The Severe Limits of Social Justice

The idea that the government should force every individual of our society to provide Social Justice is a central belief of Progressive Elitists.  The implementation of their Social Justice agenda is a massive injustice.  Let us examine the reasons that make this the case.

Justice has meaning in the relationships of individuals and meaning as an aim of government.  In the relationships of individuals, justice exists when an individual correctly identifies the value of another individual based on his character and actions.  This evaluation is clearly dependent upon one's ethical code.  Consequently, an individual will not correctly identify the value of another individual when his moral code is not correct or when he holds himself to no moral principles.

Suppose an individual has a correct moral code and is highly capable in applying that code to the complex problem of evaluating the worth of another individual on the objective assessment of observations of his character as witnessed by his actions in life.  This highly competent judge of value in other individuals will nonetheless not be able to form a valid opinion of the worth of all the other people he encounters in his life simply because he will not know enough about many of them to form an objective opinion.  He will only be able to do justice to those he knows sufficiently well.

This objective moral evaluator will understand that when dealing with people who he does not know well enough, he should be careful not to do an injustice to them.  This is at least the case in the context of a society in which the initiated use of force by individuals is prohibited, as it is by legitimate governments.  A further requirement is that the government itself uses no more force than that needed to prevent the initiated use of force among individuals.  Once the use of force is minimized in a society, then an individual can afford to live by the principle that he should hold a benevolent assumption that others are not a threat to his life and he may assume that others are of significant value until they actually prove otherwise in actions he has had the opportunity to observe. Thus the rational individual in a free society acts on the principle that he should not do others the injustice of assuming them a threat to his life.  In voluntary associations with them, he can assume that they will trade values to their mutual benefit or they will be free not to have any association at all.

This benevolent assumption of value in others is conditional on a society in which our interactions with others are of a voluntary nature.  It assumes that when we trade values in our interactions, we are not being forced to do so.  A government which harms some individuals in order to provide favors to other individuals or groups, as our present government does on a major scale, is actively making some groups a threat to the lives of many individuals.  It undermines or even denies the basis under which one may make the benevolent assumption of value in others.  It can actually force individuals to do the injustice to others of having to assume that they are a threat to his life until and unless they prove that they are not a threat and actually are a value.  This is what has happened in many fascist and communistic societies.  Big Government or statist government is a basic threat to justice in this way.

Government can clearly be the means by which massive injustice comes to characterize a society. How can government be prevented from being the cause of injustice?  It is by forcing government to observe the rights of the individual.  The rights of the individual are determined by the nature of man and by a basic core morality.  As Ayn Rand said in her essay Man's Rights:

"Rights" are a moral concept -- the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual's actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others -- the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context -- the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics.  Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

A "right" is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context.  There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man's right to his own life.  Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action -- which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.)

The concept of a "right" pertains only to action -- specifically, to freedom of action.  It means freedom from physical compulsion, coercion or interference by other men.

Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a positive -- of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice.  As to his neighbors, his rights impose no obligation except of a negative kind: to abstain from violating his rights.

The freedom to act on your own judgment implies the need for freedom of conscience and the exercise of voluntary choices within a society requires the freedom of association.  Freedom of speech does not exist unless one is allowed to advocate wrong ideas from the perspective of others or even with respect to reality.  Similarly, freedom of conscience does not exist if one is not allowed to have ideas, including moral ideas, that are wrong.  Freedom of association does not exist unless one is allowed to unjustly err in assessing the value of others.

While rights are a means of securing morality in the actions of government, those moral principles that government must recognize are the most basic and most core moral beliefs.  The government must not dictate more than the most basic of moral requirements on the individuals of the society it serves.  Government protection of the exercise of individual rights requires it to allow individuals to choose their own values and to manage their own lives in accordance with their own values.  The bare minimum of morality that forms the foundation of rights is the recognition that the individual must take actions to secure his life and to maintain it in a healthy state.  He has the right to pursue his own happiness. To take such actions effective in their purpose, he must be free to think and to pursue the information and develop the knowledge necessary to that effective action. Both freedom of thought and action for such purposes are critical values and he must have property rights to values he produces by his thought and actions.  But, he does not have the right to initiate the use of force against others, as they do not have that right against him.  No one has the right to use the force of government to do harm to others either, unless those others have first initiated the use of force.

Rights reside in the individual.  The individual is the sovereign rights-holder.  Rights are not a grant or a privilege from government.  Rights arise from the nature of man, not from the nature of the state. The state either protects the rights of the individual or it does not.  It either performs its legitimate function or it does not.

Man, whether singly or in numbers, is not omniscient.  The development of knowledge and the understanding of nature are difficult.  In attempting to understand our reality we all make mistakes and no one achieves a complete knowledge.  This is a critical part of our understanding of man's nature and of the complexity of the reality in which man lives.  This being the case, it is not reasonable to expect that all men will agree on most moral issues and most value judgments.  So how can we live in a society together even when we are not in complete agreement, or maybe even in considerable agreement, about moral decisions?  The practical answer to this is to have a government that only enforces a minimum of moral requirements.  The answer is a government that simply prohibits the initiated use of force and protects our individual rights.  We are then left the freedom to make our own value choices and to associate with others of our choice voluntarily in the private sector to pursue our common values and to trade with one another to our mutual advantage.  In this private sector we can all aim to achieve every one of our values and to gain values we want in every association and cooperative endeavor we have with others.  This is not the case in the government sector, once government expands beyond its legitimate purpose as the protector of individual rights.

The Progressive Elitists say no to this concept of individual rights.  They claim that rights are really only privileges granted those favored by government.  Those privileges may be changed at the whim of government, at least if that government is controlled by a democratic vote, whether fraudulent or not.  They say the purpose of government is not to secure and protect the rights of the individual, but to ensure Social Justice.

An individual cannot form a just assessment of the character of everyone he encounters, so he cannot offer everyone justice.  But, he can adopt the principle that he will do no one an actual injustice and he will most certainly not initiate the use of force against others.  How can a government do more than this?  A government does not have a moral assessment of every one of the individuals within the country.  The government is still composed of a number of individuals and that number of individuals will never come close to having adequate objective knowledge of the character of most individuals in the country to form a valid assessment of their individual worth.  The government can no more provide justice to everyone than can an individual.

How does a government embarked on the endeavor of Social Justice respond to this inadequacy?  It must simplify the problem.  Its response to insufficient knowledge is a classification scheme that simplifies individual differences by assigning individuals to categories.  Individuals are complex, so a given individual will be thrown into many categories, with his particular combination of characteristics largely lost to the process.  The individual may be characterized by many pixels of information, but the whole of the individual is eradicated.  For instance, one individual may be a count in each of the following categories:

• Skin color or the area of the origin of his ancestors
• Male or female or transgender
• Age
• Married or unmarried
• Dependent children or not
• Child care users or not
• Home-owner or not
• Income level
• Wealth level
• Veteran or not
• Heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and other flavors of sexuality
• Employer or employee
• Employed, seeking employment, or not seeking employment
• Labor union member or not
• Supporter of bigger government or not a supporter
• Contributor to favored charities and non-profits or not
• Healthy or unhealthy
• Paid health insurance or not
• Citizen, legal resident, or illegal alien
• Supporter of green energy and catastrophic man-made global warming or not
• Borrower or lender
• Farmer or not
• Exporter or not
• Bank accounts abroad or not

On and on the classification counting goes, but Abigail Adams and Patrick Henry cannot be reconstructed from the many bits they have been parsed into.  The individual himself is totally eradicated.  But with this simplification, the government can now pretend to pursue Social Justice.

Now having partitioned the population into numerous categories, the government can indulge in legislation aimed at helping certain categories and hurting other categories.  When helping a category, the usual justification is a claim that Social Justice is being served.  If preferences in hiring to certain ancestral groups or to one gender are legislated, Social Justice is served.  If income or property is transferred from someone who has worked hard to become educated and worked hard in business to subsidize someone else who has spent endless hours watching TV sitcoms and horror movies and who partied and played instead of studying, then Social Justice is served.  If a person unhealthy due to tobacco smoking and overeating of junk food has difficulty affording health insurance, then force healthy and young people to pay much more for their insurance in order to subsidize unhealthy behaviors in the name of Social Justice.  If it is impolitic to make employees file their own payroll tax forms and send their own tax payments to the government, then in the name of Social Justice make the employer spend his time providing this unpaid service.  If the taxpayer wants to contribute to a non-profit organization supporting individual rights, do not allow that organization to become a tax-exempt organization or if it already is and he contributes $250 a year to it, take down his name as an enemy of Social Justice.  If an individual or organization notes that the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis is a proven failure, prosecute him as a racketeer under RICO in the name of Social Justice.

Social Justice can be used to justify every act of special interest favoritism.  It is used to justify every instance in which the government hurts some individuals or groupings of individuals to supposedly help another grouping.  Endless numbers of groups are pitted against one another for the favors of government or to at least avoid being the victim of government.  The result is a general breakdown of the voluntary interactions that make it possible for one individual to assume that another has value to his life prior to his actually having such an evaluation of the character of that other individual.  It becomes easy to determine if that individual is a threat to one's life in many cases.  If you are an employer, then employees are a threat, especially if they are members of a government-favored labor union.  If you are a so-called white male, than anyone who is not a white male is a threat due to government favoritism.  If you have a high income or are wealthy, then those with significantly lower incomes or wealth are a threat by virtue of their ability to provide larger numbers of votes for a politician.

Because of government favors rendered in the name of Social Justice and the battle to be designated a special interest, society is broken into numerous, nearly innumerable, groups at war with one another to control the use of government force for their advantage.  The separation of interests of each individual into many categories is a great aid to minimizing the opposition of individuals to the government taking control of many aspects of their lives.  Each enabling act of legislation or each bureaucratic regulation commonly helps a group under one category at the expense of a group in another category.  The group hurt is hurt in one aspect of their lives, but that group still has many reasons to be busy attending to the many other aspects of their lives.  They cannot afford to spend a great deal of time opposing the new act that is imposing upon their individual rights and depriving them of their values and freedom.  The government pursuing Social Justice counts on this to perpetrate its accumulation of more and more power over the life of every individual. 

The Social Justice pursuing government cannot allow anyone to disagree with its moral proclamations.  Disagreement implies a violation of justice within this framework.  It becomes policy for the government to become intolerant of different views of ethics and of different value judgments. If you disagree with affirmative action for the hiring of Black Americans, you are a racist and because you are wrong, you do not have the right to say that affirmative action is wrong.  But, note that if you do not have the right to be wrong, then you have no right to freedom of speech.  If you believe you have religious reasons for thinking gay marriage is wrong and will not produce a wedding cake for a gay marriage, you must be fined heavily enough to destroy your small bakery. You cannot be wrong about this moral issue, so you are not allowed freedom of conscience, freedom of association, or the freedom of free trade.  If government claims that some scientific theory implies that harm is being done to someone and you claim the science of that theory is wrong, you are proclaimed guilty of Social Injustice to those the theory claims will be harmed.  You do not then have the right of free inquiry, free speech, freedom of the press, and you do not have the right to develop scientific understanding because you are not serving Social Justice as determined by the government.

Governmental pursuit of Social Justice imposes much more highly elaborated moral theory on the people of a nation than does the legitimate government whose only purpose is to protect individual rights.  That theory will neither be consistent nor highly rational since the government is chosen by those who vote and they are notably not experts in ethical theory.  What is worse, because there is an enforced intolerance of differing moral beliefs, the People are denied the benefit of a free discussion of morality.  Moral ideas are never tested and improved in the free market for the development of knowledge.  

Even if the People were thoughtful about ethics, they might be wrong and the politicians they vote for might trade ethics for geld or power in their dealings with the myriad special interests vying for the great powers exerted by Social Justice-pursing government.  Such government must violate individual rights.  It must act largely in ignorance of the interests of many of the People.  It must act to hurt many people in the name of helping others.  It must use force much more often than will the individual rights protecting government.  It must minimize the voluntary and co-operative relationships found in the private sector and replace them with involuntary mandates and transfers of income and wealth, jobs, medical care, education, housing, and innumerable other values.  The harmony of the private sector must be replaced with the strife of the Big Government sector.  All of this is a necessary consequence of a government pursuing Social Justice as envisioned by the Progressive Elitists.  In reality, this is the ultimate Social Injustice.

The closest a society can come to maximizing Social Justice is to be a society that honors individuality and protects the rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  The best a society can do is to protect these individual rights equally and to provide an environment in which the use of force is minimized by not allowing either individuals or the government to initiate the use of force.  The rational individual will understand his own life and his freedom to manage and secure his own life is his greatest value.  He understands that to do that he must be free to think and to act upon his thoughts, with only such limits as set by the requirement that he not deprive others of an equal right to think and to act upon their thoughts in the interest of their lives as well.

It is the private sector, not the force-wielding government sector, that provides us the opportunities of a good and healthy society for beneficial relationships with others to achieve our individual values in a manner consistent with a respect for individual lives and the individual minds that direct those lives. The role of a legitimate government is only to protect our individual rights. When government takes on the additional role of delivering goods and services to some at the expense of others, it is hurting some under the threat of force in a brutal manner that has no analog in the private sector.  It forces individuals into an unnecessary conflict of interest, whereas the private sector provides a wealth of individual choices for relationships, cooperation, trade of values, or the freedom to not pursue a relationship, cooperative endeavor, or a trade.  In comparison, the Big Government model, proclaiming itself to be pursuing Social Justice, is a shotgun wedding offering no possibility of divorce and a staid existence with ever-reduced choices.  Nothing more offends my sense of justice than this evermore totalitarian state.

Senator Feinstein's Abuse of the Public Trust

Senator Diane Feinstein of California recently gave up her chairmanship of the Senate Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee after many years of steering contracts for military construction, advanced weapons procurement, environmental clean-up projects, facility leasing, and quality of life issues for veterans to companies owned by her husband.

Richard C. Blum, her husband, owned majority shares of Perini Corporation and URS Corporation until late 2005.  Senator Feinstein had been voting approval of contracts to these corporations and to CB Richard Ellis, a commercial property leasing and building purchasing firm in which her husband had a major interest, since becoming the Chair of the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee in 2001.  That year, URS Corp. military construction income grew from $24 million to $185 million.  Its architectural and engineering military construction income rose from $108,000 in 200 to $142 million in 2001.  She had also voted money for Boston Scientific Corp. and Kinetic Concepts, Inc. for medical supplies when these companies stocks were heavily owned by her husband's financial companies.

At least $1.6 billion of income was steered to her husband's companies while Senator Feinstein served on the Military Construction Appropriations Subcommittee.  This makes all other Senatorial conflict of interest and theft of public monies cases small potatoes in comparison!  How abuse of U.S. citizens can go on for many years at this scale without the media raising a huge ruckus about it, is a very clear statement that the media, as well as the Senate, has no regard for the General Welfare of the People.

You can read more about this here: http://www.wnd.com/2007/03/40845/

Stock Investors Have Gone John Galt

Obama does not care a fig for whether the stock market goes up or down. So he says. From his actions and given his hatred for the "investor class", one has to conclude that he actually likes seeing the stock market going down.

Clearly stock investors are leaving the stock market. They are buying gold and in some cases they are betting that the Obama pessimism will carry the market still lower. Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard & Poor's Stock Index reached 12-year lows. The Dow closed at 6,594.44 and the S&P finished the day at 682.55, which is the lowest it has closed at since 19 Sep 96. The Nasdaq composite fell to 1,299.59, barely above its low in the last bear market on 12 Mar 03.

Many people soon to retire on the leading edge of the Baby Boomers generation are now without adequate income for their retirement since stocks now are worth only 50.2% of their 52-week high of 13,136.69. Obama does not care. Actually, Obama does not want anyone to have any more retirement income than that provided by Social Security. Obama is a very happy man.

So, investors see no reason to have confidence in the future of the American economy. They are showing this by "Going John Galt" in droves. There is no joy in Mudville, nor anywhere in America today. The Federal government does not protect property and it does not protect contracts. The failure to protect contracts is explicit in the abrogation of home mortgage contracts. The failure to protect property is explicit in talk establishing the means to take over a number of financial companies after years of pushing them to finance sub-prime mortgages and lending generally and saddling them with short-sighted mark-to-market rules under the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law. Yes, many of these institutions bear substantial blame, but so does the government which now wants us to believe that it can manage many of these companies better than their management can.

For all the faults many of those companies managers can be held to account for, there is every reason to believe that government bureaucrats will be far, far less capable. Most of those bureaucrats are in government agencies either because they could not make it in private enterprise or because they hate the profit motive. In either case, the bureaucrat is hardly likely to do well in managing a company of the private sector. Indeed, it would be unseemly for a bureaucrat to actively seek to increase a company's profit in competition with other companies. There is a strong conflict of interest between his public duties and such a role.

Such a strong conflict of interest also exists between the government-employed educator and the operation of schools. This has not kept the government from almost monopolizing the schooling of America's children and it has emboldened them to substitute propaganda for larger government for a critical assessment of the moral scope of government power. One of the primary reasons children need an education is so they will be able to hold their own against the will of government to always expand its powers. It takes knowledge and intellectual confidence for the individual to stand firm against the demands of those wielding power through government. Government is the chief enemy of freedom and freedom always hangs in a delicate and precarious balance due to the threats of government. Only when many citizens are able to think for themselves and are cognizant of history and economics can they hold government in check.

Our government-run schools have seen to it that our children cannot see the threat of government, that they believe an additional government program is the answer to every problem, that they avoid conflict and hurt feelings at all costs, and that they are ignorant of the essential lessons of history. Government schools have long been designing our children to become patsies before the onslaught of evermore intrusive government. Our children are designed to become the feudal serfs of society. This is the only class of people that Obama likes. Our schools cannot hope to do the job of education due to the fundamental conflict of interest that a government has with respect education and the expansion of its own powers.

Similar conflicts of interest exist with all of the many functions which governments take on to expand their power. Recognition of this motivated the Framer's of the Constitution to strictly limit the powers of government. Government is always primarily about the use of force, not primarily about helping the people. Government is always dangerous. But government always poses as the solution to every problem. It poses as the solution to the problems in the economy, but in reality it is the biggest problem by far in the economy. Let us "go John Galt" on government!

Big Oil U

Merrill Goozner and Eryn Gable of the Center for Science in the Public Interest published a report entitled "Big Oil U" in January 2008. The June 2008 issue of Academic Sourcebook reproduced the executive summary, with the subtitle "Corporations large and small are attempting to influence academia. These attempts are not isolated, and they are increasing. This is a threat to academic freedom."

The summary claims that "As the scientific consensus surrounding climate change has solidified, the oil, gas, coal, and electricity industries have reluctantly recognized the inevitability of political action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Most energy companies are distancing themselves from campaigns to discredit global warming science." The summary then bemoans the fact that some energy companies are funding research programs at universities and attaching conditions that have the potential to compromise the integrity of the research. Nowhere does this summary discuss the possibility that government funding ever does anything of a similar nature.

The study complains that nine such university-energy business programs have some of the major limitations on academic freedom due to:

• Company representatives on governing boards
• Industry sponsors have intellectual property first rights
• Industry sponsors play a role in deciding which projects are funded
• Industry review of research prior to publication
• Industry may delay publication

There are almost always some industry executives on university governing boards. Universities want them there as potential donors, for their executive advice on running a large organization, and because they have some insight into what skills students need to prepare themselves for jobs in industry, which whether academics like it or not, is where most of the product of a university winds up. However, this article takes the consistent viewpoint that universities are to be run for the sake of the faculty and their research interests, not for the sake of providing an education to students. There is no mention in this summary of any aspect of concern for the university function of educating students. This is very consistent with the way universities are largely run, not to mention public schools. Universities have two concerns: one for the research and publications of the faculty and one for the indoctrination of students with socialist and radical environmentalist propaganda. Universities more and more are disinterested in providing students with skills and knowledge which will enable them to be productive in industry. They would much rather that students took government, non-profit, and academic jobs.

In most of the cases discussed in which industry played a role in deciding which projects were funded, the role was less than that usually played by a government agency. Only at Georgia Tech did the industry partners make the decision by themselves.

The industry review of the research may play a very good role, since the scientists and engineers of the major oil companies know a great deal about energy. If they abuse their role, then the university can simply turn to government to fund the programs instead. The complaint that publication may be delayed can be handled the same way. There are cases when government funded research is also reviewed before publication and when publication may be delayed as well.

Apparently, the fact that the university generally has intellectual property first rights is less of a threat to academic freedom than a company having such a right. This entire article assumes that universities and industry are and ought to be at loggerheads. It totally fails to recognize that our wealthy society can only afford to pour money into these universities in amounts that consistently grow at rates even higher than the economy as a whole because of the incredible productivity of industry. It states that with more industry involvement "there is less space to perform research that is critical of industry or that challenges the conventional wisdom." Wow! Industry research funding for universities is swamped by government research funding for universities. Does this uncritical susceptibility of university researchers mean that they are much discouraged from criticizing government because of that funding. If so, and many of us recognize that this is very much so, then universities have a far more serious conflict of interest on their hands than that of accepting money from industry. Surely it is also the function of university elites to warn the great masses of dumb Americans of government excesses, mistakes, failed policies, impossible goals, frauds, inefficiencies and other problems which we know them to systematically ignore. Is it not the case that much of this tendency to ignore the limitations of governments is due to university dependence upon government funding? Of course it is!

As for discouraging a university from challenging conventional wisdom, I thought that they were in the business of creating the conventional wisdom and implanting it in their students with religious zeal. Long ago, they gave up on the ideal of teaching students to think critically for themselves and to close observe reality. Now they teach the tenets of tired and false socialism and anthropogenic global warming. Socialism has had nothing but obvious collosal failures and global warming never lived up to its billing even when there was a bit of warming and now there has been none for 10 years! No, the universities are one of the primary sources of myths in America today.

There is further admission that the commitment to truth is weak among university faculty members in this summary. Sheldon Krimsky of Tufts University observes that "It's when they ask, 'Can you write the research in a certain way?' that it takes away the autonomy of the researchers, and many researchers are perfectly willing to trade that away so that they can get funding." He is talking about the role of corporations in biomedical research, but if they are so susceptible to dishonesty in that mode of funding, surely they are equally or more dishonest when dealing with government agency funding sources.

The summary says there is an inherent conflict between the interests of universities and the interests of corporations. The summary states "University research is supposed to work toward the common good. Corporate research is primarily aimed at maximizing profits." Wow, what a self-serving assessment. If corporation research is aimed at maximizing profits it does so by producing better product, or cheaper product, or whole new kinds of products that people buy freely in their pursuit of their own happiness. This we know in a capitalist society with free markets to be phenomenally effective in serving the common good. Universities supposedly exist primarily to educate students, which, if it is done well, serves each student well and then has great benefit for the common good. More and more, in order to have good faculty who will put up with educating students, many of whom are not so interested in being educated as in partying, universities hold them by making research a priority, which also has been contrived to give the university itself great prestige, even if the students are poorly educated. So, if we are to put the role of universities in a pejorative way, we can summarize their purpose as get government funding, publish or perish, never offend the government, and always ally oneself with government to expand its role and power. This comes much closer to a truthful assessment of their purpose than it should.

Now there is a very funny twist in this summary. It proceeds to note that carbon-dependent industries have only funded modest programs with modest goals in universities. One is tempted to ask how such modest funding is supposed to pose such a great threat to the universities. Indeed, university research in total dwarfs the entire R&D budget of the oil and gas industries. Given the widespread animosity of the universities to industry in general and to the oil industry in particular, it is clear that it is the oil industry that is most in danger, not the universities. Indeed, it is precisely because government funding of so many university researchers has bribed most of them into participating in the global warming alarmist scandal that the oil companies have been trying to fight their image as evil-doers by funding these university energy programs, which the summary notes is done to protect themselves.

The summary also bemoans how little the oil companies are investing into research of alternative energy compared to what they spend on exploration and the exploitation of new oil reserves. There is a reason for this. The alternative fuels do not offer sufficient return for these large companies to make a profit and to continue in business. Furthermore, finding new oil and developing it is becoming rapidly more expensive, even as the non-national oil companies, such as those funding the university programs complained about, are at or almost at their peak in production. They are almost certainly all on a downward production path. Alternative energy cannot solve the problem. Spending too much R&D on alternative energy will only make matters worse for the oil companies, since any possible return on investment is much too far into the future.

The universities want to take the toy from the little boy next door and then refuse to share it. This makes them look rather childish. Meanwhile, these university purists claim the oil companies are the wolf to their Little Red Riding Hood's grandma, even as the naked grandma climbs merrily into bed with the government wolf.