MADNESS OF THE MANDARINS

It's a commonplace to sneer at the ignorance and misconceptions of the great unwashed, yet the news during the past few weeks on a couple of topics reveals that the delusions of the elite in this country are deep.

One is the tsk-tsking over the release of the film United 93, the grim but heroic tale of the first Americans, ordinary Americans, to fight back against the jihadists on September 11th.  Five years later, we are ready for their story.  Indeed it's overdue.  But the mandarins of culture tell us that it's just too soon.  It will only rile us against the enemy.  Hmm, I remember Hollywood coming out with Wake Island only eight months after the fall of our base there to the Japanese.   Something has radically changed in this country when artistic appeals to patriotism in the midst of an existential war are deemed vulgar and hateful.

Today I'll focus upon a drier example of the mad mandarin contempt for us.  It is revealed in their response to the rise in gasoline prices.  It's true that the man in the street often holds beliefs about the most recent price hikes that are economic nonsense, yet the fact remains there is no popular unrest about $3 a gallon gas.  That tells me that John Q. Public doesn't place much confidence in whatever conspiracy theories he might entertain about collusion in fixing high prices for gas.  (Probably for the good reason that he remembers when prices spiked to three bucks after Hurricane Katrina, they dropped when supplies increased.)  Indeed, all the rabble-rousing about gas prices comes from our politicians and pundits who are quick to divine evil running amok in the companies that produce and supply gasoline.

Never do the plain facts spill out from the mandarin diatribe about price-gouging:  [1] A barrel of oil has skyrocketed because the Third World is industrializing faster than new oil fields have been put into production; [2] production of oil has been arbitrarily restricted in the U.S. by declaring off-limits large oil fields  in Alaska, the West Coast, the Florida Gulf Coast, and the Atlantic seaboard; [3] domestic consumption of oil is needlessly high because nuclear energy has been irrationally vilified in this country, although it is the only serious alternative to the use of fossil fuels to produce electricity; [4] gas supplies are subject to price hikes during periods of high demand because NIMBY politics and draconian environmental penalties have stopped the building of any new gasoline refineries in the U.S. for three decades now; [5] the refining capacity problem is further exacerbated by federally mandated special gasoline formulas for different sections of the country, which means that if oil companies don't forecast demand in every part of the country correctly, shortages can result in a gasoline of a particular formula; and [6] that bottled water you buy when you stop at the gas station costs you about eight bucks a gallon.  In regard to that last point:  For all that has to be done to find oil, pump it out of the ground, transport it to a refinery, refine it, pipeline it to your region, and then finally truck it to your gas station, a gallon of gas is remarkably cheap.  That's because competition in gasoline is intense.

These facts are not acknowledged by the ruling class, because Facts #2 through #5 show how they are at fault for high gas prices.  They'll never admit that.  To do so is to question their power to control these things, and they aren't about to give up that power.  Indeed, they want more.  Hence, they rabble-rouse about the evil of Big Oil to get you to acquiesce to that lust of theirs.  So, perhaps there is method in this particular madness of the mandarins.  But it's not to end that will do any of us good.