I'm drawing a bead on current events in Egypt. And I appreciate what chaos will have wrought in the long term. This small piece from Fernandez at the Belmont is right on time:
A rise in oil prices is not in itself a good or a bad thing. It all depends on whether you let the market react as it should. It should bring more oil into production, create the demand for nuclear power. It should. But it might not if regulation prevents it Remember carbon dioxide is now a pollutant.
Food too should work in favor of the producers. But you can’t use food ‘as a weapon’ in the same way you can use oil as a weapon. Nor can you, like a starving man, steal a barrel of oil like a loaf of bread. That’s immoral, even if you need it to run the dialysis machine for your sick child.
If anything the unrest in the Arab world should have been an opportunity — like Iran’s unrest was an opportunity — had the US been poised to use it. But the unrest was a bug, not a feature; born I think of the assumption that Arabs were different from us. They didn’t want freedom, they didn’t want markets.
What the next years are going to prove, I think, is that nothing comes out of the ground or into the mouth without markets and price signals. Democracy is really the political expression of property rights; of self-possession. In the short term I agree with those of my friends who say, “this is the end of the Hezbollah”, but only in the sense that Pearl Harbor was the end of Hitler.
In the short term people will want food they can’t get; oil they can’t buy; to sell oil they can’t sell. And in their desperation they will blame — the Jew. That’s what the Jew is for. And when that doesn’t work, there’s always America to hate.
If you don’t mind waiting out history, it’s the best of times. If are hoping to vacation in the Middle East this summer, it’s the worst of times. But the beginnings of recovery are in the mind. They are always in the mind.
The current administration is but an expression of a vast fantasy. I will grant there is enough blame to go around. But since we are speaking in the main, the fantasy central of the world is the soon to be deceased transnational liberal politically correct, end of history project.
Until that idea is grasped and rejected we will stay in the short run; in the worst of times. Only when we get the idea right — and it is not a sophisticated idea — simply one in which common sense is allowed to be valid, will we come into the best of times.
It is a vote for enough rope, to let the kid fail, to deliver the right cynicism from the opera box. VDH expresses a similar sentiment on the domestic front in his Oddball Club.
In the present wide-open society, we assume that soon we are going to be rear-ended by someone without a license, insurance, or registration, or another is going to confront us for money, violently if need be. We expect a rendezvous like that on the horizon and expect that our reaction to it must be stoic. When my house was broken into, when my car was rear-ended, when I was run down on a bike, I accepted the culprit had his reasons for such a resort to criminality or indifference to statute, and accepted that to say otherwise was more trouble than it was worth. I made private adjustments to prevent a recurrence, as do most oddballs.
Recent Comments