Invisible Hand Wringing

The Washington Post traces the complex consequences of a world gone thirsty for gasoline. From a cabbie in Beijing to a family in Nigeria, everybody’s jonesing for cheap petrol. The more socialist forms of government are trying to control the price – which always results in hilarity, as greater and greater portions of the tax budget go against covering the spread – until this becomes impossible, and the government implodes. Even the pseudo-capitalist Europeans are considering such horrors as tax cuts - which the WP delicately calls “subsidies”.

Some on the left are reassured by the thought that it’s only the hyper-greedy class of SUV Americans that are taking it in the pants when it comes to gas prices, while developing, sensible economies take the bike to work or get pulled along behind water buffalo. This is a pleasing mental image for some folks, but at odds with a world powered by fuel, from the slums of Jakarta to the waterways of Kowloon. Poor people need gasoline too, and with little margin for error, they are the ones hurt most by disruptions to supply, or government-muddled attempts to artificially influence price.

There’s a dilemma here: When it comes to matters of religion, many people lose their proverbial shit at the notion of “imposing beliefs” on others. Yet many of these same people are convinced about the righteousness of their economic understanding of the universe - in terms of who has too much or too little, or what constitutes a fair market price. This thinking adores unregulated social behavior, but but is schoolmarmishly distrustful of individual economic judgment. Folks will give themselves too easily to greed, you see.

It’s easy for me to disparage this kind of sanctimony, but the dilemma comes into play with the Wal-Mart effect: If everyone goes after the lowest price – over time, competition is destroyed, opportunities for growth are stifled, and culture is eventually flattened into a commodity-driven monotony of grey. The irony of poverty in America is that it’s truly a poverty of spirit, a ghetto of materialism, where most people have cars, air conditioning, and even own their homes (if these facts are discomforting, read the U.S. Census data yourself). Poor people want crappy TVs built by poorer people in other countries, and who’s to say they are wrong for wanting that? Conservatives like this economic behavior, but fret over the absence of spiritual values. Liberals are powerless to decry greed by an underclass because of oversensitive identity politics, and somehow want to blame the corporations for meeting their needs.

And the irony of poverty in the world is how many millions of people want to live like the poorest of Americans.