David McElroy

It’s starting to look more and more as though Ayn Rand was a psychic or a prophet, at least when it comes to some economic realities more than 50 years after “Atlas Shrugged” was published.

Last July, I watched a mine operator tell a crowd here in Birmingham that he was quitting because of the attitudes of regulators and the public toward the work he did. Wednesday, I learned that six congressional Democrats are trying to make another part of Rand’s book come true. They’ve proposed a Reasonable Profits Board — to decide how much money oil companies are allowed to profit. The market clearly isn’t good enough for these looters and moochers.

This group of economic illiterates is led by U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). They want a board — completely appointed by the president — to set a target for what a “reasonable” profit would be for oil companies. Any profit that’s slightly more than that would be taxed at 50 percent of the “excess profit.” If a company’s profit reached more than 105 percent of the allegedly reasonable profit, 100 percent of the “excess profit” would be taken as a tax. The bill is called the Gas Price Spike Act.

There’s no such thing as a “fair profit” or a “reasonable profit.” Those things are determined by one thing and one thing alone — the price point at which a willing buyer and willing seller can come together. If there’s a profit at that point, the seller has an incentive to produce more of the product. If there’s not a profit, the product isn’t going to be produced, because there’s no incentive. People who naively believe they can regulate profits are simply trying to regulate prices from the other end. It won’t work — and there’s no rational basis on which to decide what is “reasonable.”

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I’ve finally figured out why the popularity of the “Kony 2012” video has irritated me so much recently. There are a number of reasons, but the biggest is that it once again allows spoiled, ignorant, narcissistic westerners the chance to feel good about themselves — while their attitudes proclaim, “It’s all about me.”

The half-hour film called “Kony 2012” is an emotional propaganda film made by an organization called Invisible Children. It’s about a lunatic African named Joseph Kony, who operates a tiny (and shrinking) band of armed thugs in the jungles near Uganda. His group is called the Lord’s Resistance Army, and it’s been known to press children into service as its soldiers for years, in addition to mutilating people for various reasons. Kony is clearly an evil guy, but he’s more like a crazy man with a small group of remaining followers, not someone who’s growing in power.

The film features the director promising a man who’s been a victim of Kony that he will bring the murderous nut to justice. (The same director was arrested a few days ago for reasons that might have dealt more with substance abuse or psychiatric problems. It’s hard to say.) It also features the director’s young son as he learns about Kony and what he’s done. In other words, it’s all us.

I think something about this is reminding me of the various other “awareness” campaigns that come and go. Remember “We Are the World“? How about “Farm Aid“? Band Aid? Or any of the other things that become fashionable among trendy people with money — who feel some tiny bit of empathy for starving people or hurting people or victimized people for a brief minute in the middle of a concert or something — and feel really good about themselves as a result.

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Cleaning out the old notebook again…

A week after a U.S. soldier murdered 16 Afghan men, women and children, it’s mostly become a non-story among people I talk with. The news stories I see have taken a tone that seems to be looking for a way to excuse what happened, asking what could have “caused him to snap” or speculating about brain injuries from previous combat.

Honestly, I’m a little tired of people looking for excuses. What if this had been an Afghan soldier and he was in this country for some military reason — training, perhaps — and he had taken a weapon to a few homes near where he was based and murdered 16 Americans. Do you think we would all be looking for things to blame it on then? Would we be wondering about how his previous injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder or whatever had made him “snap”?

No, we would have a country full of angry people who were ready to kill Afghans and and were ready to blame all Muslims for what had happened. Why can’t we understand how serious it is when we send soldiers into other countries and they do bad things?

Every time there have been instances of U.S. soldiers committing such atrocities, it seems that there are similar justifications. When are we going to learn that when you train people to kill and then dehumanize the people they’re fighting, this is what we’re going to get? And when are we going to learn that the sooner we get out of these countries we’ve invaded, the sooner we’ll quit making new enemies?

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