Octopodial Chrome

Lieutenant Colonel James Lacey argues that it’s not Islamic civilisation which is falling to pieces, but Arab civilisation. He points out that Arab civilisation hasn’t made any contributions to the world since 1406 and that the Arab nations spend next to nothing on research or on science. It’s a good read, and as valid now as it was in 2005.

It’s a fundamental principle that if something is priced more cheaply then it’s used more, and if it’s priced more expensively then it’s used less. It’s also a fundamental principle of a free market that a commodity’s price should accurately reflect its cost to produce: a carrot’s price should include the farmer’s time; the alternative uses to which he could put his land (e.g. building condos instead of planting carrots); the cost of extracting the steel for his tractor (including the cost of the mine it was pulled from, the smelter which produced it, the employees which removed it from the ground &c.); the cost of designing said tractor, and so forth and so forth ad infinitum. It should be clear to see that if, for some reason, farmers got free land for carrots then they would produce more carrots, and that carrots would be cheaper, and thus more carrots would be eaten.

It’s less clear to realise that those extra carrots aren’t really free. That free land could have been put to another use—a more productive use (how did it become free anyway; did we all pay taxes to buy it from Peter and sell it to Farmer Paul?). But we see the cheaper carrots in the store and don’t see the park our kids could have enjoyed, or the housing we could have lived in, or the university whose researchers would have discovered a cure for cancer.

Fortunately, most products do more-or-less reflect their cost to produce. One notable exception is food: due to subsidies, some of the worst foods are cheaper than some of the better ones—and Americans are fatter than ever before as a result. Another instance is gasoline. A report on the real cost of gasoline examined all of the costs which go into gasoline production and found that gasoline should cost between $5.60 and $15.14 per gallon. Last I checked, its actual price is around $3 per gallon.

To put it another way: you're already paying between five and fifteen dollars a gallon; you're just not paying it at the pump. If you cut back your gasoline consumption by four gallons a month, you'll save about twelve dollars but will still be paying eight to forty-eight dollars in taxes for those four gallons you didn't use. You can see why it doesn't make sense to cut back on gas usage.

This would explain why the United States uses more gasoline per day than the next twenty nations.