Pundit Roundtable
I had the pleasure of participating in the latest Pundit Roundtable over at WILLisms. This is a regular feature in which a few other bloggers and the host give their answers to a couple of questions, or related sets of questions, on different topics. It’s sort of like the McLaughlin Group in blog form, only different. Certainly more verbose.
The first topic was: How did we get into this mess of high gas prices? What is the solution? Give us your plan for getting gasoline to under $2 a gallon.
The second topic was: You have the power of life or death over any two figures from history. You may condemn one to an early death, and save one from their fated demise. Who do you choose and why?
I will cross-post my responses below, but you should go check out the complete Pundit Roundtable for the whole thing, including Jay Tea, David Anderson, and the host himself, Ken McCracken.
Now, my responses. Topic one, oil and gas prices:
People like simple, knee jerk, catch phrase explanations for things, so that is what we hear a lot of on the dramatic recent gas price increases. Pick the right one and you might even win some votes, but that doesn’t make you less wrong, or at least unrealistically pat.
The current price behavior is an unfortunate, yet perhaps overdue, confluence of many factors. There’s geopolitical forces. It’s oil; there’s always geopolitical forces. There’s the economic growth and therefore increased demand in places like China, but do we really want to go backward and lose the other benefits? There are the forces of environmentalism, NIMBY and regulation. Thus the lack of refining capacity, lack of new nuclear power in the overall mix - none of this exists in a vacuum, lack of new drilling in this country - for what that’s worth, given the fungibile nature of oil, seasonal and other blend requirements that make production more expensive and disrupt already tight refining capacity, and fundamental, seasonally variable supply and demand.
The best thing anyone could do for gas prices is to get out of the way. Let economics work. High prices give incentive to develop new sources of oil, as well as alternatives that might reduce the extent to which we depend on same. People will act to conserve, or if they don’t then the price isn’t so excessive after all. Companies will act to chase revenue and profits available at these prices that might not be at lower prices, and in so doing are likely to make the cost of alternatives or more efficient extraction methods fall.
There seems to be a high income punditry class trumpeting how low gas prices are in historical terms, and they are right. However, your average person has trouble appreciating that long term trend when the price rockets up so quickly. It’s as if milk went up another 75 cents in the course of a few months; of course we’d all complain. This is “milk” we buy five, ten, twenty, thirty gallons a week, as opposed to a gallon or two. It really does hurt.
The mistake is rushing to do something political about that pain. We’ll adjust. We’ll pursue ways to save - or not - and the signals from that will ripple through the economy to reflect in prices and availability. To the extent that we can have an influence given the politicization and regulation of oil, and energy generally.
Where the spike toward $3 was rapid, any fallback to $2 and under will be slow. How long to get that many people driving higher mileage cars? How long to slay the NIMBY Monster and build more refineries? How long to persuade congresscritters to encourage new nuclear, encourage new drilling, etc.- or at least back off of preventing or slowing same.
My plan? Get out of the way and let the economy work. Ultimately this works even if we do nothing to change the nutjob governments in key oil producing countries. Fungibility: Know it, love it.
Topic two, creating an alternate history through an extended life and an early death for two historical figures:
This is tougher than it sounds, and one of my answers sums that up in one person. My knee jerk thought on who to condemn, partly on the idea so many people would find it a controversial choice, was Lincoln.
I rapidly changed my mind and decided Lincoln was the most logical choice off the top of my head for saving, on the idea he’d done all the harm he was going to do, but was killed before he could do all the followup good we needed. His life may have been about the Civil War, expansion of federal power, and a near dictatorial Presidency, but the founders made that conflict almost inevitable, under someone, by what they had to do and gloss over to make the Constitution happen at all. Even if the muddy status of slavery couldn’t be handled, was it really a show stopper to leave the right of states to leave the union implicit rather than explicit? Some tell me it absolutely was.
After the war, things went awry due to the loss of Lincoln, so taking the war we had instead of the war we might imagine could have happened (or not), keep Lincoln alive for the cleanup. That probably makes for a smoother reconstruction and integration of former slaves, and blacks in general, into ordinary society. Imagine no segregation in the 20th century, no need for the civil rights movement, and arguably no need for programs like affirmative action to keep the races disparate. LBJ is on my short list of kill targets, but if we spare Lincoln, perhaps we lose some of the damage of LBJ’s war on poverty. So perhaps LBJ can live, if Lincoln does. The ripples go far.
The toughest question of all is who to kill, because there are just too many. Do I go with someone obvious, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Jimmy Carter? Maybe whoever is responsible for giving up Cuba? (Who is that, anyway? Help me, history buffs, you’re my only hope.) LBJ? Not if Lincoln lives. John Maynard Keynes? Imagine, no famed “we’re all Keynesians now” quote from Ronald Reagan (who is decidedly not on my short list). As I write this, I lean strongly in JMK’s direction, but if we’re gunning for “economists,” why not Marx? Heck, that’s like taking a scythe to multiple follow-ons at once. I could suggest an early demise for Jesus Christ and make the Christians feel persecuted. Oh wait, they already do! Plus if we’re being mean enough to suggest that, why not that Paul dude who got it past the mere cult stage. Or I could invite a denial of service attack by suggesting a certain crazy Arab before he can impose his hallucinations on the world. FDR? But like Lincoln, he is a mixed bag of deepest evil and decisive good, and unlike Lincoln he got to live to do the best of the good.
Augh! Can’t. Make. Up. My. Mind.
Aw, what the heck. It’s obvious, but let’s go with Karl Marx. Let the folks with dictatorial impulses find another ostensible muse to justify themselves rather than merely being what they are. Imagine a twentieth century without Marx looming over it like the father of nightmares.
Had I been thinking, I would have ended that with a “he’s dead Jim” joke. Oh well.
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