Isn't George W. Bush somehow not allowed to suggest folks "conserve gasoline" in the face of rising prices? Isn't the kernel of his economic belief structure based around the idea that what regulates consumption is the price? Supply and demand, that kind of thing? Hypothetically, if there were an actual need to conserve, because, say, there wasn't enough of something, this limited supply would produce an increased demand which would drive the prices up until they were so prohibitive that demand decreased, and prices with it. But for some reason this isn't happening; something has forced the American president to take a stand directly opposed to the basic tenets of his own beliefs (also, by the way, the beliefs of the Republican and Democratic parties).
So what gives? Could it be that, even with a certain portion of the population priced out of the gasoline market (let's call them, by definition, "the poor"; you'll note that this priced-out-ness generally takes the form of not having a car; you might recall these good folks, and the implications of priced-out-ness, from recent photos of New Orleans) there is still so much wealth-of-nation focused among the remainder (heck, let's call'em "the rich") that the whole prohibitive thing just can't work; the rich are now so rich that they simply cannot be priced out of any market? Is it possible that the human-caused great imbalance of nature that all those backpack-bearing, ecopoetics-loving, wildlife-preservation-funding people talk about is in fact inseparable from the imbalance of wealth?
Posted by jane at September 26, 2005 12:52 PM | TrackBack