Monday, September 29, 2008

Links mentioned in previous posts

Stem-Cell Fast Food - From NASA To Nourishment
Kibbutzim make a comeback
The six video series posted on Youtube titled "Heidegger life and philosophy" is part of the BBC Series "All Too Human" which has three parts about Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. Clicking on each of these links will take you to the version posted on Google Video.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Kibbutzim make a comeback

Here is an article that originally was in the Jerusalem Post and later got its way into US News and World Report. The word Kibbutzim is plural for word Kibbutz in Hebrew referring to the small communalist settlements in Israel. This article primarily on these small communalistic settlements in Israel, but this article is really not about being pro-Israel or anti- Israel. This article deals with the whole issue of the future of small-scale communalistic living.
Kibbutzim make a comeback
By LARRY DERFNER
Eight years ago, Kibbutz Ein Gedi, a tropical paradise overlooking the Dead Sea, was on the verge of closure. The latest blows were the Dead Sea’s receding, which destroyed a great deal of valuable land, and the intifada, which scared away the tourists, a vital source of income.
But for a long time, the kibbutz had been dying of socialism. “There was so much waste,” recalls Yonki Ayalon, one of Ein Gedi’s founders in 1956, sitting at her dining-room table with her husband and daughter. “We couldn’t afford socialism anymore. It cost too much.”
In the old days of the kibbutz movement, so much food would go to waste that pets were typically obese. Since members got unlimited electricity, they commonly left their air conditioners running when they went out to work so it would be cool when they came home at the end of the day, says Daniel Gavron, author of the 2000 book, The Kibbutz: Awakening from Utopia.
When the crunch came at Ein Gedi, the first thing the kibbutz did was force members to start paying for their food and electricity.
Next to go was what Ayalon calls the kibbutz’s “hidden unemployment.” There were numerous members working at Ein Gedi’s farm, spa and guest house who weren’t really needed, so many of them were told to find new sources of income. Necessity was the mother of invention; one kibbutznik, for instance, became a masseuse, another a manicurist, another a gourmet French cook, another a quilt-maker, another a taxi driver.
Then, four years ago, the biggest change of all went into effect: Kibbutz Ein Gedi ended its nearly 50-year-long system of equal salaries for all members - no matter what work they did, no matter how well or poorly they did it - and switched to the system of “differential salaries.” Since then, members have been paid according to their productivity, to the amount of wealth they produce.
The result? “Our standard of living is much higher now,” says Ayalon, 71, a clerk at nearby Ahava cosmetics whose husband, Avner, 73, is on pension after a lifetime of farm work. “We have money to travel overseas, to help our children and grandchildren. You see so many people here remodeling their homes.”
The young adults who left Ein Gedi in droves over the last couple of decades have started to return, though usually as renters, not members. “They want Ein Gedi the place, but not the kibbutz,” says the Ayalons’ daughter, Meirav, 44, a public relations consultant.
What happened at Ein Gedi is an example of what’s happened to the kibbutz movement as a whole in recent years - it’s been saved by a strong dose of capitalist individualism. In the last three or four years, the movement - which includes 273 kibbutzim, some 100,000 members and 20,000 non-member residents - has emerged from 20 years of life-threatening economic and social crisis and lifted its head above water.
The average kibbutz household income now stands at approximately NIS 11,000 a month - on a par with the nationwide family average. And after losing an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 members between 1985 and 2005, the kibbutz population has recently been on the rise due to higher birthrates, the return of members who had left (usually young families) and the addition of new members, often outsiders who “marry in” to the kibbutz.
Last year, some 1,200 new members joined the kibbutzim - the first year in more than a generation that saw more people joining than quitting.
“I wrote at the end of my book that the kibbutz was finished. Today I have second thoughts,” says Gavron, himself a former kibbutznik.
SOME SERIOUS problems, though, remain. A few dozen kibbutzim, especially in the far reaches of Galilee and the Negev, continue to fall behind economically; their members are less concerned about how to distribute wealth than about how to create it.
On kibbutzim in general, the population is aged; while the young aren’t leaving almost automatically like before, too many of them still leave - after army service and the near-mandatory year or two of traveling abroad - for the movement’s demographic good health.
The kibbutz may be viable once again; it has a future, but it can never return to its glory days from the 1930s through the 1950s, when it was the elite of Israeli society, when the kibbutznik epitomized socialist Zionism’s “new Jew” - settling the land, fighting the enemy, scorning self-indulgence (at least publicly).
In that era, the kibbutzim produced a hugely disproportionate share of the country’s political and military leaders. Then it attracted the most determined and idealistic youth. Today, the more candid members speak of an unjust “stigma” commonly attached to them - that the only reason they’re still there is because they couldn’t make it in the sink-or-swim world outside. The kibbutz pioneers were known for their holier-than-thou attitude; this stigma upon their descendants is a kind of payback.
Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the agricultural settlement started by a small group of Zionist laborers at the southern shores of the Kinneret near the Arab village of Umm Juni; the following year, they established it as a communal settlement - the first kibbutz, Deganya.
Spread out across the highway from the Kinneret, Deganya is almost as paradisaical as Kibbutz Ein Gedi. It’s a forest of trees, bushes and flowers dotted with little bungalows and smelling of freshly-mowed grass. On a wilting August afternoon, the most audible sound was of birds chirping, and the most visible movement was of a few pensioners tooling around the narrow pathways on golf carts and bikes. Not much seemed to have changed here in a long time - until one noticed the late-model cars parked in some of the backyards.
Until two years ago, Deganya members couldn’t own their own cars and had to reserve the use of one of the kibbutz’s vehicles. This and many other old ways were put aside with the shift from equal to differential salaries.
Taking a break from her managerial duties at Deganya’s old-age home, Nina Ben-Moshe, born here 70 years ago, recalls the effect capitalism had at the “mother” of the kibbutzim. “All these members who’d been staying home with back problems suddenly felt well enough to go back to work,” she says with a knowing laugh. The kibbutz’s operating deficit closed in almost no time. “There were a lot of parasites in the old days. It’s not like that so much anymore,” says Ben-Moshe.
The head administrator at Deganya, Shai Shoshany, stresses that the kibbutz didn’t make the switch to differential salaries because it was hard up economically, but because so many young people were leaving and older members were chafing at the bit. Deganya wasn’t short on money, it was short on individual freedom and opportunity.
Sitting in his office next to a photo on the wall of A.D. Gordon, the Tolstoyan spiritual father of the kibbutz movement who toiled and is buried at Deganya, Shoshany says: “It used to be understood that young people here would do their army service, take a year or two to travel overseas, then leave the kibbutz and not come back. Now, kibbutz life is an option for them again.”
Recently, four young members who’d left Deganya have returned with their families. One is Moran Chen, who is playing on the floor of her apartment with her infant son, Kinar. Chen’s mother, Nurit, a leading educator at the kibbutz, stops by to give the boy a hug.
On maternity leave from her job as a teacher’s supervisor, Chen, 31, and her partner, Eyal, a doctoral student at the Technion, returned to the kibbutz after spending several years away studying and traveling. “There’s something in the atmosphere now - it’s freer,” she says. “People aren’t looking at you, judging you on whether you’re working hard enough.”
She says she almost certainly would not have come back to Deganya if the kibbutz had stuck with the old, rigid model. “For one thing, I would have had to put my son in kibbutz day care when he was three months old and gone back to work; now I can stay home with him as long as my job allows,” she says. “For another thing, we wouldn’t have been able to save any money; now we can.”
SOME 180 kibbutzim, or two-thirds of them, have gone over to differential salaries, with the remaining one-third keeping to the system of equal salaries - so far. These old-model kibbutzim tend to be wealthy, such as Ma’agan Michael, Be’eri, Gan Shmuel, Gan Yavne and Shefayim. A saying heard around the kibbutz movement is: “The more money you have, the more socialism you can afford.”
Yet even among the majority of kibbutzim that have gone capitalist, it’s not Thatcherist, raw capitalism; it’s what kibbutzniks rightly compare to the “Scandinavian” or “social democratic” economic model. It combines aggressive, business-minded creation of wealth with high, progressive taxes to prevent overly large income gaps, to maintain high-standard public infrastructure and services and to provide a strong safety net for the handicapped and elderly, the latter group being disproportionately large on the kibbutzim.
While a few dozen kibbutzim are hard up financially, the great majority are beautifully maintained rural enclaves with good schools, health care, sports and cultural facilities, pensions and old-age care. “There’s still a far greater degree of mutual care on the kibbutz [than in Israeli society at large],” says Gavron.
Achieving this miniature Scandinavian way of life involves assessing the value of each kibbutz member’s work and paying him accordingly, then taking much more in taxes from the haves than from the have-nots. The upshot at Deganya, says Shoshany, is that the before-tax salary of the average member runs about 15 percent higher than the average Israeli’s, but the after-tax salary is about the same.
At the top of Deganya’s wage scale are professors, attorneys and hi-tech professionals, with the highest monthly salary being NIS 22,000 before taxes and NIS 15,000 after. At the bottom are the banana pickers and other laborers, who receive about NIS 6,000 before taxes and NIS 5,000 after.
“We make less money than most of our friends in the city, but our standard of living is much higher,” says Chen. Noting the expanses of greenery on the kibbutz and the Kinneret right across the road, the swimming pool, the basketball court, the cultural activities, the animals in the shed and petting zoo that Kinar sees every day, and the lifelong friends and neighbors who “smile whenever they see him,” she says: “Who wouldn’t want to raise children here?”
THE KIBBUTZ movement has come an awfully long way from where it was in mid-1985, when disaster struck. What happened then was that the government, faced with inflation running at what Gavron calls a “Zimbabwean rate,” took drastic austerity measures to shrink inflation instantly - which instantly left most kibbutzim with debts they had no hope of repaying.
During the previous years of hyperinflation, they’d been living in a fool’s paradise - borrowing way beyond their means, figuring that by the time they had to pay back the loans, triple-digit inflation would have reduced them to easily manageable size. But in 1985, when the government wiped out hyperinflation overnight, it meant the kibbutzim’s absurdly large loans would remain absurdly large, only this time in real money.
“They owed seven or eight billion dollars, something unreal,” says Gavron.
Yet the government couldn’t just let the kibbutzim go bankrupt; there were 130,000 people living on them at the time - where would they go, what would happen to all those communities, farms and factories? (A few dozen kibbutzim had refrained from taking out large, high-risk loans, and thus were not in such trouble, Gavron notes.) So the banks, which at the time were owned by the state, were obliged to write off most of the kibbutzim’s debt and reschedule repayment of the rest. The kibbutzim were saved from bankruptcy - but they were still deeply, unprecedentedly in debt.
The country had just turned abruptly from socialism toward capitalism; the kibbutzim could no longer count on generous government subsidies and protection from competition. There would be no more overfed dogs and cats, no more leaving the flat with the air conditioner on. The world-renowned experiment in communal living would have to be run like a business.
And little by little they were. On the kibbutzim that switched to differential salaries, many say the new system is actually more egalitarian than the old one. “The inequality was just hidden before,” says Ben-Moshe. Before, kibbutz higher-ups and professionals employed outside received the same salary on paper as the banana pickers, but they often concealed perks from the job, not to mention personal bank accounts, say kibbutzniks.
Meanwhile, about 90 kibbutzim - again, mainly the wealthier ones - are holding on to the system of equal salaries. Yet even they have gone capitalist in ways that once upon a time would have been anathema. They’ve turned their members into consumers, distributing equal amounts of disposable income for food, clothing and entertainment, but holding each member responsible for balancing his budget. Typically, these kibbutzim have also required many members to find profitable work outside, or create small businesses themselves, because the farms and factories at home don’t have enough productive work to go around and are no longer willing to provide make-work.
FACING THE Mediterranean north of Herzliya, Shefayim is seen - and derided - by many Israelis as a symbol of the new, capitalist kibbutz. With some 1,000 members, it sits on some of the most valuable land in the country. It runs one of the most successful shopping centers that stay open on Shabbat, renting space to Toys ‘R’ Us, Ace hardware, Office Depot and other stores, as well as McDonald’s, whose golden arches are visible from the kibbutz’s old industrial zone. The Shefayim water park is mobbed during hot weather, and the 150-room Shefayim hotel is generally full. There’s even a used car lot on the premises.
So many members’ and visitors’ cars are parked here, so many people are bustling around, that Shefayim doesn’t have that country village atmosphere ordinarily found on kibbutzim. Instead, it feels more like a beautifully landscaped industrial park, with great leisure facilities open to the public.
Yet despite all the trappings of capitalism, Shefayim, founded in 1927, is one of the socialist holdouts of the kibbutz movement; all its members still receive the same salary, no matter what kind of work they do (although high earners receive bonuses of a few hundred shekels). However, Shefayim probably won’t be able to hold out much longer, nor will many of the other kibbutzim that make enough money to share it out every month not only equally, but generously as well.
Sitting in the restaurant at Shefayim’s hotel, Shimon Gutsfrucht, 64, seems the ultimate, classic kibbutznik. With a thick, salt-and-pepper moustache and a day’s beard, wearing sandals and a plaid shirt open at the neck and showing tufts of white chest hair, he looks like he came off a produce label from the 1950s. His personality is also classic kibbutz - gruff at first, but very soon warm and generous. I ask Gutsfrucht his position at Shefayim.
“I deal with real estate investments and entrepreneurship,” he replies.
People live very well at Shefayim, he says - just about every family owns a car and takes a vacation abroad once every year or two. A second-generation member, Gutsfrucht says that in his parents’ day, newly married couples were given homes of 27 square meters. “Now they get 120 meters that they can expand to 150,” he says, noting that the new two-story duplexes with gardens at the edge of the kibbutz are for them.
I ask how many of the young people leave Shefayim after doing the army and traveling the world. “None,” he says.
When a Shefayim member marries an outsider, the couple invariably makes its home on the kibbutz. Every year for the last 15 years or so, about 10 new members have been marrying in. Compared to the veterans, these people have wide professional and economic horizons. They have no socialist roots, either. Shefayim’s population is getting younger, wealthier and more worldly. Naturally, they want the kibbutz to move in their direction.
“Five years ago, we first started discussing going over to differential salaries,” says Gutsfrucht. “Three years ago we had the first vote of the membership, and the reformers got about 40%. If we held another vote today, they would get over 50%.”
According to the kibbutz’s bylaws, a two-thirds vote is needed to make such a dramatic change, and Gutsfrucht doesn’t think it will happen within the next year or two. Instead, he gives it about five years. “I don’t delude myself, it’s clear the change is going to come, and it’s causing some friction at the wealthier kibbutzim, including this one.”
At Shefayim, the two camps divide roughly along the lines of age and earning ability; along with most of the older and/or less-skilled veterans, Gutsfrucht opposes the switch to differential salaries, at least for the time being. “It’s going to be hard on the people who’ve worked here all their lives and are now between 50 and 65. If they’re going to be paid according to the market value of their work, they’re going to lose out, and how are they going to find better paying jobs? For their sake, there has to be a transition period,” he says. “But in the end, the change is inevitable.”
At kibbutzim that have already made the change, though, there is a general sense among young and old alike that it was the right decision; the economic and demographic numbers speak for themselves. In fact, their future points toward even more capitalism.
At Deganya, as at many other kibbutzim, the next reform on the agenda is home ownership: transferring the title of kibbutz apartments from the kibbutz to the members themselves, depending on their seniority.
“Even socialists want to pass something down to their children,” says Shoshany.
At the Ayalons’ apartment in Ein Gedi, parents and daughter agree that the kibbutz should eventually stop being a kibbutz entirely and become a “community settlement” - one with good schools and facilities, but without any central economic planning and without high taxes. (Meirav, a public relations consultant, and her brother Rafi, a business consultant, each pay the kibbutz’s top marginal tax rate of 60%.) “The way it is now, it’s neither here nor there,” Yonki suggests.
There’s no disagreement between the Ayalon generations, either, about the kibbutz movement’s socialist past: It was great for its time.
“We needed those old ideals,” says Yonki.
“To settle a new kibbutz in the wilderness meant you weren’t just a pioneer, you were a super-pioneer. My parents were strutting around like peacocks when I came here,” says Avner, who left his parents’ established Galilee kibbutz for Ein Gedi in the early 1960s.
From Meirav’s perspective, the kibbutz movement’s century of life has been a natural process of evolution. “It was abnormal to build the kibbutzim just like it was abnormal to build this country - you needed a bunch of psychopaths to make it work,” she says. “But they had to go through that stage to get to this one.”

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Stem-Cell Fast Food

Here is an article from Popular Mechanics please read my comments afterwards.
www.popularmechanics.com/science/research
Stem-Cell Fast Food: From NASA to Nourish
Who needs animals? It's only a matter of time before lab-grown meat turns into the oink-less BLT.
By Ian Christe
Published in the March 2007 issue Popular Mechanics.

It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: giant sheets of grayish meat grown on factory racks for human consumption. But it's for real. Using pig stem cells, scientists have been growing lab meat for years, and it could be hitting deli counters sooner than you think.

Early attempts produced less-than-enticing results. Then, in 2001, scientists at New York's Touro College won funding from NASA to improve in vitro farming. Hoping to serve something, well, beefier than kelp on moon bases and Mars colonies, the scientists successfully grew goldfish muscle in a nutrient broth. And, in 2003, a group of hungry artists from the University of Western Australia grew kidney bean-size steaks from biopsied frogs and prenatal sheep cells. Cooked in herbs and flambéed for eight brave dinner guests, the slimy frog steaks came attached to small strips of fabric — the growth scaffolding. Half the tasters spit out their historic dinner. (Perhaps more significant, half didn't.)

Today, scientists funded by companies such as Stegeman, a Dutch sausage giant, are fine-tuning the process. It takes just two weeks to turn pig stem cells, or myoblasts, into muscle fibers. "It's a scalable process," says Jason Matheny of New Harvest, a meat substitute research group. "It would take the same amount of time to make a kilogram or a ton of meat." One technical challenge: Muscle tissue that has never been flexed is a gooey mass, unlike the grained texture of meat from an animal that once lived. The solution is to stretch the tissue mechanically, growing cells on a scaffold that expands and contracts. This would allow factories to tone the flaccid flesh with a controlled workout.

Lab-grown meat isn't an easy sell, but there could be benefits. Designer meat would theoretically be free of hormones, antibiotics, and the threat of mad cow disease or bird flu. Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins could be blasted into the mixture (see illustration above) or dispersed through veins. Revolting? You bet, but have you ever visited a sausage factory? Currently costing around $100,000 per kilogram, a choice cut of lab meat makes Kobe beef seem like a bargain. But meat-processing companies hope to start selling affordable factory-grown pork in under a decade. Bon appétit.

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The short article from Poplar Mechanics fits in with the concept of artificial food or what we at the Weed Garden like to refer to as man-made Manna. It also fits in with my concept of High Tech Self-Sufficiency, HTSS. There are numerous advantages of creating synthetic meats in the method that is described in the popular mechanics article. I would like to mention some nonspecifically mentioned in the article. One, the method could be scaled down for small communities, families, or for individual use to help create high Tech self-sufficiency. Two, it would be a radical way to help reduce cruelty to animals in factory farming. Three, it would be a tremendous way to help feed people in areas of the world where the environment is agriculturally challenged. Four, in times of natural disasters, poor harvest etc. it would be an effective way to make food available where it is needed.
What needs to be done now is to promote the concept of this type and other types of synthetic foods. The economic advantages are so clear it's really not worth debating. What must be done is to fight the neo-Luddites and those biological fundamentalist who would just yell that it is weird. First and foremost, we must promote the concept in emergency situations and in areas that are having trouble feeding their population. Second, I think I would offer an olive branch to animal rights activist who would seriously like to be a part of a method that could perhaps put an end to cruel treatment of animals on farms and in slaughter houses. Third, the same olive branch could be offered to back to nature enthusiast to promote self-sufficient farming. Again here is a method that could produce food in a more direct way with less pesticides and chemicals. Here is a way that makes self-sufficient farming economically feasible. Anyways I would appreciate feedback on this article.



www.popularmechanics.com/science/research

Friday, September 12, 2008

Martin Heidegger Life and Philosophy

I caught a BBC documentary put on Youtube on six short clips short parts called Matin Heidegger Life and Philosophy. Just google the title and you should be able to get it on the Internet. Martin Heidegger is considered probably one of the greatest philosophers in the 20th century influencing political, economic, and social thinkers no matter what their perspective. The documentary is worth seeing and it is worth considering as a discussion for the Weed Garden.
I would like just to offer a comment after seeing the documentary. It is quite possible to be brilliant in one field of knowledge and at the same time completely stupid in another field. It is also possible to be a genius and lack character. Heidegger became a distinguished Nazi member and his renowned scholarship help give needed credence to Nazism. Heidegger also destroyed the careers of a number of distinguished German scholars during his time as being a head of a distinguished German academic institution. Heidegger actively encouraged young people to be associated with Nazism. After the Nazis were defeated Heidegger had little to say about the Holocaust. The documentary goes into these and other subjects in much more depth. The documentary starts with this distinguished Quote from Heidegger.
“He who thinks great thoughts often makes great errors.”
I think we should consider this astute statement by Heidegger as perhaps a motto for the Weed Garden.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

An email from 2006 relating to energy independence

In reading John Stossel's article and Amos' post about energy independence, I remembered an email which I sent to Ltlconf about this issue. I still had it in my email account. The date was 9/28/2006. Here it is:

Some things things came to me on thinking about our discussions Saturday night.


On the issue of alternative fuels, I remembered that in a discussion with James I had proposed a role for government in this issue which I still advocate. What I said to him at that time is that government should put solar panels on its buildings. This would demonstrate to the rest of society the benefits of solar panels. Another thing that I view positively is that some school districts are now running at least some of thier buses on biodiesel. I have also heard of the military using biodiesel in tanks. I want government to do more of this sort of thing. I would be for a project whose purpose is to help government to stop using oil as much as possible.


However, outside of government, it is important for each individual and group to weigh the costs and benefits when it comes to energy usage, what fuels to use, etc. They can do this for themselves better than government can. The decisions they make together would lead to the necessary change over to alternative fuels, to the degree needed, and at the most appropriate pace. It is important for government not to interfere with this process. A Manhattan style energy project would take resources away that could be used for this purpose. It also could not address the costs and benefits on as situation specific of a level as well those in those situations.


There are some things that can be done by government to affect the incentives and disincentives in the changeover process. You told me that you believed that the Gulf War was mainly fought to affect who controlled the oil fields of Kuwait. If the U.S. had not involved itself in the conflict, and Iraq had suceeded, oil may have gone up in price. If our military is used exclusively for national defense, oil companies can not count on the U.S. to protect them from volatility in the oil market (or any other market) through foreign policy. This would have given them more of a reason to develop alternative energy sources.


Another possibility is what's called a "green tax shift". A green tax shift means moving taxation away from income and trade and onto pollution and use of natural resources. This idea is related to the Georgist single tax, or land value tax. According to the single tax theory, land should be taxed and human effort should not. Land is not created through human effort, so it should be treated differently than labor, trade, or capital. Therefore, it is the only thing that can be justifiably taxed. So, for example, a house built on someone's land should not be taxed, while the value of the land under it should. Those who advocate the green tax shift simply apply this to natural resources in general, not just land. I hate taxation, but I find this form of taxation, in the words of Milton Friedman, "the least bad tax". Taxing pollution, instead of human effort would discourage the use of oil, and provide an incentive for a change to alternative energy sources. In addition, the economic activity needed for the change over would not be taxed, which would provide another positive incentive in the process.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Rebutting John Stossel’s Views on the Idiocy of Energy Independence

Stossel commits two fallacies in his arguments that energy independence is not desirable for the United States and even harmful to the cause of free trade. First, he confuses the significant difference between preferring free-trade during times of peace as opposed to times of political conflict and war.
In a peaceful world free-trade is always desirable. However, from time to time political forces come to power that are interested in pushing national chauvinism, ideological expansionism, or intolerant religious subordination. These political forces are only interested in promoting free trade when it serves their purposes as a means to destroy the free enterprise system. In the same way Moslem Fundamentalists are using the First Amendment to hide behind as a means to eventually over throw the United States Constitution with Sharia Law.
Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya and Venezuela are regimes that don’t wish us well and when given the opportunity they have used their oil profits to promote terrorist movements. A complex geopolitical chess game must be played with each of these nations individually. But in none of these cases does the United States benefit from oil dependence. Nor do the internal dissident political forces with in these nations benefit.

Stossel points out that the United States gets most of its oil from Canada. But even if the United States were to receive a hundred percent of its oil from Canada it would still be a major concern for the U.S. because our major allies and trade partners Japan, China, India, and Europe would still be mostly dependent on oil from anti American regimes.

Historian Richard Pipes in his book Communism cites examples where the Soviet Union was on the verge of economic collapse but the West continuously came to its aid with trade deals. If the West had taken advantage of these opportunities in the 1920s perhaps the Soviet Union would have collapsed 50 years earlier and Stalin would have never come to power. Ironically, big business often benefited from such trade deals. In fact Vladimir Lenin once said, “We will sell you the rope to hang you.”

When the Nazis first came to power in the early 1930s Germany was suffering a major depression. Hitler realized that he had to quickly improve the German economy and if this did not happen soon the Nazis would not be able to stay in power. There was serious talk of a worldwide economic boycott against Germany. The Nazis were extremely fearful of such a world wide boycott. The boycott never happened. We don't know for sure but it is possible that a worldwide economic boycott of Germany in the early 30s might have possibly brought the Nazi government to its knees. During World War II the United States was almost completely energy independent and this was a major advantage over both Germany and Japan.

In his book Reagan's War Peter Sweitzer points out that President Ronald Reagan led a covert war against the Soviet Union and put a primary emphasis on hindering the development of a pipeline carrying oil and natural gas from Russia into Europe. If such a pipeline would have been built it is quite possible that the Soviet Union could still be in existence today because billions of dollars in economic aid through trade relations with Western Europe would have been able to keep alive the Evil Empire.

The post Soviet Union Russia is trying to use oil to reinsert Russia's influence. The current conflict in Georgia is in part an attempt to block oil going from the Middle East into Europe through Georgia. Russia is even trying to assert political and military control in the North Pole because it is apparently one of the last places on earth with even more oil than Saudi Arabia.

The second fallacy that Stossel commits is confusing the need for U.S. energy independence with supporting protectionism for American energy companies. If a Japanese company could find oil in the U.S. and distribute it cheaper than any American company then give the Japanese company the job. The same goes with nuclear power plants, wind mills, and solar panels.
Let’s use food production as an analogy. The United States is one of the biggest producers of food in the world. According to Stossel’s logic it would be fine for the United States to become more and more dependent on foreign sources of food. According to Stossel’s logic it would be perfectly acceptable for the United States not to be able to actually feed its entire population so long as we could buy it from other countries like China, Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. Does that make any sense?

There is nothing wrong when jobs in agriculture are outsourced or automated as long as the American consumer benefits. It is also all right for American consumers to prefer to buy cheaper and better foreign crops when available. But, anyone who would seriously argue that it would be desirable for the United States not to be able to feed its own population is on something. The fact is food and energy independence always will be amongst the most basic essentials for any autonomous civilization.

Finally, why is John Stossel hostile to offering a prize to anyone who can invent better energy technology like an improved battery, a more fuel-efficient car, etc? There are historical examples where such a carrot approach has been used successfully. For example the Longitude Prize offered by the British government through an Act of Parliament in 1714 for a practical method of precise determination of a ship's longitude led to John Harrison inventing the marine chronometer. It encourages the new Edison's and Tesla’s to show us their stuff. The consumer doesn't spend a dime until the actual device is demonstrated. It encourages excitement and more importantly creativity.

If Stossel wants to argue that it would be better for private companies and private organizations to offer such a prize fine. But, the fact is that offering such a prize for scientific technological creativity for such an urgent need is perfectly acceptable.

Stossel establishes a false dichotomy. The choice is not between energy independence versus a commitment to free trade. The real choice is being committed to the security of free enterprise, or having the free enterprise system robbed of its vital energy.