In America, what you will increasingly see is people taking energy concerns into their own hands directly through things like propane generators and storage tanks, rooftop solar panels (which even my Trump worshipping father believes in), micro-hydroelectric generators, etc. We are already dangerously far down the path to authoritarianism. ![]() They’re working towards doing the same for energy concerns because there’s no way other than controlling human behavior on a mass scale that they’ll be able to limit energy usage. Finally, and lastly, when they have fully co-opted the mechanisms of law and power for themselves, comes the authoritarian appeal, the threat of direct individual punishment for ‘undesirable’ behavior. Second, a fear appeal based on the threat of some terrible implacable foe, real or imagined. First a moral or nationalistic appeal to moral duty or patriotism. When human behavior runs contrary to the needs/wants of rulers/politicians/elites, they nudge people towards more ‘desirable’ behavior through various appeals. Whether COVID or climate change, the basic theme is control through fear. Allowing human ingenuity to thrive in a free system is our best chance to solve our economic woes. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention. Our best path out of this mess is to keep the system as free as possible so that the people themselves can innovate their way out of trouble. This only addresses the symptoms, not the cause. But locking people down is not the answer. It definitely needs political guidance and a moral backbone to stay on course. That’s not to say the market economy is perfect or free of its own negative externalities. This time it’s been driven by deep-pocketed Western venture capitalists who became convinced that outsized rents from monopoly interests could compensate for short-term non-profitability. In the communist period, this sort of misdirection was the fault of state bureaucrats who had no idea about what people really wanted. At the heart of the problem is the poorly thought-out subsidisation of negative-sum business models propelled by excessive cheap money in the system. We’ve managed to achieve it in about 14 years. It took 70 years for the communist system to fall apart under the weight of its own capital misallocation. It’s just that the consequences of papering over the flaws in the system rather than properly addressing them only became visible in late 2021. Covid, the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia may have all added accelerants to the fire, but the smoulders were burning ever since the 2008 global financial crisis nearly brought down the system. ![]() Planned economies are what got us into this mess to begin with. Save Energy.’ Or, ‘Bread and energy is cheap if you stay home!’īut here is why we must not fall for this line of logic. It’s even easy to predict the messaging that might feel compelling: ‘Stay Home. In the face of late Soviet-style chaos on the streets, unconstrained inflation, not enough electricity to heat the homes of the vulnerable, the prospect of order emanating from the “temporary” suspension of a market economy might seem appealing. We saw the evidence of that with our own eyes. The public has already been primed to believe that lockdowns were great for generating energy savings. But this could change as soon as energy shortages and supply chain issues begin to bite this winter, which they surely will. For now, the public remains far from receptive.
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