Sanctions
North America is currently importing a substantial amount of its oil and gas from Mother Russia. The Biden and Trudeau administrations — good post-liberals — hesitate to tamper with this, for fear that when the supply is cut, prices will rise astronomically. This, in itself, is not an issue for them, in terms of money (which they can always “print”), but there is danger when rightwing people, such as myself, demand that we resume drilling and fracking; and when others among the electorate are inclined to rebel. A better alternative, for the fashionable left, is to seek alternative supplies from Venezuela and Iran — two nations that have incidentally pledged to kill us.
Oil and other carbon fuels are dirty, in the leftist imagination, and therefore we must buy them only from the dirtiest people, and murderous criminals. Trucks, tankers, and pipelines, are also dirty, so that ever more expensive regulations must discourage their use, except by foreign agents.
Our own regulatory regime is no longer restricted to government acts, but includes performance by private investment syndicates, operating beyond the law. They work, on an incalculable scale, to direct companies on “woke” principles — i.e. according to the dictates of the global warming hysteria, and the latest post-humanist social ideals.
The young, who go into business today, are reduced, intellectually and morally, to the condition of civil servants, owing to the prolixity of government regulations, and these ideological pressures. They live and breathe by instructions from the tax departments, and their radical, sub-literate peers. While laws of supply and demand still work, as they will even in death camps, their effects become increasingly perverse. The forthright and honest worker, or manager, is singled out for punishment, when he calls attention to himself by speaking truthfully.
Yet superficially, production continues to move. Humans have a genius for adaptation, and even in formally communist countries, the manufacture of weapons can be prioritized, or apartment blocks in China. We have the example of the Pyramids, for what humans can achieve under political compulsion; and we have humans who take pride in the achievements they have compelled. In a “democracy,” we even get to vote for these over-achievers, and their proposed schemes, which appear so novel and cool.
We pass plentiful sanctions, against ourselves.
Our ungodly instincts demand them.