Free markets are the solution

By Richard A. Viguerie

 

As usual in a crisis, liberals are trying to take advantage of the situation. They are using the issue of high energy prices to push their agenda of oppressive regulation, ultra-high taxes, and the diversion of many billions of taxpayers’ dollars into “alternative fuel” efforts that, with few exceptions, are corporate-welfare scams.

Liberals want us to forget that they spent years pushing for higher prices. The New York Times, in an October 24, 2005 editorial, claimed that, “Cheap gas is no longer compatible with a secure nation, a healthy environment or a healthy economy – if ever it was.” On March 26, 2006, CNN’s Jack Cafferty said, “I hope gas prices go as high as they have to go to get the rest of these morons off the road in these big Hummers with the four wheel drive and the obscuring of the view for everybody else on the road...” The Christian Science Monitor, on May 12 of this year, in an editorial entitled “Why Pump Prices Need to Stay High,” declared, “Rather than prevent $4-a-gallon gas now, legislators should welcome it.”

Barack Obama June 10, 2008 on CNBC: “I think I would have preferred a gradual adjustment.” Which is to say, he’s for making life uncomfortable for Americans, just more slowly.

In their desire to “punish” higher gas consumption by some, liberals are willing to make gas, home fuel, and all food and goods transported to stores more expensive. To “punish” Cadillac drivers, liberals have in fact punished working families – and the elderly and the poor are the hardest hit – by high costs of oil.

And liberals want us to forget how their policies pushed us toward their goal of higher gas prices. In fact, they want “Big Oil,” Bush, Republicans, and conservatives to get the blame for what they did.   And liberals can’t let our problems be solved, because then we wouldn’t need liberals anymore!

We can make this a “teaching moment” by helping America and the world see the effect that liberal policies have on people’s lives. By making energy more expensive, liberal policies make people poorer. By keeping us energy-dependent on foreign governments, including repressive regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, liberal policies make the world a more dangerous place. By making energy more expensive and preventing use of domestic energy resources, liberals are causing the loss of American jobs. And by bottling up domestic energy resources through regulation, liberals encourage OPEC and other foreign oil sources to keep their prices inflated.

How did liberals accomplish these things?

They deliberately keep trillions of barrels of oil stuck in the ground, right here in the United States and offshore.

• Exploration and drilling for oil is banned in the Alaskan wasteland, even though the area proposed for such use is tiny – 2000 acres, an area smaller than Washington Dulles Airport, in a “wildlife refuge” of 19,600,000 acres, about the size of South Carolina.
• Of the 279 million acres of land under federal management where oil and natural gas could potentially be extracted, most is unavailable for exploration and drilling. Some 62% of all onshore lands are completely off-limits, and another 30% are tightly restricted.
• The government does not allow development of oil shale and tar sands in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
• The government does not allow new drilling for oil in the Outer Continental Shelf, where there’s an estimated 86 billion barrels of undiscovered recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered recoverable natural gas. While U.S. companies can’t drill 100 miles off our shores, others, such as the partnership of Communist China and Cuba, can.

Meanwhile…

• Due to excessive regulation and environmental protests, not a single oil refinery has been built in the United States in over 30 years.
• For the same reasons, not a single nuclear power plant has been licensed in the United States in over 30 years.
• Liberal policies have tightly restricted the use of coal, which is abundant in the United States.
• Government regulations issued by liberals require that gasoline be reformulated for different regions of the country and different times of the year, causing simultaneous surpluses of some formulations and shortages of others, driving prices up and creating price disparities between different areas.
• Liberal regulations also require that gasoline blends include ethanol, which pollutes worse than gasoline, furthers the destruction of the rainforest so that land can be freed up for growing corn, and drives up the price of everything related to corn, from eggs (chicken feed is mostly corn) to soda pop (which is sweetened with corn syrup).   By the way, about one-third of recent increases in food prices worldwide have been attributed to ethanol, which means that ethanol has put tens of millions of people in poor countries at risk for starvation. A tank of ethanol uses enough corn to feed a person for a year.
• Liberals raised taxes on gasoline so high that the government makes roughly four times as much on each gallon as the oil companies do. (Why doesn’t John McCain call that “obscene"?)
• And liberals hike oil prices indirectly by engaging in out-of-control government spending and over-regulation of investments, driving down the value of the dollar and making everything bought from other countries (such as oil) more expensive.

We need to make it clear to the American people that liberals are standing in the way of cheaper and more abundant energy. Americans aren’t radical environmentalists. Rather, we are, as a whole, practical and responsible conservationists. For example, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, Americans support drilling off the coasts of Florida and California by 67% to 18%. That support included 57% of Democrats. 

We can turn this issue around on the liberals. We’ve done it before.

In the 1970s, during an earlier energy crisis, liberals tried to take over the energy sector, with such policies as government price controls and “windfall profits taxes.” The result: They created gas lines, odd-even rationing, and Jimmy Carter’s Thermostat Police, all of which helped elect Ronald Reagan president. (Reagan then deregulated energy, which caused prices to drop and supplies to become abundant. “The economic realities of the marketplace,” he said, “have done more to bring down the price of oil than all those years of frenetic government regulating.”)

In the 1980s, liberals tried to dominate the foreign-policy debate, putting hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets in opposition to President Reagan’s policies on the Cold War. The result: They stigmatized themselves, for decades, as people who cozy up to dictators and who try to make America weak. 

In the 1990s, liberals attempted, with HillaryCare, a government takeover of the most important one-seventh of the American economy. The result: They produced such revulsion at the prospect of bureaucratic healthcare rationing that the American people gave the Republicans control of Congress for the first time in 40 years.

This time, as in the 1970s, liberals think they can use high energy prices to expand their power at the expense of all Americans. The liberal energy policies that concentrate power in Washington need to be repealed and replaced with practical and responsible policies based in the free market, policies that will open domestic energy production and reduce our dependency on foreign sources. This will:

• reduce energy prices for all Americans including working families, the poor and the elderly;
• reduce the costs of food and goods that must be transported to the market;
• increase our own security, and reduce world tensions;
• not just save American jobs being lost due to high energy costs, but actually increase the number of American jobs needed to tap into our vast but currently unused energy sources; and
• bring down the costs of what foreign oil we do import by using domestic sources (competition works!).