For an industry to have to defend its interests by extolling capitalism seems retrograde. Has the economic system, imperfections and all, not proven to be superior to all others? Has history not validated the companion imperatives of individual freedom and governmental restraint? Against the background of communism’s failures in the Former Soviet Union, disintegrating Venezuela, and decrepit Cuba, praising economic essentials such as free markets and private property in 2019 shouldn’t be necessary.
Yet the oil and gas industry must make uncompromising support of capitalism the centerpiece of political strategy.
Socialism’s support
Support for socialism, communism’s precursor, is spreading like the flu among US liberals, who now call themselves, with no evident sense of irony, “progressives.” From announced presidential aspirants of the Democratic Party, promises flourish for free health care, free college education, guaranteed employment, and more, all funded by government. Fulfillment of those promises would require greatly accelerating the diversion of wealth away from the economy’s most-profitable activities. The aggressive redistributionism would compromise growth but not, by itself, represent socialism, in which the government controls means of production. With their Green New Deal, US liberals seek to cross that dangerous threshold.
Fusing mitigation of climate change with utopian social and economic goals, the Green New Deal would nationalize the energy industry. It calls for a prompt end to the use of fossil fuels and a requirement that all energy used in the US come from renewable sources. This could not happen unless the government took control of the energy business. This would be socialism.
The oil and gas business should take no comfort in the Green New Deal’s political and physical unfeasibility. Ideas have consequences, and the authoritarian ideas behind the Green New Deal have full-throated support from most Democratic presidential hopefuls and an appalling number of lawmakers. Socialism, discredited by history and current affairs, has returned as a political force. The oil and gas industry must take it seriously. Socialists and climate zealots have joined forces, and they want nothing less than to eradicate oil and gas. They’ll fail. But they’ll stymie a lot of pipelines in the process.
President Donald Trump senses political opportunity in socialism’s resurgence. In recent speeches, he has evoked cheers from supporters with declarations that the US never will be socialist. But an election approaches, the outcome of which is far from certain.
Results of last year’s midterm elections suggest Democrats will retain control of the House. In the Senate, Republicans now hold a six-seat advantage but must defend 10 more seats than Democrats in 2020. And Trump himself, far from universally popular in his own party, might lose. In 2 years, therefore, a political party swerving toward socialism might control the US government.
Trump’s antisocialist sloganeering, moreover, teeters atop an inconsistent record. While his rollback of Obama-era overregulation has been welcome and good for the economy, his administration’s proposed favors for fuel ethanol, coal, and nuclear energy make clear that his priority is politics, not market freedom. And his declaration of an emergency to fund more border-wall construction than Congress approved is ominous. It undermines constitutional tenets oriented to the liberty essential to capitalism. And it sets a horrible precedent. Oil industry professionals unworried by this should imagine working for a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren appointee in an oil company nationalized by way of a presidential declaration that climate change represented a national emergency.
The high road
The oil and gas business need not take political sides. Partisanship seldom serves it well.
The industry needs instead to uphold transcendent principles under which its owners, employees, and customers fare best, such as economic liberty, market freedom, and limited government, and the embodiment of these principles in capitalism. Apparently, Americans need a reminder of their system’s virtues. Providing it offers the oil and gas business a high road to follow through a political season in which most roads seem destined to show much less elevation.
