Fossil Fuels and a True Market Economy

Frequent commentor Dan Conine writes:

… Make the actual cost of everything available at the point of purchase, rather than burying costs through incentives and subsidies. People buy gas to go to jobs to buy cars because they think it is cheaper than staying home. If they had to pay for the wars and the subsidized drilling and the tax writeoffs for corporations when they bought the gas or electricity, they would be more likely to resist the urge to waste it, and the costs of renewables would look more viable.

ALL government should be financed by sales taxes, and there should be no favoritism for ‘job creation’ or ‘business’. Most of the things in the economy that are being defended are simply not necessary to the existence of our species. You can’t have everything: where would you put it?

That’s exactly correct, as usual, Dan. It’s amusing to hear the rhetoric surrounding the midterm elections. Virtually every campaign platform is a statement of how this person or proposition aligns with the Constitution and the first principles of democracy. But is anyone talking about stripping away all the bureaucratic contrivances, leaving in place only a pure market economy in which we are free to make our purchases, based on the complete and unaltered costs of the goods we’re buying? Nope.