Guvment

Much umbrage has been taken in certain quarters, and there is a widespread belief among many, at the suggestion that Guvment should be charged with pursuing certain ends by coercive means (including taxation, incentives and legislation). In the view of many, such coercion represents a limitation on our freedom - particularly our freedom of consumption or liberty of bodies - and should be discouraged so that we can allow the flourishing of the free market and the free choice of individuals.

This argument (given all of its simplifications here) is specious. The Guvment is constantly intervening in our market system, helping certain outcomes and hindering others. We may disagree with particular ways it intervenes, but only the most optimistic libertarian "spontaneous order" fundamentalist believes that a political, economic and social order can exist without government (and yes, I have met a few of those).

A good deal of the current order is the result of the partnership of large scale industrial enterprises and Guvment. Many policies favor companies that engage in economies of scale, rather than less efficient smaller scale and local undertakings. The U.S. system has had a long tradition - spanning party lines - of supporting what Lincoln and others called "internal improvements" - canals, railroads, roads, airports, as well as telegraph, telephone, internet, etc. - to expand commerce among and between the States as well as internationally. The growth of Guvment and the increasing scale of the economy increased together, constantly in tandem. It could be argued that this is simultaneously the logic of market capitalism that requires a strong state (of course, a liberal state) in order to expand with firm expectations of stability and enforcement of laws and contracts, and it is the logic of the Constitutional order (modified and interpreted increasingly so along the way), which was designed in significant part to support this economic logic (as Antifederalists saw on their first reading).

We have seen recently that the Guvment is an essential partner in the operation of a "free" market - the Fed's intervention and support for the financial system (not only banks, but now investment firms) was only the most visible way that we have seen what is otherwise the constant presence of Guvment in our markets. Another good example is that of the Bush administration's significant regulatory activity in striking down various State regulations in areas such as auto emissions, environmental impact, and food safety, with the aim of creating uniform regulation in these and other areas across the nation for the sake of convenience and efficiency of industry. This from a party that has, for over half a century, rhetorically defended Federalism, localism, and the use of the States as "laboratories." Both parties defend greater centralization and homogenization when it suits the particular ox they don't wish to be gored.

The guvment puts more than a finger on our economic scale - without its constant intervention through regulation, legislation and enforcement, we would not have the system that we call "the free market." It is specious even to suggest that within the legislative and regulatory boundaries there is a great deal of economic freedom, since the very type of economic activity that will occur will be significantly defined by those bounds. Without the legal definition of a corporation as a "person," our economic activity would be very different. The growth of corporations has in turn resulted in extraordinary influence over our guvment. In important respects, the two are now so deeply intertwined that it's difficult to think of either of them as separate from one another. The larger point is that guvment is always involved in the economy, influencing its direction and activities in one way or another. The fundamental debate is not whether it should do so, but how and to what end.

What is important, then, is not whether guvment is involved - it is finally to what end. And our current end is growth and expansion of the modern project of the human mastery of nature. When we debate over guvment involvement in the market, we obscure the nature of the debate - whether this is the appropriate or sole goal of a society. I would submit that it is a deeply flawed goal - sharing the view of Aristotle that a proper economy is cognizant of limits to moneymaking in the name of fundamental human goods of which prosperity is a part, but only a part. Those goods include healthy and stable communities which are both formed by culture and in which cultures are maintained and preserved; a sound culture that inculcates central human virtues and that is ably passed on from one generation to the next; a culture that makes and keeps good families; a culture that inculcates the very virtues that will be necessary for a good, humane, and moral economy (one that avoids the abuses that we have recently seen in our financial markets); a culture that strongly emphasizes a sense of gratitude and obligation between generations; a culture that encourages stewardship, conservation and fidelity; and perhaps above all, a culture that reins in and chastens our eternal temptation toward Promethean or sinful self-aggrandizement, that teaches and enforces limits, that calls to our mind our flaws, and that does not allow us to lose sight of our fundamental condition of being dependent upon one another. A further good is our ability to act in concert with one another to achieve and maintain such a culture and polity - citizenship as shared and mutual governance, which goes far beyond our current conception as citizenship as suffrage.

This general form of a polity is a legitimate end of guvment, but it is one that is now largely rejected in our own society in the name of individual liberation from such culture - on the Right, in the name of economic liberty and unlimited growth, and on the Left, in the name of personal autonomy. Because we are so often engaged in the discrete political battles of our day - and I wouldn't suggest that they don't matter, for they do - nevertheless, we easily lose sight of the deeper similarities between our two main Parties, parties that are both defenders of what John Stuart Mill indicated was actually one Party - the Party of Progress. In our current society there are few defenders of what he identified as the other Party, the Party of Tradition. Mill was a severe critic of this latter Party, inasmuch as it discouraged what he called "experiments in living" and the obstruction of our experience of ourselves as "progressive beings." The Party of Tradition, he suggested, held the view that humanity had a certain kind of nature and end, and thereby sought in various instances to limit or restrict activities that it viewed as contradictory to that nature and end. He was particularly scornful toward traditional religion that sought to restrain our acquiescence to our appetites: he viewed "Calvinism" as pessimistic and restrictive.

Among my students, and more broadly in the culture at large, Mill is widely admired and embraced, whether by self-described people on the Left or Right alike. All are variously attracted to his stirring libertarian defense of the individual (they quickly become less enamored, the Left when I point out the logic of his assumptions that leads to a justification of imperialism, the Right when I point out his equally stirring defense of communism). In that initial positive reaction (e.g., not only do my colleagues on the Left adore Mill, but they readily purchase the Collected Writings of Mill from Liberty Fund press, by reputation a conservative organization which published Mill's works) one sees that we live in a time largely defined by one party. That is, we are not truly capable as a society of debating over legitimate ends, because very few of us are even able to articulate any alternatives.

There is a legitimate debate to be had. It cannot be had, however, because we are largely incapable of considering whether "liberty" as we currently define it (largely the absence of restraint) is even debatable. We have resources, however, even within our own tradition - broadly in the West, including Aristotle and Aquinas, and in America, including the Antifederalists, Hawthorne and Melville, Orestes Brownson, Henry Adams, Jonathan Edwards, Santayana and Royce, the Southern Agrarians, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre and Wendell Berry, among others, who help us see that there are alternatives that we currently do not consider (in spite of our vapid self-congratulation about our "diversity"). Such authors allow us to see that what is at issue is not "guvment" vs. our liberty, but a different conception of liberty altogether - one in which, ultimately, we govern ourselves by governing our appetites, and in so doing become ourselves a government, a democracy of citizens (not "consumers") enacting laws that we impose upon ourselves with an appropriate and chastened acceptance of limits and humility.

Til Death

The California gay marriage decision has received plenty of commentary, and the world hardly needs another. One particularly striking implication, noted by both E.J. Dionne and Joe Knippenberg, is that the Court's decision renders untenable the "moderate" stance of approving domestic partnerships but disallowing marriage. Courts, as usual, circumvent the messy imperfection of politics to force all-or-nothing outcomes, thereby increasing polarization throughout the electorate. And, ironically enough, as Bill Kristol noted today, the decision will probably hurt the Obama candidacy.

However, few have noticed that the Court's logic really contradicts the basic grounds for marriage. My particular concern is the basis of the California State Supreme Court decision:

"The constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish — with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life — an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage."

To my mind, what's most striking about the Court's decision is the language of the inviolability of "individual liberty and personal autonomy." These are the legal and Constitutional grounds on which a decision about the basis of marriage are being grounded. On the basis of such grounds, can there really be marriage at all, at least in a form that is worthy of defense? Aren't we really talking about an advantaged tax and property arrangement, one that can and should be altered at the will and inclination of the individual's "liberty and autonomy"? It is really nothing other than the contractual partnership defended in Locke's Second Treatise, sans the children (or at least conceived by the couple in question). And doesn't it permit any possible form of coupling, including ones not limited to couples (e.g., polygamy, etc., between consenting adults?)

Consider some of Wendell Berry's writings on marriage - certainly among the most articulate on the matter - and compare them to the language of the California Supreme Court:

"Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another and back to the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their own behalf and on its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves "until death," are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could ever join them. Lovers, then, "die" into their union with one another as a soul "dies" into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing - and our time is proving this is so." ("Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community," pp. 137-8).

Marriage is the sacramental form of self-sacrifice and self-denial upon which all societies must ultimately be based. No society can continue into the future without the willingness and ability of adults to govern their own personal and selfish inclinations for the sake of a future generation. It is the fertile training ground in which such sacrifice and "self-dying" is practiced and always imperfectly achieved - and, one hopes, passed on to the young. It is the oath a current generation makes to future generations.

Once marriage is defended on the grounds of "individual liberty and autonomy," it may as well not be defended at all. In this respect, the victory of proponents of gay marriage is a further expansion of individualism (and, of course, the real prize is "recognition," the Hegelian marker of modern autonomy - it's not enough to be free, one has to receive positive, official confirmation of one's freedom and worth). With the advance of the logic of modern liberalism and free-market ideology, marriage has been increasingly justified by many heterosexuals in just the manner that gay marriage is being legally advanced. Many would seem to want to close the barn door after the horse has escaped, or at least a good way out of the door.

Would gay marriage proponents be willing to step up in defense of the elimination or serious truncation of no-fault divorce provisions, and in support of "covenant marriage" counseling, efforts to reduce sex before marriage, the legal discouragement of divorce, and more generally "the dying of the self" for the other against the grain of our time that valorizes "individual freedom and autonomy?" For that matter, would a vast number of heterosexuals? Until then, we are debating at the edges and missing the heart of the matter.

No Prob

A person named Jim Manzi over at NRO's The Corner is quite irritated by Peak Oil "hysteria," reminding us - rightly - that oil production's "peak" has been predicted at various times in the past, and yet didn't to come to pass in accordance with those flawed prognosticators. His advice - don't worry, be happy.

It amazes me that anyone could be so obtuse about the nature of the situation, once one has really given it any thought. Manzi, and others like him, doesn't deny that we are facing a future of energy constraints - he simply says we don't know when this will take place, so there's nothing we can nor should do about it. However, implicitly he and others like him recognizes that it WILL happen, so the "don't worry, drive happy" stance is tantamount to child neglect. It's saying, let the future worry about our irresponsibility. It's hard to think of a civilization that has been based on such an infantile premise.

A respondent (and reader of this humble "blawg"!) to Manzi's post at "The American Scene" really says it better - and certainly more succinctly - than I'm able:

"...It seems kind of beside the point whether Peak Oil is upon us now or twenty years in the future. There is a fundamental logic there that shouldn’t be shrugged off. It is simply a fact that we have designed huge chunks of our country around the premise that gasoline will be abundant and cheap. (I’m from Indiana, and let me tell you, if you don’t have a car in Indiana you ain’t going anywhere!) When that abundant and cheap era ends, we will have to find a new way of living our lives. I’m sorry, but twenty years does not sound like enough time to begin rearranging those places in our country that most need the rearranging. Especially when there is zero political will to do anything right now. I tend to share Deneen’s belief that we will have to get to Peak Oil, and beyond, before any meaningful changes are made precisely because we will be forced to. The problem is, those changes will have to be made during a different era, one of expensive and unreliable energy. Deneen’s basic premise seems pretty sound, that we are enjoying a relative life of ease while our children’s lives (or their children) are going to be infinitely more difficult."

This is the actual implication of today's column by Paul Krugman, who of late has really jumped on the peak oil bandwagon (and is one of the few places in the MSM where the issue even gets a mention). In a column entitled "Stranded in Suburbia," Krugman discusses some of the implications of peak oil and energy constraint, particularly the need to own smaller cars and drive less (he has yet to catch on to its implications on "globalization," its impact on the trucking industry, and its agricultural implications, etc. He seems oblivious to the implications of a no-growth economy for the financial markets. But you can only do so much in a short column, and he's coming along). He points to Europe as an example of a living arrangement that uses far less oil than the U.S., and nevertheless does well economically. He suggests that America will come - by necessity - to resemble the German model. This is something I suggested not too long ago, and for which I took some significant heat. Americans don't like being told that the Europeans are doing some things better - especially not "conservative" Americans.

Based on the lower patterns of energy consumption in Europe, Krugman opines "I have seen the future, and it works." But, Krugman should read the likes of Manzi: it is the mainstream view, and certainly that of the "economists," that nothing needs to be done until we receive the proper price signals. As Manzi's commentator points out, we will wait until energy is constrained to begin changing our behavior. However, if Europe is to be our future exemplary living arrangement (one that closely resembles the vision of "the urban transect" advanced by New Urbanists and some Catholic natural law thinkers such as Philip Bess), we should note 1. Europe has kept prices "artificially" high for years - since the gas shocks of the 1970s - through higher taxation, which it uses to fund an excellent public transportation system, among other things; and more importantly, 2., Europe never changed its basic living patterns as a result (along with smart zoning regulations that permit mixed use areas as well as limit building outside town and city limits).

Manzi suggests that we can wait until the last possible moment - when peak oil is upon us, which we will not know until we can compile several years of data about worldwide oil production - and then begin to make adjustments. However, if we KNOW it will be upon us at some point - and many reputable geologists believe it will be soon, soon, but regardless, it will come - then shouldn't we use whatever energy bounty we have now to prepare for that eventuality? We will need to begin a rather significant project of infill of existing living arrangements, particularly the suburbs, to achieve the necessary population density to justify public transportation. We will need to build high speed trains between the more far-flung cities of the U.S., in anticipation of the demise of the airline industry (if Manzi doesn't think they are done for, then he hasn't been reading the papers.) We will need to encourage more local forms of economic activity, particularly agriculture. Not only will it be more expensive to drive, but even maintaining our current huge investments in the automobile infrastructure will prove increasingly untenable. For instance, the cost of paving our millions of miles of petroleum-based asphalt roads will prove unaffordable.

In short, we will need to invest huge sums to prepare for a way of life that will be significantly different than the way we live now. And people like Manzi are saying, "we don't know WHEN it will happen, so don't sweat it." What we will find is that once we begin to sweat, we won't have the means - the energy and the attendant funds - to change very much. In the meantime, we WILL use the existing surplus and still cheap energy to continue the great American wasteland - the build-out to nowhere, an economy premised upon an infinite future of cheap transportation, an agricultural system based on energy inputs that far exceed calorie outputs, and the destruction of arable farmland for endless tracts of McMansion temples to the modern ego. The petroleum reservoirs of the earth were not formed for any one of us, not even those with the most money. However, we act as if it is ours alone to use and exploit without thought or reflection on the implications for future generations. The future will suffer as a result of our profligacy and unwillingness to act responsibly.

I'll say it again - it amazes me that we have come to a pass in this nation's history when someone like Manzi would be called a "conservative." To be oblivious of the implications of our current actions in the name of an ever better future is the hallmark of progressive liberalism.

Saudi Arabia to U.S.: Drop Dead

Dubya went begging, cowboy hat in hand, for the sheiks to open their spigots for all us poor Americans. Their answer: shove off. Some superpower.

An interesting question arises, however: whether the Saudis CAN increase production. Everyone assumes that they can increase oil flows with the flip of a switch, doubtless based on their stated reserves. However, based on the research of Matthew Simmons and Stuart Saniford, there is substantial evidence that Saudi Arabian oil production has begun to go into decline. As Simmons has stated, if Saudi Arabia is in decline, then ipso facto the world has reached peak oil.

It's difficult to say of course, and only the benefit of hindsight will tell us whether this is the case. It is and it is not in Saudi Arabia's interest to allow the price of oil to remain at these historically high levels (today broaching $127 per barrel). Given that they are keenly aware that their reserves are finite, it is in their interest to get as much lucre as possible for what they can still pump. However, at a high enough price, the world economy will decline and, subsequently, so too the price of oil. Further, high prices will only stoke greater demand for alternative fuels. Saudi Arabia would likely only be willing to accept these latter conditions if they had little control over current high prices due to constrained supplies.

When we await our alternative energy future, we often do so with current assumptions of the existence of plentiful energy and accompanying wealth. However, investment resources will dry up as quickly as the empty petroleum wells in Saudi Arabia if those assumptions do not pertain. We saw how quickly billions of dollars disappeared with the flash of a computer screen during the credit crisis during last summer and in recent months. While we wait for market signals to kick in, the Saudis are enjoying the remaining years of their party while we willfully cling to the belief that the solution lies in their simply letting us buy more of their oil. Because we want it, it must be there (this is the most pervasive and generalized form of faith of our age, infecting people on the Left and Right alike). Just so, we demonstrate that the wages of gluttony is a loss of freedom and abject humiliation at the feet kings from the likes of whom we once declared independence.

Graduation Weekend at Georgetown

So many happy, expectant faces. Visions of success, travel, adventure. Proud parents. Professors in robes, as if they profess their faith. The students are good kids, and have been taught well by their elders about a world that has existed for about 150 years and yet which increasingly seems fragile, tenuous, even fanciful. They have few resources, have been taught little that will stand them in good stead, for a world that will be different. It all seems a bit surreal to me. I wish them all well - and hope that their future will not feel like a mugging.




(h/t J.P.)

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Jeremy Beer has called my attention to these lines from T.S. Eliot, in "The Idea of a Christian Society," written in 1939, nearly 70 years ago.

"We are being made aware that the organisation of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of ‘soil-erosion’—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale for two generations, for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert. . . . [A] wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God, and . . . the consequence is an inevitable doom. For a long enough time we have believed in nothing but the values arising in a mechanised, commercialised, urbanised way of life: it would be as well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet."

Why was it possible for a renowned conservative to write such a thing over half a century ago, and now for such a statement - were it written today - doubtlessly to be reviled by conservatives who are deeply wedded to "organisation of society on the principle of private profit"? Certainly the Cold War was the intervening event that made possible, even necessary, the coalition - or fusion - between traditionalists and economic libertarians. Even as we can agree that Communism was a malevolent, pernicious, and false political dogma, can it be that one of its most enduring and lamentable legacies was this coalition in the West - in particular, the ascent of economic individualism over a healthy culture? If so, can we be so certain that we really did "win" the Cold War?

Certainly not if it turns out that Eliot was right - and growing evidence suggest that he was. We are indeed confronting alarming levels of topsoil erosion across the world, the result of the very efficiency of industrial production. Possessing the "wrong attitude" toward nature, we ultimately strip the world of any respect and sanctity, reflecting ultimately - as Eliot suggests - "a wrong attitude towards God." Or, as Berry has written, "if we understand that no artist - no maker - can work except by reworking the works of Creation, then we can see that by our work we reveal what we think of the works of God" ("Christianity and the Survival of Creation"). Our work today is one of profanation and ingratitude.

We are literally on the path to starvation because of the plenty we are producing. For starters, we will need to change our basic paradigm, as the assumptions of the above-linked article reveal:

"Organic farming methods also can reduce soil loss. [Such methods] have shown a marked increase in soil health, water retention and regrowth when organic methods are used rather than the traditional methods."

That is, organic farming is considered a new-fangled alternative to "traditional methods," i.e., industrial farming. I don't think I have to explain what's wrong with this formulation.

Peak Oil - Liberals vs. "Conservatives"

In a column yesterday, Paul Krugman discusses the widely held theory that the recent spike in oil prices is the newest financial "bubble." He entertains various possibilities and concludes that financial speculation is not the most fundamental basis of the rise in oil prices.

"The only way speculation can have a persistent effect on oil prices, then, is if it leads to physical hoarding — an increase in private inventories of black gunk. This actually happened in the late 1970s, when the effects of disrupted Iranian supply were amplified by widespread panic stockpiling.

"But it hasn’t happened this time: all through the period of the alleged bubble, inventories have remained at more or less normal levels. This tells us that the rise in oil prices isn’t the result of runaway speculation; it’s the result of fundamental factors, mainly the growing difficulty of finding oil and the rapid growth of emerging economies like China. The rise in oil prices these past few years had to happen to keep demand growth from exceeding supply growth."

In short, the rising cost of oil is due to rising demand and constant, even declining, supply.

What's most interesting about Krugman's column is his observation of the political reaction to the growing evidence of constrained oil supplies. He writes, "Traditionally, denunciations of speculators come from the left of the political spectrum. In the case of oil prices, however, the most vociferous proponents of the view that it’s all the speculators’ fault have been conservatives — people whom you wouldn’t normally expect to see warning about the nefarious activities of investment banks and hedge funds. The explanation of this seeming paradox is that wishful thinking has trumped pro-market ideology. After all, a realistic view of what’s happened over the past few years suggests that we’re heading into an era of increasingly scarce, costly oil."

The denial of the growing evidence of - yes - "peak oil" by commentators on the Right resembles their vociferous denial of global warming (more sophisticated responses now reveal that, all along, it wasn't the reality of global warming that bothered them; it was the implications. And they are daunting).

The same is true of the reaction on the Right about Peak Oil (in fairness, there's a good deal of techno-optimism on the Left as well; while the Right thinks there's plenty of oil - enough in ANWR to run our civilization for another century, it is implied - the Left thinks we're going to replace oil with algae and fairy dust.)

Krugman's column prompted Andrew Leonard over at Salon.com (their in-house Peak Oil man - h/t Joe Knippenberg) to post a smart column about "the peak oil culture wars," observing what should be obvious at this point - the debate isn't about the facts, it's about the implications. And, people on the Right - "fighting like caged rats" - don't want to entertain the possibility that all those "dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right" - and worse still, we might have to change our behavior.

Writes Leonard:

"Partisan conservatives pooh-pooh peak oil (and human-caused climate change) because they think that to concede that these challenges are real and must be confronted is to acknowledge that greed is not always good, and that free market capitalism must be restrained, or at least tinkered with substantially. Peak oil and climate change are fronts in the culture wars, and to some conservatives, watching the price of oil rise as the Arctic ice melts, it might feel like being in Germany at the close of World War II, with the Russians advancing on one front while U.S.-led forces come from the other. The propositions that cheap oil is running out and the world is getting hotter -- as a result of our own activities -- threaten a whole way of life. The very idea that dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right is absolute anathema.

"Given that many on the left also see peak oil and climate change as cultural battlefields, as weapons with which to assault enemies whose values they politically and aesthetically oppose (see James Kunstler), it's no wonder that some conservatives are fighting back like caged rats, or that they want to blame speculators for oil prices, or biased scientists for climate change."

My own view is that this debate is going to collapse as more people realize that our high oil prices are NOT the consequence of financiers or the evil oil companies stoking profits (all along, their production of oil is declining), but the cold hard facts of reality. The tired Left-Right consensus - one essentially designed to obscure that there is no real disagreement about whether a growth economy premised on an itinerant and rootless workforce is desirable - is going to collapse and something else will take its place. The great fear is that a new consensus will form that someone is to blame, and we have plenty of weapons to get what we want, or at least to distract us from our penury. The great possibility is that we will realize that a future of less driving, stable neighborhoods, greater localism, the reinvigoration of diverse local cultures isn't as bad as our kneejerk panic about impending change would lead us to believe. Surely this is something a "conservative" would not object to?

What may be most productive in coming years is to stop calling this cadre of economic libertarians - what we now call "the Right" or even conservatism - conservatives. There is nothing they want to conserve - nothing in the natural or moral ecology. They are rapacious exploiters who want to use every last natural and cultural reservoir for their own immediate profit - even at the price of leaving nothing for their children. Recall, it was Dick Cheney who said "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for a sound, comprehensive energy policy." Probably true, but it's a damned good place to start, and we fool ourselves if we think we are not going to need substantial reservoirs of personal and political virtue in coming years.

Soon, if not soon enough, I predict, there will be a party of conservatives and a party of "live now'ers." Live now'ers have original sin on their side, and are likely to win a lot of votes until it's clear that the grasshopper was wrong and the ant was right. Then they will tell us it's time to get the guns. Are you sure that's the side you want to be on?