Law OfThe Excluded Middle-Zim-CHCH News

Aristotle, in "The Nichomachean Ethic", instructs us on "the law of the excluded middle." Simply put, the law of the excluded middle means that contradictions cannot exist. Ayn Rand summed it up as "A is A"; or "A" and "not A" are mutually exclusive. Too bad that so many liberals have such a difficult with such a simple concept.

One of my pet peeves, as it is for many libertarians and conservatives, is the much bally-hooed "war" over scarce resources like petroleum. "Conserve gas," they tell us. "Don't drive so much, or if you must, do it in a car which doesn't burn very much fuel." What is overlooked by those who preach this is the ironclad fact that conserving fuel will serve do decrease prices. As prices go down, consumption will increase. As the demand increases, the price of gas increases as well.

One thing that I really appreciate is being lectured on conservation by people who own private jets and yachts. Don't get me wrong: if I had the money to buy a GulfStream G-5 or a sixty- or seventy-foot Hatteras, I'd buy one in a New York minute. I do own a Suburban, so I guess that I'm not too terribly different than my "better". "Who is my 'better'," you ask? Of course, it's John Kerry. Yes, Kerry is guilty of the gravest of sins: hypocrisy. I guess it doesn't make too much difference to his following though, because he certainly talks a good game.

According to Gulf Stream's website, the max range of the G5 (a twin engine private jet that can seat up to 8 passengers) is 4350 nautical miles, with a max fuel payload of a little more than 29000 pounds. Jet fuel (basically, it's enhanced kerosene, if you were interested) weighs slightly less than water at about 7 pounds per gallon. Since kerosene is slightly less dense than water, that's probably about 25000 gallons. We can see that Mr. Kerry's plane burns about 6 gallons per mile, or about 3500 gallons per hour.

I don't know what the fuel consumption rate of a Hatteras is, but you can bet that it's well in excess of 50 gallons per hour. Doesn't sound too much like he's terribly interested in conserving fuel personally, but somehow it's a good idea that we should be conserving fuel.

Did any of you happen to catch a glimpse of the picture of Kerry unloading his snowboard in Idaho a couple weeks ago? He pulled his equipment out of the back of a Suburban. Later, when he was asked if he owned an SUV, he denied it. When pressed, he confessed that his wife owns one. More parsing of words. We don't need another president who is unclear of the meaning of the word "is".

Now back to the topic that I introduced in the first paragraph. Let's run through a little scenario to illustrate the absurdity of what we hear from the "protectors" of the "little guy." I've already established that many of these liberals seem to ignore or do not understand the law of supply and demand, but I want to make it clear that what they espouse is a contradiction of epic proportions.

If these liberals were serious about getting us to conserve fuel, they'd slap a massive tax on a gallon of gasoline. That would certainly discourage me from using as much fuel as I do.

Bear in mind that what I'm about to demonstrate is an extreme and unlikely example, but it should serve to get the point across. Suppose that gas cost $1 per gallon. Let us further suppose that our government were comprised primarily of liberals whose objective was to get us to quit using so much fuel. Let's slap a $3 tax on every gallon of gas sold.

Assume a monthly household budget of $100 for gasoline, and you have two vehicles that, between them, average 20 MPG. What we are really saying is that this household has budgeted for 2000 miles of driving a month. If you live in the Northeast, this may sound crazy, but it isn't for the rest of the country. Adding that $3 tax to the gas means that my budget for gas now only covers 500 miles of driving per month. I don't know about any of you, but I commute about 50 miles a day, and my wife commutes about 16 miles a day. And that's without running our kids to swim practice (every day) or to soccer practice (6 practices a week between two kids) and two soccer games a week (in two different leagues that play at parks that are both about 10 miles from my house and in opposite directions). Obviously, my kids are going to have to give up sports. But what of my schooling and my wife's job? Perhaps we could cut our driving by 500 miles a month, but I'm still going to have to budget for $300 worth of gas a month instead of $100. What else am I going to have to cut out of my life to come up with that additional $200?

Never mind the fact that it takes fuel to prepare ground for planting, for sowing, for pest control, for harvesting, for transportation to a storage facility after harvest, for transportation to a processing facility, for transportation to a preparation facility, or finally transportation to the grocery store's shelves. What happens to the price of food with the cost of gas at $4/gallon? It's going to get a great deal more expensive. Your gas budget has gone up, and now your grocery bill does as well. Everything in our economy will get more expensive. In short, we'll see a massive spike in the consumer price index.

And that's just food. Think about all of the industries that are heavily dependant upon petroleum: manufacturing, electronics, technology, medicine and on and on and on. Few of these industries heavily consume gas or diesel directly, but without gas or diesel, they will certainly implode. The supply-chain industry is the backbone of the economy, and if fuel prices increase, they will have to increase the price of their services to the people and companies that use them. These companies are going to have to increase their prices to compensate for the increase in the price of moving their supplies around.

Wages are certain to lag far behind this upswing in prices; and don't forget the fact that there's only so much money to go around at any given point in time. Eventually, though, wages are going to have to at least come close to catching up. The only way to do this is to increase the supply of money. But by increasing the supply of money, we're going to put ourselves right back where we started when gas was $1/gallon. People will have more income and will be able to afford to increase their monthly gas usage, killing the reason why the tax was added in the first place. If my household income was $50K/year before, it will probably be between $100K and $150K once prices stabilize. That may sound like a great deal of money, but money only has value in relation to a quantity of any commodity that you can trade for it, and to a quantity of time you can spend selling your services to obtain it. If your budget was tight at $50K, it's going to be tight at $150K because everything will have gotten more expensive.

NOTE: Copyright by Zim 2004