Liberty as the Source of Prosperity: A Question of Power

A version of this article was originally published on Texas Scorecard.

I can’t think of a greater opportunity in my lifetime than the present for people to learn about the connection between liberty and prosperity.

The problem is, just like other opportunities in the past, all the experts are busy telling us whatever they can to distract from the real reasons for the current challenge–an economic collapse–we face.

Of course, we all have become aware the physical harm that can be caused by a rapidly spreading disease. However, we are being told the cause of the economic harm is the reasonable, medically necessary actions taken by our governments at all levels in response to the COVID-19 virus.

Yet, it is not clear to me that that is actually the case.

Should we be washing our hands, practicing social distancing, and restricting some economic activities? For the most part, yes. But there is no reason in my mind that we couldn’t–and wouldn’t–be doing these things ourselves in connection with our employers, businesses, charities, churches, and other civic institutions without the government forcing us to do so. And doing them more effectively with much less disruption to our economy and our lives.

It is uncertain what the short- and long-term harm to prosperity of the government’s response to COVID-19 will be. However, we already have a pretty good track record of the economic harm caused by governments all over the world when it comes to limiting access to an affordable and reliable supply electricity.

That’s one of my big takeaways from Robert Bryce’s excellent new book, A Question of Power.

Here is just one of the many intriguing facts Bryce adeptly marshals throughout the book to tell the story of how electricity has benefited humanity and how to help everyone get plugged in:

Roughly 3.3 billion people—about 45 percent of all the people on the planet—live in places where per-capita electricity consumption is less than 1,000 kilowatt-hours per year, or less than the amount used by my refrigerator.

That’s also less than a quarter of the 4,000 kilowatt-hours per year per capita electricity use that Bryce suggests is “considered the minimum for living a long, high-quality life.”

So why is it that almost half of the world’s population are living in “Unplugged” countries like El Salvador, the Philippines, Bolivia, Pakistan, and India where they “are using about the same amount of electricity as an average resident of Chicago did back in 1925?”

Interestingly, one aspect to this seems to be what God you believe in. Bryce notes that “while Christians are spread fairly evenly among the three segments, about two-thirds of the world’s Muslims live in Unplugged countries and about 99 percent of the world’s Hindus live in the Unplugged world.” In the “High-Watt World,” Christians outnumber Muslims by five to one.

From a biblical and historical perspective this makes perfect sense. The Triune God of Scripture is the God of liberty. Christ came to “to proclaim liberty to the captives” and “to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

This is first to be taken in a spiritual sense, as we “who were once slaves of sin, … having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness” (Romans 6:17-18 ESV). Yet many authors, such as Rodney Stark, have shown how Christianity’s understanding of man being made in the image of God and its consequent “emphasis on human freedom and secure property rights” led to the very societies (largely in the West) where liberty and humans prosper most today and, not coincidentally, use the most electricity.

Bryce lays out very clearly the connection between increased electricity use and increased health and prosperity. For instance, he examined a number of studies that

found “unidirectional causality between electricity consumption and economic growth.” That is, electricity use drives economic growth. While electricity drives economies, it is also clear that greater wealth increases electricity consumption. That makes sense. As people get wealthier, they consume more electricity because they can afford more electrical devices.

He also points out that the “close correlation between electricity use and human health and economic growth has become so obvious that international investment bankers have adopted electricity use as a measure of economic activity.”

Throughout history most humans have lived on the edge of subsistence, dependent almost completely dependent on how much sun and rain came their way; storage of food like with Joseph in Egypt occasionally offered short-term relief. However, “by using hydrocarbons (at first coal, then later oil and natural gas) humans were able to harness ever increasing quantities of power and do so in ever-denser packages. In place of animal power, sun power, and wind power, factories began using advanced waterwheels and coal-fired steam engines.”

Yet this progress has not taken place uniformly. Bryce explains that the three critical components to an affordable and reliable supply of electricity, integrity, capital, and fuel, have often been in short supply in many parts of the world.

By integrity Bryce means that the system must not “leak,” either because of poor design, poor maintenance, or theft. “People who operate the grid, as well as the people who rely on it, need to have some sense of responsibility for it. Or, if they don’t feel responsible for the grid, they have to fear getting caught and punished for stealing electricity.”

This often doesn’t happen, however, in impoverished countries operating without the rule of law because the elites have “organized society for their own benefit at the expense of the vast mass of people.” In countries where the elites are best at oppressing their citizens, corruption is rife, black markets abound, and grids leak.

That is, to the extent they have grids in the first place. Which brings us to the second critical component, capitol. “Keeping theft and corruption at a minimum is imperative because theft robs the grid of the capital it needs,” say Bryce. In fact, it robs entire countries of the capital they need to prosper. Particularly when the theft comes from oppressive governments through high taxes, heavy regulation, confiscation of property, and inflation of the money supply. People in countries like this often can’t afford to build a reliable grid, or much of anything else.

The last of the three “key determinants of the quality, cost, and cleanliness of the electricity” that we consume is fuel: “Without fuel, you can’t make electrons move.” And Bryce makes it clear that the fuel of choice around most of the world is coal.

By 2017, more than 6,600 coal-fired power plants, with a combined capacity of about 2,000 gigawatts, were operating around the globe. That coal-fired capacity accounted for nearly one-third of all global generation capacity. Not only that, coal’s share of global electricity production has remained nearly constant, at about 40 percent, since the mid 1980s.

Why is this? For the simple reason that coal is cheap and widely available:

The world has gargantuan coal deposits. At current rates of consumption, global coal reserves are projected to last another 134 years. The United States and Australia both have more than three hundred years’ worth of coal reserves in the ground. Russia has nearly four hundred years’ worth. The large number of countries that produce and export coal allows buyers to compare prices from a number of suppliers and therefore get the best quality and price.

Add natural gas to coal, and it is clear that unlike with integrity and capital, over the last 200 years there has not been a shortage of the affordable fuel we need to generate electricity.

At least not yet. But that is changing as the political leaders of the High-Watt World are doing their very best to make fuel more expensive and less available. In three ways.

First, they are imposing draconian controls on the use of carbon-based and nuclear fuels that do nothing to improve human health. Whether it is micromanaging aspect aspect of the design of nuclear generators or requiring levels of particulate emissions that are below the natural levels, the government has dramatically and artificially increased the cost of electric generation from these fuels.

Second, they are taking billions of dollars from taxpayers and giving it to corporations with markets caps totaling into the hundreds of billions to subsidize wind and solar generation. In the U.S. alone, my calculations show that taxpayers have ponied up more than $80 billion since 2006.

All this money is going to unreliable and inefficient sources of energy that can never supply us with the energy we need at any cost. Wind and solar only generate electricity when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. Because of this, they require battery storage so that we’ll have electricity when we need it. Yet Bryce calculates “storing the 9.6 terawatt-hours of electricity needed for California to get 80 percent of its electricity from renewables would require the state to install more than seven hundred million Power walls” (Tesla’s latest battery). The truth is that every penny spent on renewable energy is being wasted.

Third. they are seeking to completely eliminate the use of coal as a fuel because of concern about climate change. Bryce notes that even as coal use around the world is thriving, in the U.S. “more than half of all coal plants have announced planned closures since 2010.”

If I had one nit to pick with A Question of Power, it would be that it takes more or less as a given that the world needs to do something to address CO2 emissions to reduce man’s effect on the climate. On this topic, there is little of the insightful analysis used elsewhere in the book challenging conventional wisdom.

Yet there is plenty to challenge, as Patrick Michaels and Caleb Stewart Rossiter explain:

Computer models of the climate are at the heart of calls to ban the cheap, reliable energy that powers our thriving economy and promotes healthier, longer lives. For decades, these models have projected dramatic warming from small, fossil-fueled increases in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, with catastrophic consequences. Yet, the real-world data aren’t cooperating. They show only slight warming, mostly at night and in winter.

They go on to cite atmospheric scientist John Christy, an author for a previous edition of the U.N. report on climate change, who “recently concluded that, on average, the projected heating by the models is three times what has been observed.”

The story told in a Question of Power (through my lens) is one of scientists, politicians, and activists holding themselves out as experts and telling us how to power the world while taking our money to make us pay for their ideas. And while some of them may be experts in narrow fields, even all together they do not have the expertise to fully comprehend, much less manage or provide, every aspect of the integrity, capital, and fuel needed to power the world to prosperity.

Which gets us back to COVID-19.

It is interesting to note is that even though the COVID-19 models developed by the experts have failed even faster than the climate change models, politicians all across the world are taking advice from these experts about how deal with this pandemic.

This problem is enhanced even more by the fact that while many of these experts are experts in medicine, they seem to have little expertise in governance, economics, or liberty. So their advice is focused on one thing; preventing deaths caused by COVID-19, no matter what the costs or consequences in human lives from the actions taken to stop the spread. And their will be consequences, as we recently saw in the aftermath of the Great Recession:

… studies reported detrimental impacts of the Recession on health, particularly mental health. Macro- and individual-level employment- and housing-related sequelae (the result or consequence of something) of the Recession were associated with declining fertility and self-rated health, and increasing morbidity, psychological distress, and suicide, although traffic fatalities and population-level alcohol consumption declined. Health impacts were stronger among men and racial/ethnic minorities.

This is the perfect example of what is called the precautionary principle that has guided government regulators for millennia, whereby regulators seek to stop harm from being caused by what they are regulating even if more harm is caused by their regulations. Because, as in the current case, if somebody dies from COVID-19, they’ll be blamed; but if two people die from excessive heat this summer because they lost their job during the shutdown and can’t pay their electricity bills this summer, someone else will take the blame.

Bryce doesn’t focus as much on the elite and government in his book as I do here, but he does give us plenty to think about when it comes to the future of powering this world. In particular, he shows us through discussions of the high tech and financial industries that the electrification of the world that began less than 200 years ago has shown no sign of slowing. He makes a compelling case that the demand for electricity is going to continue to grow and displays his optimism that we’ll succeed in our efforts to meet this demand:

Electricity has conferred on us a bit of the creative power that
God showed in Genesis. With the flip of a switch, we can kill
the anti-God and banish darkness. With a touch of our mobile
phones we can ensure safe passage through a strange hotel or ga
rageat night. With quadrillions of electrons at our beck and call,
we can create as much light as we want.

I join him in that optimism, with one caveat: the path to increased electrification and protection from disease–and everything else–will continue to be harder than needed until people realize that the best path for moving forward won’t come from experts but from the wisdom of God delivered to us through His Word and His Spirit:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18–19 ESV)