National Perspectives : Avoiding the cause
Posted on Monday, May 12, 2008
When you know that the high cost of oil is due directly to the weak dollar and Wall Street speculators, I don't know how anybody expects to solve the energy problem without dealing with the weak dollar and Wall Street speculators.
World supplies are, at the present, sufficient to meet the demand. There is no shortage of oil. There will be in the future, but at the moment, there is plenty of the stuff. The windfall-profits tax being proposed is stupid. Whatever else you wish to say about the big oil companies, they know how to develop energy sources, and they sure as heck can spend their profits more wisely than the politicians in Washington.
Our federal politicians have for years perfected the art of addressing problems while ignoring the causes of those problems. The only way to solve the energy problem is to use fuel more efficiently while at the same time develop alternate forms of energy. None of that can be done in time to lower the prices at the pump for the summer driving season. Temporarily suspending the federal fuel tax will simply put us further behind in repairing transportation infrastructure. More refineries would help, but the principal obstacle to those is federal regulations.
As for health care, Japan, Great Britain, Canada, France and Germany, to name just five, have health-care systems that provide better care to more people at lower cost than our system does. Again, our politicians tend to ignore the causes. You can't lower health-care costs with 1, 200 percent profit margins in pharmaceuticals; you can't do it with millionaire physicians and with super expensive hospitals stuffed with overpriced medical devices.
If you're going to provide affordable health care, you're going to have to lower the incomes of the people in the health-care industry. It is stupid to suppose that you can call together the people who are benefiting from the present highprofit system and expect them to devise a low-cost system. I know of no instance where anybody ever voluntarily decided to lower his income, and that will certainly be true of the over-paid lobbyists and their rich clients.
The same principle applies to the rising costs of college tuition. Besides a stable dollar, which the government is failing to provide, education requires only a classroom, a teacher and some books. But if you wish to build multimillion-dollar campuses and overpay your professors, then how are you going to lower the cost of an education ?
A tradition has grown up in our country that causes many people to look at every single aspect of human life as a moneymaking opportunity. Senators and representatives have voted themselves into the top 5 percent of the income bracket, and they work only part time. Presidents live like emperors, surrounded by servants and bodyguards. The idea that public buildings should be simple, utilitarian and inexpensive is gone. You can no longer bury Aunt Suzy in the backyard because the cemetery industry has lobbied the law-peddlers to force you to use its land. Practically every law on the books is designed to help somebody make money.
All of the money, time and blood we spend in the Middle East is wasted because we refuse to address the root cause of the conflict, which is the displacement of Palestinians by the Zionists in Palestine. Unfortunately for them, not many Palestinians contribute to political campaigns. It's virtually openly acknowledged that if you want access to your elected representative, you have to pay for it, just as you have to pay for access to the people's court system. Perhaps we should all attend a summer chautauqua and discuss the possibility of substituting a revolution for the next election. Change in political micro-increments doesn't seem to be solving many problems.
• • • Charley Reese writes for King Features Syndicate. He can be reached at P. O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802.
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