Another conservative for Gekko

If the jihadis don't end us, it's a lead-pipe cinch the conservatives will. Unless the Daily Kossacks do.

But let's just say it's the National Review conservatives who will destroy America, because that is the source of today's Gordon Gekko "Greed is good" moment. Over on The Corner at National Review Online, syndicated columnist Mark Steyn took it upon himself to take an MIT prof to task (at least Steyn seems to think his correspondent was a professor) for challenging this country's addiction to Saudi oil:

Americans will never accept that the way to make the world better is to drive smaller, less comfortable cars. And, besides, the premise is completely false: If you trade in the Expedition for a Honda Civic, that oil you save won't stay in the ground and thus impoverish the Saudis; it will merely be sold to the Chinese and Indians and other fast developing nations who will replace America and Europe as buyers of the cheapest and most easily extractable oil in the world. So the sheikhs will be as rich as ever and funding as many Islamist nutters. But we'll be driving worse cars and feeling virtuous.

The long-term solution is to accelerate a move to a post-oil world, to develop something better and cheaper that makes oil obsolescent, and obliges at the very minimum the Saudi princes whoring in London to make do with cheaper hookers. But instead my correspondent calls for "a working passenger rail system", and at that point his choo-choo pretty much jumps the tracks. Look, America is a de-urbanizing society, even compared to Canada. And that's a good thing. This is the cheapest country in the world to buy a four-bedroom house on a big lot and an automobile that'll take three or four kids. That's one reason we're not in the demographic death spiral of Europe or Japan. It's easy to make do with a Honda Civic or 2CV or Fiat Uno when you've got nothing to put in it.

IN OTHER WORDS, "Greed is good."

Americans will sulk themselves into a barren, childless future and send this country into a demographic death spiral unless they can drive their Expeditions and live in their exurban McMansions. Right. That's exactly why the Europeans and Japanese are depopulating themselves into historical-footnote status.

And I thought it was because they just didn't want to be bothered with anyone but themselves, having -- as whole societies -- lost God and then hope. Hopeless people don't create a future, which children most certainly happen to be.

After all, if a suitably big, petroleum-quaffing land barge is a key prerequisite for allowing one's sperm to say howdy-do to another's ovum, please explain Shakwanda in the 'hood, age 24, with three kids, a crappy apartment and no car.

Actually, the explanation is pretty simple. Not the right kind of breeder. EEEEEEEEENNNNNT! Doesn't count. Tidy market-oriented theories require tidy market-oriented people like . . . us!

But thanks for playing Greed Is Good on ConservoTV, and please accept these delightful parting gifts! GOTCHA! No parting gifts for you! Awwwwww, don't cry -- here's Officer Stedenko to haul you away on a bad-check charge!

COME TO THINK OF IT, though, Steyn's premise is even more flawed than that. If you totally discount all the Shakwandas from Compton and all the Esquelas just in from Tegucigalpa, the American birth rate probably isn't that horribly far off European levels of futility . . . er, fertility.

Despite the McMansion in Suburban Sprawl Land. And the two cars and an SUV in the three-car garage, as opposed to having to dash from your London flat to catch the last train to Ipswitch.

Really, the lengths to which morally bankrupt right-wing ideologues will go to avoid saying "Greed is good" when what they really mean is "Greed is good."

Here's a news flash: Nobody -- with the possible exception of the old woman who lived in a shoe -- needs a McMansion in the exurbs. Nobody needs a Ford Expedition. Or a Chevy Suburban.

Nobody.

AH . . . BUT WHAT ABOUT Steyn's argument that "it will merely be sold to the Chinese and Indians and other fast developing nations who will replace America and Europe as buyers of the cheapest and most easily extractable oil in the world."

Well, I guess that's true, as far as it goes. But if we weren't addicted to petroleum, it wouldn't be us the Saudis had by the shorthairs, now, would it?

And we just might be in a position to tell the Saudis to rein in the jihadis and stop exporting Wahhabiism or watch their oil fields and refineries get blowed up real good. Which would turn the sultans back into Bedouins real fast.

Americans are not a stupid people, nor do we lack ingenuity. We could live in a world of possibility -- freed from the Persian Gulf death trap -- if only we didn't love our greed more than we hated seeing those towers fall six years ago.