It's not easy being consistent when cherry-picking trendy morals

The bugger about changing social landscapes when you're left-leaning* is that you can't rely on yesterday's liberal morals to get you very far in today's world. Liberal morals seem to have a shelf life, and you always have to be taking inventory if you want to stay current. Consider, for example:

• left-leaners often believe in choice when it comes to abortion, and also are often supportive of movements to relax attitudes towards homosexuality. So, what happens when you are able to identify a homosexual child in the womb and are offered the choice to abort a gay baby before it's born so that you won't have to deal with the headache?
• one of the moral concerns of environmental vegetarians is that so many resources are required to produce a pound of edible meat. One estimate puts it at about 14 pounds of corn per 1 pound of beef. Such folks often also have problems with imperialistic actions around natural resources, and like to feel poorly about world hunger. So, what happens when corn is being used to produce ethanol to fuel your car to reduce dependency on foreign oil imports, while also tightening world grain supplies and raising prices beyond the reach of third world countries? Do you stop driving, too? I wonder.
• Also on the topic of fuel. If you're so worried about the plight of animals in factory farms, what about the plight of real people being killed in wars over oil? The same left-leaning folks will likely argue that Iraq was at least partly about control of oil. It is impossible to absolve yourself of products derived from oil. Your vegetables were probably grown with the aid of oil-based pesticides. The dark secret of vegetarianism is that many vegetarians care more about animals than they do about people. Animals, you see, can't speak up and tell you that you've ruined their lives and that you're annoying the hell out of them :)

Anyway, there's no particular point to this post, other than to highlight that, sometimes, trendy morals are a moving target, as with anything else that's trendy. I don't think enough people stop and take inventory of their trendy morals often enough, and they become stale, outdated, and a bit funky.

I don't normally support that idea that just because there are problems with your argument, that you shouldn't try to keep up the parts that have no problems. Work with what you have and keep trying to do better. Just because your argument doesn't hold water entirely, it doesn't mean that some parts don't. But, sometimes these attitudes are taken for feel-good reasons without approaching the issues with genuine concern.

For the vegetarian issues specifically: in the end, we need to reduce our consumption of everything. We need to eat less meat and learn how to appreciate the taste of real food again (general rule of thumb: if you've kicked ketchup, you're probably on the right track). But, we shouldn't need to eliminate meat entirely. After all, if we moderate ourselves then factory farming will not be necessary. Take away the need to put meat on the family table seven days a week, and your need to factory farm will be greatly reduced. By focusing exclusively on one area of concern, it's easy to become self-satisfied and ignore the issues with all of the other choices we make. A balance is required: that's the moral choice.

Everything in moderation: doesn't this always seem to be the sensible conclusion?

Technorati: vegetarian, abortion, morals

* A disclaimer of sorts.. I don't really believe in "left" and "right", politically-speaking, at the personal level. It's a convenient polarization for simplifying discussions, and a useful stereotype, but I recognize that it's not foolproof and doesn't describe most thinking people. It describes political parties and those that are political because such organisms put aside their own personal beliefs in order to belong to a group. It rarely describes real people with real, genuine beliefs. Also, I'm not sure if vegetarians are generally left-leaning or not. It seems that they often are.

Canadians should shut up about gas prices

I'm going to use rather harsh, care-free language in this post because the attitude to gasoline price increases in this country is just about as equally simple-minded.

So, there's an interesting site designed to pacify the lumpen that can't warm their brains up to the idea that perhaps a market price is made up of more than someone's idea of "reasonable profit": http://www.gasgouge.ca/.

And what is GasGouge.ca? It's a site that estimates what you should be paying for gas based only on the price of oil and traditional refiners' profit margins. I don't know what it takes to get through to people that if you don't increase the prices, you will lose supply. You will run out of gas. Is that the better option?

There are so many reasons why gas prices could be high:

• Consumption is the obvious one: cut back your consumption, and you save on gas! Quite simple. If you use more, the price has to go up to encourage consumers to think twice about how important it is that they deplete the shared supply. If the price goes down, more SUVs will be sold, more trips will be made. If the price was cut in half, for example, you can bet that there would be plenty of people finding new uses for gasoline based on its affordability, and this would strain supply. So, you have a choice: pay more for gas, or run out of gas. Notice that this has nothing to do with profit margins.
• Environmental regulations are another one: stricter environmental regulations may force older refineries to close down if they can't meet the new regulations affordably; and new refineries may not be built in their place. I thought we all cared about the environment? This exposes the dark side of that conjecture: we care about the environment as long as we don't have to pay for it. Our environmental problems are largely due to our unsustainable demand for a cheap, gluttonous lifestyle. Cleaning up costs money.
• Peak oil is another problem: if consumption around the world is expected to increase beyond the ability of supplying countries to supply it, this means that there will be pressure to reduce oil consumption (via price), and, transitively, to reduce gasoline consumption. Why, then, would anyone start building new multi-billion-dollar refineries that would help alleviate the gasoline shortage when faced with the likelihood that oil supply will start to decrease in future, and alternatives to gasoline will become more popular?
• Refineries, aging and reduced in number, are running flat-out to meet increased demand. This means that scheduled maintenance is being postponed, and the chances of a refinery breakdown increase. When a breakdown occurs, production is reduced, decreasing supply and driving up price. During a breakdown, national gasoline reserves are drawn upon to fill some of the gap, and gasoline reserves are then restocked after the outage.

And this is very, very far from exhaustive. Although markets are simple, the forces behind them are complex. So, the idea that gasoline prices are somehow forever tied to a fixed profit margin shows that the author of such an idea has no clue what a market is and how it works.

And, why aren't these people going further? Oil prices are around $65 USD per barrel right now. Oil prices have varied from below $20 to above $65 in the past 10 years. If you see gasoline pricing as being dependent on oil pricing, which is so obviously is to some degree, where's the profit margin argument on the oil price? It costs nowhere near $65 per barrel to get oil out of the ground, and the gap between what it costs and what is charged has massively increased due to world demand weighed against supply pressures. Is it really possible that these people complaining about gasoline profit margins see oil as a free market commodity, while seeing gasoline as something else entirely? If so, how clever is that?

Arguing for gas tax cutbacks is, frankly, stupid. Market prices are market prices. Remove the tax and the price will recover to its former position to bring equilibrium to the market (if people are able to pay $1.10/L and keep supply/demand in check before a tax cut, they are willing to pay $1.10/L to do the same after the tax cut). But, now the tax revenue has been converted into corporate profit and the government has to look elsewhere to restore their revenue stream. Your taxes go up. Likewise, arguing against "tax-on-a-tax" with respect to the GST will get you perhaps a 1-cent cut on the tax that will quickly end up in the pockets of oil companies instead of your government's. On top of that, there's no justification for decreasing gas taxes because the costs of running our "happy motoring" system are nowhere near covered by the existing gas taxes.

And let's not forget that many European countries who we so proudly emulate on our paper-thin veneers are paying more than twice what we're paying at the moment.

If you came to this post with a "brother, save me!" attitude about Canadian gas prices, are still reading thusfar, and after all of this, you still aren't questioning your attitude toward said Canadian gas prices, I will diagnose you as stupid. And I won't charge you for it. Happy motoring.

Technorati: Canada, gas prices