They will believe what they want to believe or fear is true
The headline/subtitle is so true. Terry Goodkind’s first rule is one of those most important lessons in life. You can see it happening all around you all of the time. Almost everything human beings do is not the result of logic and reason, but fear and wishful thinking.
Case in point: This last week a gas station in Southern Ontario accidently posted a gas price of >$2 a litre because the stock boy behind the counter hit a 2 instead of a 1 on the good old number pad. Big deal right?
Hahahaha. As a result of that one gas station a rumour spread THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE COUNTRY that gas prices were going to rise by more than a dollar in the next few hours and that everyone better fill up with gas.
End result of this stupidity and lack of thought? A run on gas where people were getting in fist fights in Toronto and stopping traffic for miles in Halifax, all because one guy hit a 2 instead of 1.
Fearing it might be true instead of analysing reality and acting upon it intelligently. Sort of like living in a city below sea level, right up there in the all time brilliant club.
I’ve heard way to much of this “I’m mad about gas prices and I’m not going to take it much longer! Government do something and lower our gas prices or we’re going to take measures into our own hands” crap. (Al Brown from Rock ’95 this is directly for you, you fool)
After Katrina gas prices rose immediately. Everyone accused the gas companies of price gauging. Sorry, but no. Here’s why it happened:
- Raising gas prices immediately serves to ensure that people actually know why they were raised. If they didn’t do it immediately and instead had waited until the supply crunch really did happen in a few months, people would have been mad, and blamed it on something else and the result would have been worse.
- Raising gas prices immediately mitigates the shortage later by slowing consumption now and softening out the sharpness of the increase. Instead of prices going from a dollar a litre to 3 dollars a litre in the span of a few days because we go from having lots of oil to almost none, increasing the prices by 50 cents a litre for a week or two now, slows consumption now while there is still oil and results in a levelling effect that smoothes out the huge bump that could have caused some people to go bankrupt trying to pay for 3 dollar a litre gas prices. (Al Brown, you sound like one of those people, so be glad that capitalism works you ignorant idiot!) That’s why the oil companies did it and it was the right thing to do, as it will no doubt happen again in the wake of the latest hurricane and it will be the right thing to do again.
- Many many times, what we call “price gauging” is actually the best thing for an economy. Last year, in the wake of the hurricane in Florida the Florida state government fixed prices for building materials and workers. Instead of having the desired effect, the end result was the surge of out of state workers that normally follows a hurricane and results in houses being rebuilt more quickly and the state getting back to normal, the end result was that it took 5 times longer to rebuild than in previous years where prices were allowed to rise to whatever levels people wanted to charge. The price fixing backfired and left more people homeless for longer than ever would have happened if capitalism had been allowed to flourish and solve this problem itself as it has every time in the past.
So to those of you that think that it’s the responsibility of the government to do something and force the oil companies to charge less for their product let this be a lesson. This is the same lesson that you should learn from the bankruptcy of Air Canada (government forcing them to fly routes to places that couldn’t possibly sustain the costs and expecting them not to go bankrupt). People are calling for the oil industry to be nationalized in Canada. Please! Think carefully! Every time anything has ever been nationalized in Canada or anywhere else, the government ends up losing huge amounts of money and killing people (Nationalized health care). They then finally sell it off again at a huge cost to tax payers because they can no longer afford to ignore reality and capitalism makes money and the situation gets better. (Petro Canada, etc. etc. etc.) In Mexico they tried this with their railway. End result? Essentially no railway for almost a decade. Peru is talking about nationalizing its mining operations. You can guess what will be the end result of that one. The stock market already knows exactly what will happen and punished any company that has any stake in mining in Peru. Anyone with a brain knows exactly the outcome. Why does Peru fail to see it?
When will people learn? Socialism doesn’t work! Free the system and capitalism will do the very best that is possible. It will make sure that your gas prices don’t go ridiculously high and it will make sure that people are paid what they are worth. Capitalism is the perfect system. Not just in theory, but in practice. If it wasn’t, then the universe would have collapsed long ago because the universe is built on capitalism (for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction is simply a scientific observation of capitalism at work in the universe.) Socialism is evil, it isn’t that it’s perfect in theory and only human beings prevent it from working. It is evil. It takes reality, for there to be a reaction there must be an action, and ignores it. It ignores reality and as Terry Goodkind said “You’re free to ignore reality, but you’re not free to ignore the consequences of reality.” Socialism is evil because it ignores reality and expects you to deal with unexpected consequences which are always more profound than dealing with reality with a rational mind before hand. Just ask the people of New Orleans.
If you wish to have a better life, to see improvement every day and see a world that gets better and better instead of more and more North Koreas, and Darfurs then embrace capitalism and take care of yourselves and allow others to take care of themselves. Only by acting in your own best interests and helping yourself will the world get better. Hand outs to others that have not earned them is not only not a help, it’s evil. It kills those very people eventually because you have deprived them of the tools that they would normally have to take care of themselves. It’s like giving a kid those floaty things for their arms and never taking them away and forcing the kid to learn to swim. Sooner or later he’s going to need to swim and won’t have the floaty things and he’ll sink. That our society expects there to be someone there that not only learned to swim, but is willing to risk their own lives for the sake of a fool that never learned to swim, is pathetic and wrong. You’re sacrificing those that think ahead for fools. The only end result that you can possibly expect is a society of fools, because you’ll have killed all of the rest of us.
The problem is that socialism became so very popular in North America at the same time that technology was booming. The end result was that the capitalist technology sector that was moving faster than the governments could possibly legislate and socialise carried us while the bleeding heart hippies of the 60s marched and danced in support of socialism and held up the very gains caused by increased knowledge and technology, the antithesis of socialism as gains for socialism. We have suffered a grave false positive. We need to go back and reassess the situation and realize that the great men of the 17 and 18 hundreds that built the United States and taught us about true freedom, that thing that we value so much, that the world had never seen before, and that the world has completely forgotten about now, were right. That socialism is the greatest evil that the world has ever known, even beyond religion. It’s only when we reassess socialism and realize that it doesn’t work, and turn this train around, instead of ploughing forward with more and more socialism as if more of a bad thing is going to make things better, that we’ll ever see the former glory of the western world realized again.
Yes, I keep harping on this same topic. But guess what? It keeps rearing its ugly head and needs to be beat down and shown for exactly what it is.