Capitalism/financial crisis: oil and gas discussion

I used to work for one of the largest of the petrochemical companies, and one thing they never appreciated and, in fact, tortured me out of my job and pension, is that I'm one of the best friends that "oil companies" and producers will ever have. That is because I can demonstrate that one can conserve the environment and also full out utilize natural resources such as oil and gas.

In fact, it is important to realize that one will never defeat poverty and raise the poor unless the price of gas is consistently cheap. Fuel is one of the foundational items in the "subsistence" side of true capitalism (see previous blogs on the subject of capitalism for my definition of subsistence and surplus). All you have to do is look at impoverished countries, such as Haiti, and many countries in Africa, who have stripped the landscape of every scrap of wood in order to survive, so that they can burn the wood to cook food and warm their dwellings. Humans cannot live without fuel and that's why fuel, such as petroleum, exists on earth, dummies.

For those of you who do not believe in the true God, the one who has deliberately provided all that humans need to survive on earth, including petroleum, here is the way that you can understand my point using only rational logic. Life does not tend to evolve and then thrive in conditions that are hostile to life. I mean, duh. Think about it. While scientists often discover microbes and other life living in extreme conditions (under ocean vents, at the depths of the ocean, in boiling sulfur springs, and so forth), it's not as though those particular forms of life then exploded into high numbers and took over the earth. We aren't watching millions of sulfur spring microbes commuting to work in cities each day. They are confined to where they can "thrive," relative to their limited population. Hence human beings now number in the billions precisely because petroleum and other fuels are abundant. Humans would never have achieved dominance, or perhaps even permanence as a species, if fuel available for their use was not abundant and easy to obtain.

This is why one must understand that petroleum is not the source of gasoline for those evil drivers of gas guzzlers who are just running around wasting "precious oil," that precious oil, I guess, that is so precious that it's supposed to remain locked in the ground forever. Petroleum is a life giving and humanity ensuring subsistence product.

If you have not already, read my previous post about understanding God where I discuss what it means to be poor. Here is where I am going to show you how to understand "cheap gas prices" as being both a rational and a faith based necessity.

Humans cannot survive and they can not thrive without cheap or free access to subsistence levels of fuel. That is most obviously seen as an example when every year some people freeze to death because they cannot obtain fuel for warmth in the winter. The most basic need of human is the ability to keep themselves warm when it is cold, and to cook their food so they can digest it. For those of you young people who have had such a terrible education, here is an explanatory aside for you. Early prehistoric humans learned to cook their food not because they like it hot, but because it is necessary for digestion to take place. Humans cannot digest food, especially meat, that is raw. It's not a matter of aesthetics or preference, but an essential process to cook food to break it down into digestible and nourishing components. It is simply fantasy to image that humans could ever prance through vegetarian gardens, plucking raw and uncooked food solely, and thus "not harming the 'environment.'" You don't have a lot of babies and you do not stay healthy if you do not eat cooked food, for not just the digestion reason, but also hygiene. As you know, if you have a good education, bacteria are both essential to life ("good bacteria" lives in human bodies in a symbiotic relationship... yeah, "yuck" I know, but that's one of the things one should be glad for and just ignore the aesthetics of it all) but bacteria are also harmful (the "bad" ones) and constantly evolve and so humans can never be lax about hygiene.

This is all so obvious, but capitalism (and the war against poverty) has become so screwed up and misunderstood, even being derailed in many places, that I have to help you go back to "the beginning" of understanding. Those of you who have been through prolonged power outages know what I mean. If it happened in winter you were really cold and you also could not cook your food. Throughout human history and to the modern times people lost their lives as simply as that. In developed countries there are shelters and hopefully other alternatives during crisis. But it is an instructive reminder to the "take it for granted" western countries that fuel for cooking and heating means the difference for everyone (no superhumans here) between life and death. You can even see it in the converse, when fuel is lacking for cooling during heat waves. You can search on the Internet to read about the hot summer heat wave in France where hundreds or thousands of people actually died of heat exhaustion. Fuel and the devices that use fuel are essential to heat or cool humans, to cook their food, and to keep their immediate environment sterilized from the bad types of bacteria and other contaminants.

So how does the obvious need for fuel to heat, cook and clean translate into fighting about how much gas ("petrol") should cost for driving cars? Well, how did people "earn" their living in the thousands of years up until the last century? They did not have "jobs" and they did not receive "paychecks." So what did they do? They grew their own food, built their own homes, and made their own clothing. Their "job" was to eke out life from the land around them, and their "paycheck" was to live another day, another year, and to feed their hopefully growing families. People used to "earn their living" by living.

But now in modern western society, one is unable to simply "live" to live, no matter how "back to the earth" one may try to be. And that is not a bad thing because as I explained, that is the birth of capitalism, true capitalism. People made their own individual living off of the land, aka "subsistence" living, until they made "extra," aka "surplus," which they could sell on the "free market" for cash, and also provide more of to others who were too aged, sickly, young, weak or ill or otherwise occupied in order to survive. That is how "farmers' markets" arose. Farmers took their produce into the city, where people could not grow their own food, in order to raise their surplus cash. But farmers were also providing those who could not grow their own food with subsistence. This is what every generation of human has done, and the birth of capitalism, since the beginning of organized civilization until the last century. No one had "jobs" or "paychecks" until the Industrial Revolution in the 1800's. Further, in times of crisis, as recently as World War II, countries were sufficiently and predominantly agriculture based so that much of the population could turn to that tradition way of life with ease, growing their own food and fixing their own homes and providing other essential needs.

Today, however, in western society, one needs a car even if one is living a "subsistence" life, which basically means working a minimum wage job or receiving public benefits. One genuinely cannot live and thrive without a car and cheap gasoline. I don't know why people persist in cartoon character arguments about driving big SUV's or whether they will drive far for family vacations when the real issue is that one cannot eat, live in a home, earn a paycheck or receive entitlement benefits, send your children to school, or receive medical care without a car. The idiocy and elitism of the "green" arguments make me want to bang my head against the wall, regularly. Western society "greens" have not a clue that everyone is, ultimately, part of the "poor." Even someone who is wealthy can find themselves suddenly in a situation where if there were no fuel, and the grocery stores were empty, and there was no heat in the winter, a situation that reminds them that the barrier between care free survival and possibly dying in need is a barrier that is very thin. Everyone is "poor" in the sense that everyone needs and is dependent upon somehow receiving reliable sources of the subsistence goods and services essential to life. To structure society so that cars and gasoline are needed for life itself, for subsistence, and then to not use all of the American' natural resources to keep petroleum and gas (both petrol and natural gas) available and cheap is a fundamental error and outrageous.

Jacking up minimum wage is not the answer since that's part of the inflation of subsistence, which cannot be tolerated. The price of all essential subsistence goods should be LOW. Can not people see the insanity of forcing minimum wage up and up so that the gas pump can take away more and more until it's not even worth it to work? The minimum wage would be just fine if there were plentiful apartments that cost $100 a month, if food were as cheap as it should be, and if gas (petrol) was under a dollar a gallon and jobs and schools were nearby one's residence. There is absolutely no reason that technology and good will should not have already by now resulted in a society in the USA where one could live a good life in security at that stratum, and where others can still do their ambitious capitalism thing in order to accumulate wealth.

This is my point I alluded to in my previous post. In the time of the Bible everyone was "poor," if you define poor as we do today. Everyone in the Bible was "poor" because they lived lives that were vulnerable and subsistence based. Thus when the Bible talks about taking care of the poor, they did not mean poor the way we mean it today. The "poor" in the Bible were those in survival crisis. That is why the poor was constantly defined as the widow, the orphan and the lame. When Jesus said that the poor will always be with us, he meant people whose very survival was in immediate crisis. Jesus did not mean those of few resources and subsistence living because.... the "poor" is "us." For example, up until medieval times most families did not own even one dish or one spoon. Having a spoon was considered incredibly important and listed in last wills and testaments as a family legacy. Even the wealthiest kings lived sparsely in modern terms. I mean, for example, they didn't have a set of bed sheets for each day of the week. Until recently people lived in conditions that we call "poor" today. The difference is that they were able to live that way, unless they fell into crisis (for example, the bread winner died), and even then, so long as there were sons and uncles their survival was assured.

What has happened in modern times is that there has developed a lack of understanding of the relationship, one that should be affirmative and positive, among capitalism and fighting poverty. I'll use the word poverty because that is one that is easiest to make resonate to modern mindsets. True capitalists would have not used the "free market" to raise prices and availability of subsistence goods and certainly not to eliminate jobs that allow subsistence living. When it comes to the "surplus," sure, knock yourself out and try to "build a better mousetrap" in order to accumulate wealth. But as I've admonished before, "making a killing" took over the "make a good living" mindset, and that has codified and enforced poverty, not only in the United States, but throughout the world. (Putting aside for the moment equally egregious causes of poverty such as human conflict and war).

So who is in poverty today? You can begin to see now where I am leading you in this analysis. In some ways even the most impoverished in western countries are wealthier than most of humans were through most of their existence. People skip meals, go hungry and cannot afford the healthiest food, but generally they do not starve to death in western countries (except, oddly enough, in a new child abuse fad of starving one of your children to death while taking drugs or watching video games or something). So "traditional" poverty in history, and in parts of the world, carry with it a genuine risk of starvation. Contemporary western poverty tends to not result in starvation, but it is still wrong and it is still cruel. Some on the right like to gloat that no one starves because we have such a great country. Well, I say that even one child going to bed hungry one night is outrageous, and I resent the cartoon characterization of hunger by those on the right. The left, however, all errs because, like I said, they are so blinded by efforts to bring "equality" that they do not understand how to actually work the system in the proper way, which is NOT to keep inflating pay, benefits and prices. If the left had their way I guess everyone would get paid a million dollars an hour but then pay four hundred thousand dollars a gallon of gas... oh, wait, for ethanol, ha ha ha. I mean, then we would not be "harming" the earth, or so they would say.

If the United States in particular had cultivated the combination of capitalism with ethics and the American dream of making "a good living" (but not "a killing") this would be a far different and better country today than it is. Many people would be able to live in homes or apartments that cost one fourth or less than they do on the average today. They could earn modest livings in good jobs where their dollar "really stretched," buying cheap food, gas, energy for their home, and needs for their children. I cannot believe how the word "inflation" has become marginalized to mean some sort of relativistic measure ("Oh, it's not that bad from year to year or decade to decade" they claim) while prices that are "normal" now should never have been a fraction as high as they are now. Technology is supposed to make things cheaper and more available, at higher not lower quality. I just find it incredible how the prices of subsistence needs have been gouged into permanent states of inflated high prices allowing the few to "make a killing." Convincing people that their homes with rising prices were their "bank accounts" were part of this unconscionable manipulation of subsistence sectors of the economy.

Unlike the greens of today, I remember what polluting cars smelled like, but thanks to using technology not even a busy street emits smog or the smell of cars (except in special cases such as low wind cities). People learn how to do things better. Greens never give humans the credit that is due to them and only look for the next environmental "enemy" (without paying attention to real problems, like not enough sewage treatment plants, or the need to break the cycle of poverty so that people do not war against the environment as they try to survive). Off shore drilling is another example. In the 1970's I was against off shore oil drilling on the coast of California because I felt they had not demonstrated that they could do so safely in a high risk area. Over thirty years later, look at the Gulf of Mexico and witness how there has been no disaster even when the worst of hurricanes struck. I still am not thrilled about the thought of California off shore drilling, but who can argue against more drilling in the other areas? It is the same with ANWAR in the Arctic. I was against drilling there in the 1970's because I knew that humans needed more time to perfect their safety measures and to properly assess environmental impact. Well, they have, in my opinion. All the greens do is dart from one demonizing to the next, without either genuinely fighting poverty or genuinely protecting the ecosystems that are most at risk.

"If I had been asked" I would have had nuclear power plants, at least one or two additional refineries in the USA, more domestic oil production, low polluting but fun cars, and darn cheap gasoline (petrol). There would not have been a single family in the USA who would have had to worry about heating or cooling their homes and cooking their food, or driving their car to work, if they must. That's what the freaking nuclear, oil, coal is there for! Further, people would be much more astute and advanced in safety and environmentally protective know-how because they'd actually have been "doing it" for forty years, not arguing about it like ill informed and unethical neurotics.

I just thought of a term for what many who oppose full use of domestic energy resources are doing. They are doing some sort of "reverse colonialism." When many earnest young pups in the 1960's began speaking up they criticized colonialism, where developed countries would go into less developed countries and mine their natural resources. And that is, for sure, an area where great wrong has been done. However, here's what's weird, if you think about it. Today's earnest young pups don't want America to fully utilize their own natural resources, making many Americans feel like they are being colonialists, but in their own country? It's like they took the valid question of whether it is fair to develop and exploit natural resources in a subordinate country, and now turned it back on ourselves saying what, exactly? That it is "unfair" for America to use their own resources? There is a very strange psychology behind this, one that is not healthy or balanced.

I have of course more that I can say about the overall question of poverty, but I wanted to write here specifically about my views regarding the stupid arguing and reluctance to use America's own domestic natural resources, specifically oil and gas. Also, as I've alluded to in previous discussions of the economy, we will never balance our budget so long as we send so much of our financial resources overseas to obtain oil that we could generate at home. A country that is not sound fiscally cannot raise and sustain its entire population out of poverty.

So I'll leave you now with your own thoughts about this most recent material, until the next time. I hope that you have found this helpful.