April 30, 2008
Gas prices are rising. What happens when gas prices rise? Everyone starts looking to Washington to find a way to lower gas prices so that we can keep burning fossil fuels willy-nilly:
Soaring gasoline prices spilled over into Washington and the presidential race yesterday, as Congress moved toward a showdown with President Bush over legislation aimed at forcing oil companies to help ease the burden on consumers.
First, can anyone tell me where the Constitution guarantees the right to inexpensive gasoline? Second, the people who want to pander to voters by trying to lower gas prices tend to be the same ones who want more environmental regulation to prevent the advancement of global warming. Putting aside completely the merits of any given regulation, isn’t an increase in gasoline prices exactly what we should be hoping for?
When oil is cheap, there is no economic incentive to either conserve it or find alternative energy sources. When the price starts soaring, we have the good people of GM cutting production of their giant trucks and SUVs in favor of smaller vehicles, and presumably people will find other ways to use less gas: carpooling, public transportation, walking or biking when possible. High gas prices are not an environmental panacea, but they can only really help the push for innovation and conservation.
Also, when you have the government jumping in the make things better, you tend to get situations like this:
[ethanol] has linked food and fuel prices just as oil is rising to new records, pulling up the price of anything that can be poured into a gasoline tank. “The price of grain is now directly tied to the price of oil,” says Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, a Washington research group. “We used to have a grain economy and a fuel economy. But now they’re beginning to fuse.”
Thanks, guys, I know I really appreciate paying more for my groceries because someone had the boneheaded idea that ethanol would cure our gasoline-price ills. To say nothing of the poor in third-world nations who are getting pushed past malnutrition and into actual starvation by rising food prices.
April 30, 2008 at 10:54 am
The constitution does not guarantee the right to inexpensive gas. Just like it doesn’t guarantee something called “The White House” or the “Air Force” or “tax exemptions for churches” but so called originalists never complain that those things aren’t in the constitution.
April 30, 2008 at 11:07 am
No, but it provides for an executive branch, a military and free exercise of religion. You’ll notice that all of the rights included in the Bill of Rights are what we might call “negative rights,” or those which guarantee that the government can’t do something bad to us. There is no indication in any of our founding documents or philosophy that positive or economic rights were at all considered, or those rights which say citizens are entitled to certain material goods.
If you can provide some evidence that our founders meant to create a nation where people where entitled to goods at below market prices, I’d be happy to hear it.