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The local Swiss press
carried a summary of a report compiled by a panel of
so-called "experts" of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Science
(SATW) under the startling rubric that motor gasoline "should"
henceforth be priced, by fiat, at no less than four francs per liter — roughly double the current market price and
representing what, to an American, must seem like the eye-watering equivalent
of around $14 a gallon.
The reason given by these
cloistered killjoys for recommending such a brutal curtailment of people's
material well-being? Nothing less than the incredibly convoluted one that
since — in their lofty estimation — Swiss demand for petrol will
inevitably outstrip the available supply sometime in the next two decades, it
is better to anticipate the resultant economic stress by "discouraging"
consumption now, rather than to allow such a painful (if utterly
hypothetical) disappointment to be postponed until later.
Presumably, on this basis,
in order to lessen the chance he might run over a cliff during the next mass
migration, we should prevail upon the prudent lemming to fling himself out of a skyscraper window today.
Nor is this the only
instance of such right-on rhetoric to emanate from a Swiss officialdom
clearly at odds with the solid, Bürgerlich level-headedness
which typifies a nation whose engineering talents and entrepreneurial skills
have long allowed them to flourish in a tiny land, hemmed in by sterile, icy
peaks and endowed with all too few natural resources to support them in any
sort of comfort.
No, far from regarding the
achievement of their fellow citizens as a matter for well-merited praise, the
governmental authors in Bern sourly condemn it
as an act of despoliation and robbery. Certainly, one can put no other
construction on the following, highly patronizing passage, taken straight
from the pages of the official statistical yearbook for 2008:
Switzerlandbiocapacity…
The ecological footprint expresses consumption in terms of how much surface
area (in global hectares) is required to sustain this consumption. It shows
whether and to what extent our use of natural resources exceeds the
regenerative capacities of the biosphere…
When consumption exceeds
our biocapacity, natural resources at home become
depleted or have to be imported from other countries. In such cases, we end
up living at the expense of other regions of the planet or of future
generations.
Several pages of argument
could be spent dispelling the woeful economic ignorance being expressed here
about such basic matters as supply, demand, opportunity costs, and price signaling, but let us limit ourselves to one simple
observation that seems to have escaped our earnestly-PC engineers and bureaucrats: though we all routinely suffer wants that far exceed our means to
satisfy them, most of us have reluctantly come to accept that it is our
earthly lot to have to forego some
delights in order to sample a range of others — an epiphany we reached
somewhere between becoming fully toilet trained and realizing that Santa Claus was only a figment of a toy salesman's fertile
imagination.
Even if there is any validity to the "Peak
Oil" scare (a rather large hypothetical, in this author's
estimation), the Swiss — just as all other peoples — will adapt
much more readily through allowing what we call the I²E²S²
process (Innovation, Economization and Substitution, leading to Investment
guided by Entrepreneurialism and fueled with
Savings) to percolate through the free market than by means of anything
policy wonks and political wastrels may dream up, respectively, in their
ivory towers and smoke-filled rooms.
It is critically important,
moreover, to recognize such an instance of "fatal conceit" as being
all too characteristic of those who pander to the modern day danse macabre of exhaustionism and collectivist penury which so
infuses both the anti-humanist Greens and the rent-grubbing business types
who hypocritically seek to line their pockets by pandering to these
latter-day Savonarolas.
For example, far across the
Atlantic, a truly sinister cabal seems to have
been hatched between the Republican "Swift Boat," corporate
raider-turned-windmill wannabe, T. Boone Pickens; the Democrat serial
fantasist and climate alarmist, Al Gore; and the One World–elitist
media mogul, Ted Turner — this unholy trinity setting aside their
supposed ideological differences for no higher purpose than to be better able
to shear the flock of credulous sheep they have frightened with their
intertwined tales of killer storms, melting ice sheets, and maniacal
terrorist oil sheikhs.
One is tempted to ask
whether old man Noah also managed to cow an ill-informed citizenry into
subsidizing his little
floating zoo, or whether the Ark — which would deliver the fruits of
the Earth to him and his seed alone — was already disporting the
misleadingly cute-panda motif of the genocidally
aspirant theme park owners of the WWF at its
masthead.
But though all this seems
so frightfully contemporary and in tune with the suburban Gaian's
zeitgeist, the despairing
tyranny of inefficient ersatz,
the drive to autarky, and the
quest for Lebensraum that lies
beneath it possess a very dark precedent, indeed.
To see this, we must first
recognize that the serpent tongue of propaganda employs a different semiotics
today.
Thus, "ersatz" is dressed up in the
clothes of "alternative energy" and "sustainable
technology" while "autarky"
translates into such concepts as low "food miles" and reduced
"carbon footprints." In turn, the same old Malthusian fears that
there are not enough natural resources to go round have been inverted from
justifying an outward drive to win precious living space through armed
conquest to the promotion of population control measures aimed at reducing
the "cancerous" impact of man,
the "pest species" on our "fevered" mother planet
instead.
Already, our use of the
older phrases may have alerted the reader to their provenance, but, to show
that more than a pat generalization is involved, let us quote a few specifics
from Adam Tooze's magisterial study of Nazi
economics, The Wages of Destruction, by way of
corroboration.
Though undoubtedly a genius
of industrial chemistry, as Tooze relates, it was
Carl Bosch's ineffably modern fixation that the world was on the brink of
"Peak Oil" no less than eighty years ago which led directly to the
devil's bargain sealed between his sprawling conglomerate, IG Farben, and the incoming Hitler regime:
[I]n 1928, at its Leuna facility … IG Farben
embarked on the construction of the world's first facility for coal
hydrogenation, the alchemical process through which coal was transformed into
petrol… The RM330 million investment …
would pay off when the oil wells ran dry and fuel prices rocketed.
Sadly for Bosch, that same
prospect of an imminent shortage inspired a wave of entrepreneurialism which
resulted in major new oilfield developments in Venezuela, California,
Oklahoma, and the Permian Basin of Texas, culminating in the discovery of the
famous "Black Giant," late in 1930 — and hence to a glutted
world market.
For Carl Bosch this was
clearly a severe setback, but IG could certainly have retreated from
hydrogenation. Losses of a few hundred million would not have broken the
company. Such a retreat would, however, have run completely counter to Carl
Bosch's vision of the firm, which now depended on the willingness of the
German government to impose high taxes on imported oil.
One cannot fail to be
struck by the similarities not just with Pickens and his cynically populist
campaign for wind energy, or with Gore and his multibillion-dollar
"eco" hedge fund, but also with today's avid subsidy grubbers among
the advocates of solar power and the members of the vast biofuel
lobby who have found a novel way of penalizing plain, hard-working consumers
of cereals, and oilseeds in order to feather the luxurious nests of the
Midwestern agribarons.
Nor do the parallels end
there, because, in the 1930s, having
once started down this route, both parties became
hopelessly wedded to the need to keep fuel prices artificially elevated at
what were, by a neat coincidence with the SATW's
latest ideas, roughly double world prices.
This imperative —
which provided corporate welfare to Bosch while raising revenues for the
Reich — forged a tangled chain of unintended consequences, as all such
"initiatives" de haut en bas tend to do. Not least was
that it was later to have a disastrous impact on Hitler's ambition to emulate
the accomplishments of "Fordism" by
providing an affordable car for every German household.
A triumph of enduring
engineering design Ferdinand Porsche's Volkswagen "Beetle" may well
have been, but because petrol was
so unnecessarily expensive, ways had to be found to reduce the capital cost
of the car itself, so that the total running cost could fit within the meager budget of the average family. The resonance with
current proposals to offer a range of tax breaks and state subsidies for the
production of hybrid cars is just too striking to ignore.
Finding the talismanic
ceiling of 1,000 Reichsmarks per car impossible to
achieve in a purely commercial setting (Porsche's brainchild was, in fact, no
less pricey than Opel's cheapest existing model), production of the vehicle
was soon entrusted to a plant to be specially built using the captive funds
that had originally been donated to the now-proscribed trade-union movement
and supplemented by an ongoing compulsory levy on all German manual workers.
Plagued by the cost
overruns that are inevitable in a closed society, over-reliant on
home-produced goods and already straining to afford its mountainous
rearmament program, the responsible entity, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, further tried
to finance itself by offering its members an installment
savings plan, backed up with a sizeable, mandatory subscription to a two-year
insurance policy on the vehicle, payable by its would-be owners.
Although some 340,000
trusting souls eventually signed up to the scheme, the schedule slipped
further and further into arrears and the hidden losses continued to mount.
Ultimately, despite all the
podium posturing and hysterical flag-waving, not one single VW was ever
delivered to a member of the German public. The half-finished factory was
eventually converted to military use and the 275 million Reichsmarks
in savings so arduously scraped together fell victim
to the horrendous postwar inflation.
All this should warn us to
be on our guard when we hear the honeyed words of today's politicians and the
blandishments of their corporatist allies when they twist the commendable
desire to avoid the wanton destruction of our environment into an instrument
of imperial expansion, state control, and undue self-enrichment.
Nor should we allow
ourselves to be browbeaten by the IPCC carbophobes
when they use dubious science and worse economics to make us believe that the
entire planet is in imminent danger of a cataclysmic collapse unless we
ordinary folk (though, naturally, not the cosseted members of the Green Sanhedrin itself) give up
all hope of a better standard of living.
More emphatically, we
should reject all suggestions that, in the Canute-like arrogance
that they can somehow prevent this faux millennium, the central planners
will offer a route not only to earthly salvation, but also to faster economic
growth and greater material prosperity as we forcibly struggle to overcome
the handicaps they seek to impose upon us. If every adult male has his right
leg amputated by order of the state, the fact that more artificial limbs will
then come to be sold is not exactly a mark of progress.
To fortify our resolve to
resist such insidious schemes, we might also do well to think upon the sorry
fate of a previous people who, having lost their faith in free exchange and
the international division of labor amid a tempest
of monetary insanity, became converted instead to a messianic vision of
impending scarcity and unavoidable strife — and brought the wrath of
heaven down upon their heads as a result.
Sean
Corrigan
Sean Corrigan
is Chief Investment Strategist at Diapason Commodities Management (Lausanne
and London)
Copyright © 2006 - Copyright © Diapason
Commodities Management - Sean Corrigan
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