RUSH: Bill in Darby, Montana, glad you called. Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, am I on?
RUSH: How are you, sir? Yes, you’re on.
CALLER: Oh, mega bake sale dittos to you.
RUSH: Thank you. Appreciate that.
CALLER: Listen, I wanted to tell you, you were talking about global warming and going through the fuel from corn and stuff. It’s costing me more to feed my milk cow now because of stuff like that, and my milk has gone up. Prices go up, people don’t understand. You were talking the other day about understanding economics, it’s just simply a matter of there are alternative uses for resources. That simple. If they’re going to turn corn into gas, then it costs me more to feed my cow.
RUSH: I know, all that’s true economically. But the reason it happens is more interesting to me. We have to go to ethanol. Why ethanol? Well, because we’re polluting the planet, we’re destroying the planet, global warming, Americans, SUVs, greenhouse gases. So we gotta go to ethanol, which will reduce the actual amount of oil, theoretically, and decrease the amount of greenhouse gases. And, of course, the American people have been swamped with all of this environmentalist wacko hoax, fraudulent data for years, and everybody wants to matter and everybody wants to make a difference, everybody wants to think they’re contributing to the betterment of their society and their world, and so they go for it. Underneath the scene, underneath the surface, you have an alignment between the corn growers and politicians to sell more corn, to grow more corn and so forth, and the dirty little secret is, is that what corn’s primary use is — that’s for food, not just here, but around the world — skyrockets because there ends up being less of it because it’s being taken and used for ethanol, which, as it turns out, is a scam in itself. It’s not that relevant, it doesn’t make that big a difference. But it doesn’t matter because people feel good.
It’s like when they go out buy a hybrid, it really doesn’t matter a hill of beans, other than you’re driving around in the ugliest-looking cars you could ever imagine. But when you’re driving around in your ugly little hybrid, you feel like you matter. It’s like wearing a red ribbon for AIDS or a blue ribbon for whatever other disease, you put that on and it tells people, ‘I care, I’m better than you because you’re not driving this car.’ It’s all about people want to feel good. Most people don’t feel like they’re relevant, everybody wants their life to have meaning, and so these slick politicians on the left know how to tap into that desire of people and use them for their own specific political purposes and, in the meantime, the economic impact that results from it ends up showing that the original idea was worthless, it was fraudulent, and it was bad. You would think after all these years of failed liberal policies, Social Security, the Medicare, the Medicaid, to the war on poverty, you would think that, at some point, people would say, ‘You know what? It doesn’t work.’ The unintended consequences of all of these things and the never-accounted-for spending and cost don’t work. But people resort more to their feelings and their desires to be relevant and matter than they do their thoughts on things like this. But the tide’s turning on all of it, you wait and see.
Eddie in Dayton, Ohio, welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you today?
RUSH: Fine and dandy. How are you?
CALLER: I’m all right. I’m a registered Republican, but I take a little issue —
RUSH: When somebody starts out telling me that they are a registered Republican, I have my doubts. Registered Republicans do not have to announce it.
CALLER: Well, okay.
RUSH: It’s like somebody tells you they’re not a whore, they’re a whore.
CALLER: (laughter) All right, if you say so, but I’m a registered Republican. You there?
RUSH: Yeah, I’m here. Okay, you’re registered Republican.
CALLER: But anyway, my point was, you were talking about gas and the prices earlier, and I listen to you every day at lunchtime at work.
RUSH: Hm-hm. Most people do.
CALLER: Yeah, most people do. But what I wanted to bring up is during the first George Bush election with Algore, you said if you want $2.50 a gallon gas prices you go ahead and elect Algore and if you check on the EIB archives you’ll find I’m telling the truth. And we sure got a lot more than that with our buddy George right now.
RUSH: You’re talking about George H. W. Bush?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Okay, so you are trying to make what point?
CALLER: What point I’m trying to make is, I think our president, which I have great respect for, should have fought harder to get these energy policies so we ain’t paying this for gas.
RUSH: Look, you know, something? He has tried. Everybody’s tried. As a registered Republican, which you can’t be, or you would not have made this call — if you were a registered Republican, and if you listen to me every day at lunch — you would know that Bush has offered energy policy plan after energy policy plan, dead on arrival. The Democrats have run Congress, haven’t done anything with it. He’s tried I don’t know how many times to open up a bunch of oil fields, Alaska and other places, for drilling. Ain’t no way. Isn’t going to happen. It’s not just Democrats in Washington, too. It’s local, state legislatures and governors who are all impacted by the environmental movement. So this is not something that’s strictly Bush’s fault. I wish I had more time in this segment to deal with this Algore business because what you’re trying to say here is that, look, we got Bush and we got three dollar a gallon gasoline and we had Clinton and Gore and we didn’t have gasoline priced that high. You’re going back, what is it, 15 years and trying to draw economic comparisons worldwide in an oil business, which you can’t make — registered Republican.