mistakes their fathers did,but they do tend to make the same mistakes their grandparents did. It was in the era of our grand parents which started all the large social reforms which attempted to bring control to an seemingly uncontrolled economy. All of the new deal reforms and putting regulation into airlines, the starting of Social Security. Not just in this country but in the UK and many other parts of the world big social programs were all the rage... The biggest of which was the USSR, but to other degrees just about everywhere in the world people wanted controls and accepted big government as their Saviour from market economy's
Obsiously starting in the 1970's & 1980's that all started to change, with Poland, Czech Republic Margret Thacher Ronald Regan, The Berlin wall and so on.
If you recall the tiger economy's as they were called. Japan, Korea Thailand all had huge economic booms pushed along by foreign investment and then shortly thereafter crashes. The crashes were followed out by bailout and world bank controls put on their banks to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
Bailout came from mainly US Dollars
Now what. Our economy did the same thing. Under Greenspan credit was loosened to spur growth, and greed took over. Mortgage company's / Banks and anyone who wanted in the game all borrowed WAY too much .. putting lots of Cash on the street. The prices of houses rose and as long the prices went up, the banks, mortgage companies and the investors couldn't loose
This is the sort of bubble growth we all saw happen in with southeast asia 15 years ago, but no one put two and two together and thought it was possible that we needed to reign in our unchecked rapid increase in wealth. (maybe we needed to fund the war or something ??)

Back to my point
Are we experiencing a made up crisis ? Where the only hope is more government controls which will stabilize prices at the expense our more personal and business freedoms ? It has been proven though the years that big government programs which try to set prices and controls all fail and overall bring higher prices due to lack of innovation and competition.

Ill close with a few interesting points.. We know that people need transportation. Even if we work at home, we do need go shopping, or to the beach. Our government pushed along a public funded program to buy 30,00 ethanol-capable trucks This has caused their gasoline consumption to rise by more than 1.5 million gallons. A Postal Service study found that the new vehicles get as much as 29% fewer miles to the gallon.

Are large public funded solutions the answer, or does the answer lie in free market solutions like the 300 MGP Car like the Aptera or the 230 MPG VW

While we appear to be held captive to those countries who have oil and the prices which get set for the product by the greed of wallstreet speculators ...I think the answer is in changing the question, by keeping an open mind rather than moving backwards to the mistakes of our forefathers and asking for tighter controls.
Encourage innovations like IBM come up with solutions which tap into solar power 23,00 times more effectively than ever before, all using existing well known technology.

Ill end with this
We have all heard about Hillary and McCain being flip floppers Following up on a comment I heard about Obama pushing for Capital Gains tax's to be pusehd back to the % 28 level. Obama had this to say.

I guess they are all polished politicians who know how to clearly warp their words into saying something which is impossible to hold them to.
Bob Lee

posted by Bob Lee @ 9:50 AM