Posted on 06/25/2008 3:05:45 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
[Click HERE to read the cover letter to conservatives that accompanied this article]
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.
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:
No doubt about it. None. Too bad the GOP was too busy with prescription drugs and campaign finance reform to get this corrected while they were in power.
Jim, there’s trying to force social changes upon the American people by keeping energy cost high at a time when we could and should be energy self-reliant and have affordable energy cost for our homes and businesses.
“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.”
A little bit off on a tangent, but this always makes me curious. Is that 2,000 acres the only area in ANWR where they believe crude is located, or is it the only area that’s been explored.
Any estimate as to how much crude might be in that entire 19,600,000 acres?
OUTSTANDING article by Richard A. Viguerie! OUTSTANDING post, Jim Robinson! Thanks to you both. WOOOOOHOOOOO!
this wurkz 4 me
America’s energy problems have been brought to us courtesy of the environmental movement and their political allies – liberal Democrats and timid or complacent Republicans
Correct.
Energy is not traded freely.
It’s a 100% artificial market.
If you like $5/gal, Thank Congress in Nov.
Pray for W and Our Troops
I dunno what these people are smoking, but I swear, they are insane! Sad that they are, but get them out of the public policy making arena!!!!!!
The reality is that there is no energy crises. This is a price of energy crises caused entirely by the devaluation of the dollar and increased demand by China and India.
Adjusted for inflation the price of oil today is apx. equal to $40 a barrel gas in the 70’s. High but not out of sight.
Increased energy production is not likely to decrease prices. Decreasing prices will simply increase demand from China. All that the has to happen for the cost of energy to go down is that the Feds need to stop creating money like crazy. The problem with that solution is that our financial institutions are on the verge of collapse. The collapse of the housing bubble has devastated leveraged investments.
Finally, until the cheap oil from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East is either exhausted or not able to meet demand, it doesn’t make financial sense to try and compete. The Saudi’s cost of oil is in the under $10 dollar a barrel range (closer to a dollar) and our average cost per barrel is closer to $30.
The true energy solution (for us) would be to make more nuclear power plants and/or simply seize the Middle East oil. Neither of which is going to happen.
In a free market there is a tendency toward the equalization of the price of a good in the present with the expected price of that good in the future.
The basis of this principle is the familiar fact that any discrepancy in price creates an opportunity for profit, the exploitation of which reduces the discrepancy.
The activity of speculators therefore serves to transfer supplies from a period on which they are less urgently needed, as indicated by their lower price to a period in which they are more urgently needed, as indicated by their higher price. In this way, it brings about the optimum rate of consumption of limited supplies.
bookmark
And they need to proclaim it loudly and continuously. This is the winning issue of the 2008 elections.
The Congress is controlled by liberals.
GOP was too busy prosecuting Compean and Ramos.
The Congress is controlled by liberals... in both parties.
Viguerie BumP!
agree.
but this is just too complicated for emotional tv viewers that hate “big oil”
to figure out.
/s
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