The Politically Incorrect Show - 14/09/2000

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Thursday September 14, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down!]

"I say, old chap, jolly rum show, this oil brouhaha, what? The natives are getting restless, what?"

One can just imagine Queen Elizabeth's comments to Tony Blair as she signed off emergency powers to him to bring in police & soldiers to deal to truckies blockading oil depots in protest against the price of fuel, 75% of which goes to the British government. Mr Blair, unlike his French counterparts, is refusing to countenance a reduction in the petrol tax, just as Comrades Cullen & Neanderton are refusing to here. OPEC has stepped up production to reduce the pressure on prices, but its chairman has, quite rightly, advised angry citizens all over the western world to point their fingers at their respective governments.

Of course, it would also be helpful if we weren't so reliant on the OPEC countries. That reliance is in large measure due to years of kow-towing to the eco-fascist movement by successive administrations in the United States. I quote from an article called The Real Oil on Oil Prices by Dr. George Reisman in Issue 41 of my magazine, The Free Radical:

"The U.S. government, acting largely under the influence of the ecology movement, has restricted the supply of oil in the following ways: (1) It has prevented exploration for and development of oil reserves in vast areas of territory arbitrarily set aside as wildlife preserves or wilderness areas. It has even consistently sought to prevent the development of the vital North Slope Alaskan oil fields, on the grounds of alleged concerns over harmful environmental effects, such as disturbance of the feeding habits of caribou herds and deterioration in the appearance of frozen waste lands. (2) It has joined in an international agreement to close Antarctica and its potentially vast oil deposits to all mining operations for the next fifty years. (3) It has prevented the development of offshore oil wells on the continental shelf. (4) It has prevented the construction of oil and gas pipelines, of new refineries, oil storage facilities, and facilities for handling supertankers. (5) Over the years, the U.S. government has imposed price controls on oil and has acted further to restrict oil company profits, and thus oil industry investment, by punitively increasing their rate of taxation through first reducing and then totally abolishing the old depletion allowance on crude oil...

"In the absence of the U.S. government's misguided policies, the Arab cartel would probably never even have been formed in the first place, because the conditions required for its success would have been totally lacking. If, today, the United States were to abolish its restrictions on the production of energy and abstain from enacting price controls and any other punitive measures against the American oil and other energy-producing industries, the OPEC cartel would be broken once and for all, and the real price of energy would resume the descent it enjoyed from the start of the Industrial Revolution until the 1970s.

"Such a policy, of course, would entail removing the prohibitions on the construction of atomic power plants and the restrictions on the strip mining of coal. It would also entail the privatization of the vast landholdings of the federal and state governments in Alaska and the other Western states and of the continental shelf, and then fully respecting the right of the new private property owners to use their property as they saw fit, so that oil, coal, and gas reserves and atomic power could all be freely developed. That would be a policy of abundant and cheap energy in all of its forms. It would be a policy that would operate in favor of the American consumer, not the Arab governments that control substantial oil reserves."

Of course, here in the Sheeple's Republic of Aotearoa, with its anti-business ethic & idiotic paranoia about anything nuclear, Dr Reisman's proposals would go down like the proverbial lead balloon. The irony is that in this environment, even Politically Correct alternatives like wind generators are being stymied by District Plans because they are blights on the landscape!

One thing this whole brouhaha does reinforce - as usual, government is not the solution, it is the problem. And while the natives remain so pro-Big Government & anti-business, they have no business getting restless. The sheeple are getting what they deserve, what?

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