Red and Green

Today's Wall Street Journal editorializes on the current intellectual malaise of the House, Senate, and would-be Presidents on what we can now legitimately term our "energy crisis" ("Windfall Profits for Dummies," May 3). Here is a succinct list of contradictions these shape-shifting weasels present as policy solutions to the American public:

1. They want lower prices, but don't want more production to increase supply.

2.They want oil "independence," but they've declared off limits most of the big sources of domestic oil that could replace foreign imports.

3. They want Americans to use less oil to reduce greenhouse gases, but they protest higher oil prices that reduce demand.

4. They want more oil company investment, but they want to confiscate the profits from that investment.

Until someone within the government Leviathan itself begins to articulate these obvious incoherences, Pelosi and the Nancy Boys, Chuckie Schumer, and both of the economically illiterate Democrat candidates for President will continue to confuse the public and to demonize the one group that has the wherewithal to solve the issue--the oil and gas industry.

For Democrats, demagoguery on this issue is second nature--actually, demagoguery per se is second nature to Democrats. But these contradictions that the Journal identifies are the surface emanations of the underlying commitments to which the Democratic party continues to cling. The barely concealed Marxism underlying their antipathy to corporations (whose profits are only the expropriation of the surplus value created by the workers) is in league with, but also in tension with, the new green sensibility that now passes for public morality. Thus, we cannot tap our own huge reservoirs of energy because to do so runs into the de facto veto exercised by Green Peace and the Sierra Club--Thou Shalt Not Do Anything That Forwards Modern Capitalist Industrial Society. But even as they vilify capitalists and industrialists, even the Marxists know deep down that that's where the money is, and if the greens ever succeeded in their project to reduce us all to noble Neolithic-era savages, they would have precious little title to the name "Progressive".

This coalition of Red and Green may be an easy fit under the Democratic tent, but the resultant doctrinal inconsistencies extending into our public policy are really beginning to threaten our economy and our world leadership.

Any Republicans out there listening?