The iconic Patriot Coal Corporation just recently filed for bankruptcy protection. Seeing the headline on a popular financial website was surreal and felt like something from the pages of Atlas Shrugged. Liberal cronies force “Patriot” corporation out of business for the sake of the common good? This isn’t fiction. This is the daily paper.
It’s not just the company name that’s symbolic, of course. There are few economic tasks as meaningful as the natural resources industry. It’s symbolic because it reveals man’s only real option for success on earth: harvesting the planet. Human prosperity requires digging up metals, mining coal, turning trees into lumber, and then building civilization with these sources of wealth.
Even though it’s the blood of the economy, and natural resources are one of the main ingredients for any and all sources of economic growth, the Obama administration has been flagrantly fighting it. In 2008, Obama even boasted of a plan to make electricity more expensive.
We Can’t Say We Weren’t Warned
Before he became president, Obama said in an interview that “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket… that will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.” That wasn’t a gaffe. That was the plan.
While the president didn’t successfully achieve his cap-and-trade insanity, he did achieve a series of new regulations through the EPA and other regulatory agencies.
In a Fox News opinion piece, Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment, wrote: “These are the first real, market prices that take Obama’s most recent anti-coal regulations into account, and they prove that he is keeping his 2008 campaign promise to make electricity prices ‘necessarily skyrocket.’”
The Future Of The American Economy
This isn’t just about a single company, a single resource, or a single industry. This is about the nature of our economy and our way of life as civilized people. This is about the future of America on a very basic level.
Obama’s administration has been waging a fruitless war against economics, and America is the one losing. We’ve lost billions in taxpayer money to his laughable solar-power endeavors. He’s stood in the way of allowing more oil to be drilled while America has enough oil to be the next Middle East. And he’s intentionally and publicly destroying the coal industry.
If you want to see an economic recovery, then freeing up our natural resources is a great first step. Natural gas, oil, coal – these should be seen and embraced, not fought and shackled by bureaucrats who hate a productive and free economy.
Shaun Connell is the editor of The Capitalism Institute
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