Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 23/05/2001
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Wednesday May 23, 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!]
Nightly on the news we hear about power blackouts in California - a result, we are told, of deregulation. Our own state-worshippers gleefully point to California in their rush to champion government control, not just of electricity, but everything. Closer examination reveals that California's energy industry has been anything but deregulated. For chapter & verse, I recommend a visit to a web site dedicated to the late economist Ludwig von Mises - www.mises.org - where you will find a number of articles on the subject. The latest is by Dr George Reisman, professor of economics at Pepperdine University & author of the mammoth work, Capitalism. His article is called Greens vs Energy, & focuses on the obstruction by environmentalists & politicians in their thrall of new energy projects. Here's part of it:
'When the inevitable consequences of not increasing the supply of energy appear anything but the actual causes. Propositions based on the fact that electricity comes from power plants, and to have more electricity, more power plants are needed, are ignored. The lack of power plants, of crude oil and oil refineries, of natural gas and natural gas pipelines, is considered irrelevant to high prices of power, oil, and gas, and to shortages of these products when prices are not allowed to rise sufficiently.
'Their lack allegedly makes no difference. What explains the high prices and shortages according to the environmentalists is "manipulation" and "price gouging" not frustrated by the environmentalists, would have held prices down, or actually reduced them, and prevented shortages.
'It should be obvious that the environmental movement has become a massive public nuisance, striking at the material well-being of all Americans. This is the literal meaning of its repeated frustration of efforts to find new sources of oil and gas and its repeated prevention of the construction of power plants, refineries, and pipelines.
'The movementıs endlessly repeated demands for "energy efficiency," i.e., producing with less energy per capita, strike at the very heart of the productivity of labor, which requires the use of more energy per capita if the same, very limited, muscular endowment of human beings is to be able to produce more and better goods. Our standard of living depends on the fact that we have augmented our modest human muscle power with ever-greater amounts of manmade horsepower, in the form of engines, motors, and generators, powered by fossil fuels and nuclear energy. This is what the environmentalists wish to undo...
'The environmentalists make no secret of the direction in which they are trying to move us. Bill McKibben, one of the leading representatives of the movement writes: "The environmentally sane standard of living for a population our current size would probably be somewhere between that of the average Englishman and of the average Ethiopian 'In an age of class-action lawsuits, isnıt it time to consider one on behalf of every American who values his standard of living and has seen it reduced because of the repeated destructive interference of this cabal of self-righteous pests?'
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