At the Threshold of Less

Mr. Sparks, now chairman of the Board of Trustees of The Foundation for Economic Education, is an executive of an Ohio manufacturing company.

During the mid-1800′s the people of this nation were in an energy crisis. But lacking today’s means of instant communication, most people then were totally unaware of the serious­ness of the impending calamity. No president made any speeches about it. No energy czar sought to fashion government programs to cope with it. Yet, there was a crisis.

Whale oil which was used primar­ily for the lighting of lamps, and sperm oil as a lubricant, were dwindling in supply and prices were about to blow through the roof. Sources of energy for heating were not then of grave concern, for nearly everyone lived near coal fields or forests from which fuel could be readily obtained.

Had the federal government been as officious then as now, it could have taken steps in the face of the looming disaster, to subsidize an in­crease in the whale population and the production of whale and sperm oil. But the government took no such action. Indeed, most people at the time held the strange notion that any shortage was their respon­sibility and curable only as they did something about it. That they were on the threshold of less whale and sperm oil was to them, not some kind of doom, but a challenge and an opportunity to replace the item in short supply with something better.

And replace they did, with some­thing far better. Shortly after 1850, petroleum was discovered in Penn­sylvania . At first it was used in small quantities for medicinal purposes. But free people, acting in a market unencumbered by govern­ment regulations, have a knack of performing miracles. Before another century could pass, petroleum and natural gas, and their conversion to electricity, had become a major source of energy. Beyond possible belief in 1850, such energy would propel millions of vehicles over thousands of miles of paved high­ways, along waterways, through the air and outer space, linking peoples and communities throughout the world. Homes and farms and other businesses would be heated, lighted and powered by these same sources.

Despite increasing taxation and government regulation and control, the capacity of comparatively free people to perform miracles has en­abled them to outmaneuver and course around such blockages.

Today, however, government offi­cials are taking great pains to ad­vise and inform the people that we stand “at the threshold of less.” The planet earth and its people have passed the zenith. We cannot expect our levels of living to improve in the future as they did in the past. On the contrary, they say, now we are mov­ing rapidly downhill. The best we can do is to ration irrevocably di­minishing stores of resources. We must save what we have. There will be no more. The way is no longer for the adventurous ones, who try the impossible, and make it. Instead, it is for a new breed of American—the timid soul.

What nonsense!

Have the peddlers of doom not heard of the wisdom of the past: necessity is the mother of invention . . . when the going gets tough, the tough get going . . . they said it couldn’t be done, but he did it … those who give up liberty to gain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety . . . God is with those who persevere. . . . One could go on and on with these proverbs drawn from the way of life of free men.

This is not to ridicule the wisdom of conservation or the abhorrence of waste, but it is to submit all the facts and conditions and desires and abilities of individuals into the market place and let the market work. Into it will be drawn an infin­ity of ideas from individual men and women, and from it will emerge to­morrow’s ingenious solutions to to­day’s unsolvable problems. The only prerequisite for such miracles is that peaceful persons be free from government interference.

Herman Kahn, William Brown, and Leon Martel, with the assis­tance of the staff of the Hudson Institute, have published a thorough and thought-provoking book, The Next 200 Years.’ Its basic message is this: “Except for temporary fluc­tuations caused by bad luck or poor management, the world need not worry about energy shortages . . . in the future. And energy abundance is probably the world’s best insurance that the entire human population (even 15-20 billion) can be well cared for, at least physically, during many centuries to come.” The authors base these conclusions on the probability that per capita consumption in the world two centuries hence will be some twenty times higher than today. Many of the energy sources are fully renewable. They cannot be depleted.

Let the private innovators be free to innovate. Let the private inventors be free to invent. Let the private enterprisers be free to support those new ideas that will make them rich—or poor, if certain ideas turn out, as some do, to be less bright than was expected. We, all the rest of us, will ride the coattails of the successful ideas into higher levels of living than ever before dreamed, and hardly be smudged by the poor ideas that fail to survive.

We stand at a threshold—not of less—but a threshold of danger that we let this fear psychology prevail to the point where government places free people in shackles and prevents the development of mankind that otherwise has barely begun. We cannot afford to cross this threshold of more government interference in our lives.

1 William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1976, p. 83.