This Book in PDF - Gary North

XXVlllIS THE WORLD RUNNING DOWN?running out ofenergy. u-e are simply the victims ofa government-created oilcartel. Like all cartels, it has shown sporadic signs of falling apart, asmembers cheat on the previously agreed-to production limits. Hopefully,this will continue. In any case, we should have learned by nowthat capitalism tends to lower the price of raw materials if the freemarket is left alone. This is the testimony of two centuries of industrialproduction. The evidence is overwhelming. 30Ifwe ever do run out of commercially available energy, it will bebecause we first ran out of freedom.New Age PoliticsWhat Rifkin wants is a "New Age politics."31 What he wants isregional organic farms. 32 Who will run these small, regional enterprises?Why, our old favorites, The Workers: "... firms should bedemocratically organized as worker-managed companies."33Does this begin to sound familiar? Haven't we seen all thisbefore? Isn't this just warmed-over rhetoric from the 1968 counterculture?Isn't this language left over from some yellowing mimeographedplatform statement of some faction of Students for a DemocraticSociety (SDS), the radical organization that, figurativelyspeaking, blew itself apart in 1969?There will be no jet planes in the coming utopia. "A Boeing 747,for instance, simply cannot be manufactured by a small companyemploying several hundred individuals. Thus, a new ethic will haveto be adopted...."34 No more jet bombers, either. No moremissiles, I would imagine. Not in "Christian" America.The trouble is, what if the Soviet Union doesn't go along withRifkin's New Age politics, but the United States does? What then?Now all this should begin to sound familiar.Will life be prosperous in the New Age, the way it is today formost middle-class Americans? I fear not. "The entropy economy isone of necessities, not luxuries."35 Don't expect much, but expect tobe happy. Everyone who lives in a utopia is happy. That is the mark30. Herman Kahn and Julian L. Simon (eds.), The Resourceful Earth (New York:Oxford University Press, 1984).31. Rifkin, Entropy, p. 211.32. Ibid., p. 214.33. Ibid., p. 216.34. Idem.35. Ibid., p. 245.