Economic Policy Stupidity

I understand that the Biden drain of 50 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is merely a ploy to be seen to be doing something. But the markets are underimpressed so the oil price went up on the news.

I confess that I am finding the developing economic stupidity of the Biden administration hard to take. I feel that I paid my dues on the economic stupidity front back in the 1970s when I was 30ish.

I thought that everyone recalled the 1970s as a Never Again decade. Particularly if you were a Democrat, because the 1970s set up Ronald Reagan, the Amiable Dunce. Oh no!

But ruling classes return again and again to stupidity. And I think it is because the whole point of being a ruling class is to do the Henry V thing and send the nation once more unto the breach. Because?

Because politics needs an enemy, and an enemy deserves a war, and what are the people but cannon fodder for the ruler's heroic war against the enemy? Anyway, it will all be worth it!

I suppose I ought to congratulate our global rulers on the whole climate change war. Because it is a new kind of war. It is not a war of sending teenage soldiers into battle, but of giving billions and trillions to worthy green enterprises that no doubt richly reward their political pals in return. A world war with no butcher's bill. What's not to like?

The rulers get to go to cool global-elite conferences and the climate-warrior activists get to stage real cool peaceful protests. What's not to like?

And then the war on systemic racism provides the rationale for new trillions in domestic spending, and funding of the race warriors in ten thousand CRT and DEI programs. Really, what's not to like?

Hey, I know, let's play this game!

Let's declare war! On the greenies and the anti-racists.

If our lefty friends can have their Ally narrative, fighting for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors, then we can play the same game.

We few, we happy few, we band of Allies, fighting or the Climate Victims against the Green Oppressors!

Or, 

We few, we happy few we band of Allies, fighting for the Oppressed Parents against the CRT Oppressors!

But I think that there is a problem, and it is the problem that conservatives have had at least since the 1960s, or even further back to the 1930s New Deal.

You see, while our lefty friends really believe with a full heart that their politics will vanquish the monstrous enemies they are fighting, we ordinary folk don't believe that politics is the royal road to justice, but neither do we think that our liberal friends are enemies.

We just believe they are stupid. Like AOC. We don't think she is evil; we just think she is a foolish virgin that believes what she has been carefully taught, from Green New Deal to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

And if politics is all about the enemy, and making war on the enemy, and then looting the enemy and handing out the spoils to the supporters, why not?  

You fill empty heads full of mush and then lead them to the breach, telling them they are saving the planet and bending the arc of history towards justice. As political leaders have done since the dawn of time.

But I just wish we weren't making the same old mistakes all over again.

Because ordinary decent people get their lives ruined by the strutting and fretting of the ruling class and its politics and its enemies and its wars and its looting.