When gas prices fall, is it is good or bad for the economy? Read Charles Krauthhammer’s opinion and compare it to mine.Seems we both believe in Don Quixote.
Economics 101 Supply and Demand teaches when prices fall on a product, demand will rise. This is good for the purses of present oil and energy consumers, but bad for the economy and welfare of future generations of consumers. Why? Because there is not an infinite supply of gas and oil. In time, as the supplies decrease, prices will rise.
So what is my point in relation to wise King Solomon? He wrote and said two things three thousand years ago that I believe we should start considering doing now.
One
A good man leaves his wealth to his posterity, but a sinner amasses wealth for a righteous man. (Proverb 13:22)
A good man transmits the material benefits which accrue from his goodness to his posterity, but a sinner’s wealth is held in store (not for his own posterity but) for a righteous man. ‘A man plants olive trees for his grandchildren.’ In there is the contrast between the righteous man who eats his fill, and the evil man who never have enough to eat and suffer the pangs of hunger. (Proverbs McKane)
Two
Solomon’s Prayer of Dedication
…36then hear in heaven and forgive the sin of Your servants and of Your people Israel, indeed, teach them the good way in which they should walk. And send rain on Your land, which You have given Your people for an inheritance.(Kings 8:36)
Points of This Post.
We seem to believe future technology will discover new sources of energy. However, there will never be any commodity or technology that will be less costly or efficient than our present inheritance of natural resources which were the result of millions of years of time and evolution.
In One, my point is that I predict our future generations will look back at our generation and judge us to be foolish, sinful, and greedy for wasting away rather than wisely preserving our natural resources of energy.
In Two, start praying that God will provide for our future generations.
My Personal Recommendation
All world leaders take a time out from warring with one another to best serve their national interests to control energy sources. Then all have a pow wow to agree to end the economics of supply and demand pricing for natural energy resources, and instead focus on slowing down depletion by investing and managing alternative sources NOW.
If some nations will not agree and decide to instead continue to terrorize and war to satisfy their selfish interests, all the nation who agree, join together and agree not to buy their oil or products that they obtained by warring with their fellow brothers in mankind.
And, yes one of my favorite heroes is Don Quixote, The Man From La Mancha. I also believe this. What the world needs now in addition to love is wisdom.
Regards and good will blogging.
References
Wikipedia Supply and Demand
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand
Veterans Day The Soldier, Citizen, and Sin of Pride, and the comments.
http://citizentom.com/2014/11/11/for-veterans-day-the-soldier-the-citizen-and-the-sin-of-pride/
Greenpeace Founder on Why He Left Group
https://rudymartinka.wordpress.com/2014/10/30/greenpeace-founder-on-why-he-left-group/
King Solomon, Cats Paws, Dogs Vomit
https://rudymartinka.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/king-solomon-cats-paws-and-dogs-vomit/
KIng Solomon on Sheep OIL
https://rudymartinka.wordpress.com/2014/09/27/king-solomon-on-sheep-oil/
Thank you for the link and an interesting post.
Keith DeHavelle makes some interesting points on this subject in his comment here, http://citizentom.com/2014/11/11/for-veterans-day-the-soldier-the-citizen-and-the-sin-of-pride/#comment-55987. I cannot say I entirely agree with him, but that is because I “I don’t know” correctly states my position. Nevertheless, Keith makes a strong case; he should be taken seriously.
Will we eventually run out of fossil fuels? Given current trends, the answer is yes. However, I have no idea how long current trends will persist.
Consider this example. We very nearly exterminated whales. Then people started using kerosene instead of whale oil. With respect to fossil fuels, something very similar may happen. As Keith observed in his comment:
Then again, solar power satellites may be too costly, or we may not be able to find a safe and efficient way to transmit power from the satellites to the ground. I don’t know. What I do know is that putting the government in charge of the research will not help. I worked at NASA for four years, and I have never seen such a waste of smart people and good money in all my life. Working there helped to make a Conservative out of me.
Consider the story of Joseph in the Genesis. After the Joseph explained the Pharaoh’s dreams — related them to a seven-year famine that would start after seven good harvests — the Pharaoh put Joseph in charge of preparing for the famine.
When happened during the famine? At first the Egyptians bought the grain they needed from the Pharaoh. So the Pharaoh ended up owning everything his people had. Then, when they ran out of money, the Egyptians sold themselves to the Pharaoh. Thus, the Pharaoh owned his people, and he fed his property.
Grateful to be alive, and revering their Pharaoh, the Egyptians accepted their reduction in status gracefully. Nevertheless, this little bit of history illustrates what we can expect whenever we put the government in charge of anything. Government programs best serve the best connected.
The problem with government-run research is that it tends to divert a lot of money to the well-connected, and not much research actually gets done. We get a big bureaucracy and a good sideshow, but most of the money is wasted.
You want people to use less fossil fuels? We already tax the dickens out of fossil fuels, and those taxes already discourages us from using fossil fuels. But perhaps further increases may be feasible.
You want to increase taxes on fossil fuels in exchange for lowering income taxes? That might work. Just be careful our government doesn’t raise taxes so high or so fast people cannot adjust. If we get a black market in fossil fuels, that will make things worst, not better.
Meanwhile, get government out of the way. Let free enterprise do what it can do better than government. Let inventive people search for alternative energy sources. Let entrepreneurs risk their money and earn profits when people like what they produce. Insist the lawyers who run our government do the job they are supposed to do: protecting our God-given rights.
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Government use of tax breaks has always been an incentive for personal wealth and industry.
Problem with energy and space exploration is the cost to start up a private industry is the enormous risk or investment needed for these high tech endeavors slows down the development.
Plus like I believe they can never compete in cost with fossil. Amortization of energy costs is as I have stated needed in my opinion..
Regards and good will blogging
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“Government use of tax breaks has always been an incentive for personal wealth and industry.”
You are using “always” when you really mean the past century and a half, or so. And these are incentives against personal wealth (except for a few cronies) and industry. The US government incentivized post civil war railroad cronies to build cross-country tracks, whereas private industry did a far less expensive, and far safer, job of it. The subsidized railroads out-competed each other in waste and fraud.
Decades later, they did all of this again with steamships. There, private industry completely won the day, and the government subsidies finally, after years, shut down. And the false competition and waste finally ended. We did not learn any lessons from this, either.
You’re aware that two different completely private space companies are delivering supplies to the ISS right now, aren’t you? Yes, government incentives (to others) supporting waste and fraud and “turf protection” slowed them down. But they made it.
===|===============/ Keith DeHavelle
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Do you believe those two private space companies could have raised enough capital that was spent by taxpayers and NASA to develop the technology they have been handed.?. n
As wasteful as NASA probably was, without Government funding not only would the US never have gotten up to space, Russia, China, either.
Regards and good will blogging.
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NASA did not hand SpaceX their technology; SpaceX designed and built it from scratch. Orbital Sciences uses a different approach, but it is not from NASA either.
But you suggested it couldn’t be done through private industry, and haven’t commented upon learning that it is already being done.
NASA has fought this for years, and has been using regulations and lobbying for statutes to keep private industry out of space. They were apoplectic over the idea of Dennis Tito going to space commercially and worked hard to stop him. This had an amusing backfire effect, and I need to write down the story of “Tito’s Toilet Training.”
I am one of the unpaid citizen lobbyists who has gone to Washington to talk sense to Congressional staff. They are gradually coming around, and NASA is now required to use private enterprise if it’s better than what they’ve got. NASA hates this, and hates commercial space development in general (this was one of the plot elements in Dan Brown’s Deception Point1. But that’s all a free market needs; a fair chance without government interference through taxes and other “incentives.”
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
From the Wikipedia entry on the plot:
I was amused and astounded to see this little group of people (helping to advance the human exploration and settlement of space) portrayed as major villains. I’ve been in that group for two decades or so.
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Hard to believe SpaceX could not have benefited from NASA engineering which has been in existence sin the Kennedy Era and the rocket engineering beginning with Hitler.
I agree that private will be more efficient than government enterprises. However, I find it hard to believe private could have “got off the ground” without the massive investments by taxpayers to fund space exploration.
I am wondering if Virgin spaceships will continue after the crash. Insurance companies will back away to agree to cover space mishaps.
Regards and good will blogging
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Remember that when you say “NASA engineering” you are primarily talking about the engineering that NASA pays for through subcontractors. NASA did not build Saturn and Apollo and the Lunar Module.
All engineering benefits by what has been learned before. From NASA in recent times, it’s become a “how not to do this” lesson. It shouldn’t be that way, but they are becoming simply an engineering-educated (some of them) bunch of government bureaucrats.
I was hired to teach large-scale microcomputer system standards and design to the Social Security Administration. I spent one week a month there for quite a while, and my experience with them is illustrated by a poster on the supervisor’s cubicle wall:
I don’t think I could salvage more than two in ten of those people. They’d been thoroughly poisoned.
Even their approach to hiring me reflects bureaucratic waste. They knew who they wanted, but took out ads in every major city in the country listing qualifications, knowing that I was the the only person on the planet who had them. Then they hired me through an intermediate subcontractor (Martin Marietta) who marked up my rates tremendously.
I deal with the government now all the time. The feds spend enough money “studying the homeless situation” that they could buy every homeless person in the country a house, every year. But instead, the money is absorbed by the bureaucracy.
Back to space: The accident, while tragic, will not stop the advance. One man pulling the wrong control at the wrong time, if that’s indeed what happened, cost him his life — but cannot be allowed to cost mankind’s future.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
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Free trade is great if it Is fair trade. The premise that Congress agreed to was that US dollars paid for imports would return to the US when trade partners bought US products.
Since jobs losses result when jobs are outsourced because US workers cannot compete with labor being paid $200 a month when a US worker has to pay $900 a month rent, the trade must be balanced
Our trade deficits are one half trillion dollars a year. That equates to four million US jobs and workers that have to now subsist working part time jobs for minimum wages and apply for government subsidies like food stamps, rent subsidies and health care, etc. etc.
A one half trillion dollar trade imbalance should never have been allowed by Bush.He ran up a ten trillion dollar deficit by cutting taxes, starting a war, etc.
Balance the trade is the key to fair trade in my opinion. Do not take the US dollars back by selling bonds to fund the national deficits partly caused because fifty million US workers no longer make a livable wage and as a result do not pay taxes.
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I updated (ud) this post to include Charles Krauthhammer ‘ s opinion. He also seems to agree with your comment suggestion to raise price of gas and offset the tax with a tax credit.
Regards and good will blogging
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Dr. Krauthammer, paraphrased:
No, I do not agree with Charles Krauthammer in this notion. He often has good things to say, but he has yet to completely shake off his history of being a big-government liberal speechwriter for a Democrat opposing Ronald Reagan. He’s still thinking in terms, despite is protestations, of “feeding the maw” of big government to solve problems.
When we are increasing our debt by nearly a trillion dollars a year, but our approach is to take more money and add to spending, we are not serious about the core issues.
The outsourcing of jobs is not anywhere near as large an issue as bringing in millions of illegals to take current jobs — and merely making them legal doesn’t make it better. According to OSHA, 45% of construction workers in the entire country are not American citizens, and 25% of all construction workers are illegals. This is not a case of “jobs Americans can’t do” — it is jobs we’ve always done, but no longer can compete because we have brought “overseas low-wage workers” here.
==============/ Keith DeHavelle
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You wrote: “Free trade is great if it Is fair trade.”
This is, unfortunately, poisonously wrong. You’re not talking about enforcing contracts, which is one of the legitimate duties of the Federal government. You are, instead, supporting the intrusion of government bureaucrats and busybodies into commerce, injecting whatever notion they have at the moment (driven by polls and power-lust) of what is “fair.”
In so doing, you continue to throw spanner-wrenches into a mechanism that has served mankind extraordinarily well. Free trade, to the extent that it has been allowed, is what has lifted humankind from abject misery. Restricting it by making it conform to your notion do jour of “fair” is restricting benefits to all mankind.
Let businesses fail that do not perform in ways that please customers. Let customers take their business elsewhere. Stay the heck out of the way! The so-called “ugly” drive for profits is arguably the most positive practical force that has worked its effect across the human race, though governments love to cripple it to obtain cashflow and power. There, with the bureaucrats, lies the real, evil greed.
==============/ Keith DeHavelle
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Fair trade to me is being fair to workers of both trade partners. US workers cannot compete with foreign workers paid $200 a month when a US worker has to pay $800 a month rent.
The WTO agrees that huge deficit trade imbalances are harmful. The current US trade deficit is one half trillion dollars or four million livable wage jobs.
World trade was sold to US Congress by selling the idea that all US dollars would return to the US when the trade partner buys US goods in return.
That is not what has happened as evidenced by one half trillion dollar trade imbalance that harms US workers by only making minimum wage jobs available to them of stocking retail merchandise with foreign made products instead of manufacturing the products and earning a livable wage.
So until workers on both sides of borders make the same amount of wages, trade must be somehow made fair to US workers who would prefer to make a livable wage rather than make a minimum wage and then have to apply for food stamps, rent subsidies, free health care, school lunches, etc
Regards and good will blogging.
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Have you ever thought about adding a little bit more than just your articles?
I mean, what you say is fundamental and all. Nevertheless think
about if you added some great photos or videos to give your
posts more, “pop”! Your content is excellent but with pics
and videos, this blog could certainly be one of the best in its field.
Terrific blog!
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