By Paul Weiser
Moral explanations tend to be circular - "what goes around, comes around." This can make them seem illogical, but - when faults are grievous and unintended consequences pounce - circles abound. Take, for example, "Biofuels."
In the 1970s, reacting petulantly to their third or fourth drubbing from Israel, Arabs colluded with other oil-producing kleptocracies such as Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Indonesia, Mexico and Venezuela to jack up oil prices. After febrile Nixon-Ford-Carter rationing, sweater-wearing and idiotic stumbling around, President Reagan solved the crisis by abandoning rationing to let American ingenuity find more oil and price it to market.
But American liberal idiocy (and kleptocratic petulance) simmered on. Pursuing a fictional strategy for energy independence which called for extracting and refining progressively less American oil rather than more, it hit upon "biofuels" - ethanol derived from field crops (mainly corn) by energy-intensive and polluting processes. This the idiots subsidized heavily.
The result is that last year a quarter of American corn was messily distilled into a pitiful few percent of our gasoline needs; this year it's likely to be 35%. Chasing the lunatic subsidy, fields of other crops are being converted to corn. Countries dependent on imported food - especially the capitals of klepotocracies such as Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico and the like - riot due to, not scarcity, but high prices as the market compensates for American crops now poisonously cooked into ethanol at an enormous but subsidized loss.
And so it comes around. The kleptocrats who jacked up oil prices empowered the idiots who subsidize ethanol; the idiots' "success" in doing so kicks the kleptocrats where it hurts, with regime-destabilizing violence and revolts in their capital cities. Is it worth the cost in stupid subsidies just to see them squirm? Perhaps not... but it could be worth the price to see them hanging from lamp posts.
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