The Hole Fillers

Now consider rising prices unadulterated by newspeak. They are not necessarily caused by inflation; they can be caused by generally rising costs, and that is where we come to energy and environment, for that is what is happening now. No, I don't mean the temporary oscillations of oil prices. Two World Wars and three Middle East conflicts, including the closing of the Suez canal, barely put a dent in the overall trend of the rise and fall of oil use and prices. Saddam cannot permanently change them.

spendthrifts at the end of the twentieth. The Clean Air Act of 1977 and other pollution controls cost around $81 billion last year; the one passed in 1990 will be much more expensive, for in many areas the pollution reduction percentage is already in the nineties, and when you get close to 100%, the cost gets close to where it is infinite. The total cost of the new Clean Air Act is now estimated at $221 billion, unless this is an overestimate by the government, well known for its cost underruns.

Of that, $7 billion will be spent on acid rain scrubbers, though the $500 million NAPAP study shows that most of acid rain is a hoax The Paris hole fillers at least filled real holes; but the ozone hole fillers will cost $125 billion in replacement of CFCs over the next ten years.

But that part of the bill is not yet due. What you are already paying for is the toll to the hole fillers for most industrial products.

It is not just inflation that raises the price of electricity. of every 1,000 MW capacity, at least 40 MW are now consumed by pollution controls. Paper prices are not driven up by inflation, but by costly equipment to eliminate laughable amounts of dioxin. Cars, appliances, food, services, all head upward in price. Can you name a single product whose price the de-industrialization lobbies have not raised by frivolous "safety" and "environmental" restrictions?

Postage for this newsletter will increase at least 16% next month. But it gives me more hope than it cuts into my profit. Ten years ago, it seemed impossible to break the postal mono-poly with its lobby representing 600,000 employees. Today, those who invested in a FAX, pay 9 cents to send a page from coast to coast with the speed of light, less than 1/3 of what the post office charges for losing it. What the telephone did to Western Union (turn it into a corpse lingering on by subsidies), the FAX will eventually do to the US Snail, which is already beginning to price itself out of the market.

No, education will not stop the hole fillers, for who will edu-cate the educators? But there is a social force that cares little about the blather of priests, philosophers or politicians: tech-nology. It cuts through adversity, and indeed, is speeded by it. It changed society via fire, agriculture, husbandry, printing press, gun powder, steam engine, and multitudes of other revolutions, and it will revolutionize it again by the computer and a hundred other innovations that give more power to the individual.

For no matter how annoying the Green liars and their sub-servient wimps may be, in the long run they are no match for the individual who has always found a way to outwit the coer-cive deadwood that rules him.