SLUH Review 1.9

ET COGNOSCETIS VERITATEM ET VERITAS LIBERABIT VOS

SLUH REVIEW Vol. 1 Issue 9

A journal of Faith, thought, and civics

Corn’s Problem and Sugar’s Solution: America’s Problem with Ethanol

By Joe Esswein, Sophomore Editor

April 26, 2010

Brazil seems to have ethanol figured out though.

Instead of using corn for fuel, they use sugar. Using just 1 percent of its arable land they produced half the amount of oil produced by Iran, according to Justin Rohrlich with the Mises Institute. The Brazilian ethanol accounts for 50 percent of Brazilian auto travel. Brazil’s sugar ethanol gives them 80 units of energy for each unit invested, while American corn yields 1.5 units per unit invested. Sugar ethanol is also much cheaper than corn ethanol.

Corn is in an incredible amount of food, from pancakes, to potato chips, to Cheerios. Corn is also in oil. The fuel that runs our cars has a very expensive form of oil in it. Ethanol, a form of oil made from corn, is cutting into American’s pocketbook at the supermarket and at the pump. In fact, corn based ethanol is causing prices at supermarkets around the country to go up by 10 to 15%. These prices for our food staple, corn, hurts Americans, but it causes death in poor African countries where an increase in food prices causes people to be unable to eat for long periods of time.

The World Bank announced that world food prices had jumped 83 percent over the last three years. As much as one-third of this inflation can be blamed on ethanol production, according to Chris Peterson, professor of agribusiness at Michigan State University.

What is preventing the US from digging into this great resource?

The unfortunate answer lies in tariffs. The United States government opts out of using the world-wide free market and instead supports environmental lobbies and American oil companies at the expense of the American consumer by placing a 54 cent tariff on corn ethanol and a 51 cent break for corn ethanol produced by farmers. The US government makes it fiscally irresponsible to buy the more efficient form of oil and the one that’s better for the environment. Because of the US’s irresponsibility in the field of alternative fuel, food prices around the world are up, the environment is harmed, and you take a toll at the pump.

Ethanol doesn’t help gas prices either. If the price for gasoline is at 47 cents per gallon before government taxes and shipping costs, then ethanol is between 47 and 95 cents, depending on the percentage of corn in the oil. More ethanol in the oil means higher prices. By 2022 environmentalists want to have oil with 85% ethanol. The high demand for corn throughout the market has driven the price of corn up from two to four dollars per bushel in the past year.

-This article references information from Mises.org, BusinessWeek.com, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

The journal Science has proven that ethanol hurts the environment. Science says that the conversion from forests to corn fields increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. After learning that it would take 167 years of ethanol use to offset the effect on the environment, some environmental groups have stopped supporting ethanol.

Taxed Enough Already

By Luke Chellis, Writer The TEA Party movement represents an arousal of a too-long dormant constitutional awakening, reminding us that the United States began with a tax revolt. Tea partiers, like John Jay, worry that “all the fruits of [Americans’] labor and industry may be taken from [them] whenever an avaricious -1-

governor and a rapacious council may incline to demand them,” as he said in 1775. The 1765 Stamp Act Congress and TEA parties across the nation boldly insist that Americans have the “undoubted right … that no taxes be imposed on them, but with their own consent.” The founding concept of America is the antithesis to a large confiscatory and regulatory regime.

See the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution is the practical document created to make this ideal a reality.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution explained, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined [to be] exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce.” Americans are fed up that their brazen, extraordinarily heavy-handed Congress which follows neither the spirit nor the letter of this law.

The Tenth Amendment clearly states that any power not explicitly listed as a power of the federal government is absolutely forbidden to the federal government.

The Constitution grants specific powers to Congress in Article I section 8, none of which permit two-thirds to three-fourths of the actions of modern-day Congress, including spending on prescription drugs, Social Security, public education, farm subsidies, bank and business bailouts, or food stamps and mandating how Americans may use their land, the speed at which they can drive, whether a library has wheelchair ramps and the gallons of water used per toilet flush.

Americans should no longer allow Congress to use its coercive powers to grant one group of Americans privileges it denies to another. This includes all forms of wealth redistribution and social spending. TEA Partiers need to do more than just reaffirm our founding principle of liberty at rallies. Such outrage is the natural beginning, but the United States needs radical change, a fundamental reorientation towards constitutional limitations on government and a firm insistence on the international sovereignty of property rights.

Virginia’s Bill of Rights consolidates the American definition of liberty, saying that government exists to protect “certain inherent rights, namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

When government violates this mandate, it is illegitimate and should no longer be allowed to govern. TEA Partiers are expressing a return to this idea, like Freerepublic.com founder Jim Robinson said at a Georgia rally, “I would like to see this country go back to the Constitution—get rid of all this socialism.” Some of the most common TEA Party signs read HONOR THE CONSTITUTION or WE ARE ENDOWED BY OUR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS.

Environmentalism and Animal Rights Logan W. Hayward, Junior Editor In this article, I will contend not against the existence of man-made (anthropogenic) global warming, because of time constraints, but I will contend against the necessity of stiff environmental regulation, the mania about the effects of global warming, and the elevation of non-human living things to human standards of dignity.

But what is the correct action to match this change in sentiment? Americans who believe in their rights and the Constitution should not look to voting Republican as the simple answer. The problem infesting our government is systematic, what the Declaration calls “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” Many Conservative Republicans are only conservative by disposition and wish to preserve elements of big, unconstitutional government merely because it has existed for some time, promoting Maoist programs like Medicare and Social Security. Americans need to radically reform, not simply vote in an opposition party that spends nearly as much as the other. What’s needed is the reinvestment of principle in the political class.

Party affiliation matters less than moral affiliation.

What if Al Gore is right? What if global warming due to human activity melts both polar ice caps? Al Gore proposed that the ocean would flood coastal cities around the world. If this is true, why is there no rallying cry for more levies? If increased levy coverage around New Orleans would have prevented Hurricane Katrina from wrecking that city, why is there not a global consensus proposing vast new levies surrounding potential flood zones around the world? Corporations from Hong Kong to Tampa Bay would seek to protect their property in those cities—have any of them pushed for levies around coastal cities? I cannot recall hearing any such propositions. If global warming were an imminent, potentially-catastrophic threat, businesses would seek to protect their property from its ill-effects. And yet, instead of proposing

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more levies, some corporations are focusing on green energy. General Electric has been trying to prod the government into regulating the United States economy further in order to limit non-green sources of energy. If Americans accept their repetitive brain-washing about the intense danger of global warming, they would seek alternative uses of energy on their own, regardless of government regulations (many have already done so).

maiming—are evil, because they produce evil desires and obsessions in the minds of the torturers.

However, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with slaughtering animals for food, clothing, medical research, or even cosmetics.

Animal rights activists believe that there is no difference between killing animals and killing humans. So-called regulation czar of the Obama administration, Cass Sunstein, believes that pets should be allowed lawyers. Peter Singer, a Princeton professor, believes that it is fine to kill a newborn baby in certain circumstances, but is nonetheless a vegetarian. So the elevation of the dignity of non-human animals leads to the devaluation of human dignity.

So why don’t green companies just let the market respond to their propaganda about global warming, or “climate change” as the PCers now want us to call it? Unfortunately, many corporations in America have lost their capitalist spunk and rely on government to prod people to buy their products.

They see an opportunity to make a fortune, but they need government intervention to make it. A business leader who truly believed that his product(s) would be supply for a market demand would not need to beseech the government for regulation. This massive campaign to impose huge costs on the global economy in order to halt global warming, instead of preparing for its potential effects, leads me to believe that any potential effects of global warming will not be as catastrophic as environmentalists say.

Why do animal rights activists believe that humans are equal in dignity to animals? They evaluate dignity by the wrong approach. They believe that dignity and therefore rights are tied to feelings. A great many animals can feel pain and fear, and so can humans. But why should those feelings qualify dignity? Dignity is a result of the will of God, not chemical reactions in the brain telling one to be afraid. If one is atheist, one cannot logically accept dignity. However, many atheists simply do not want to come to the logical conclusion of their disbelief in God. Because many eyes have turned away from God, especially in the last hundred and fifty years, some people have turned to substitutes for religion that propose a new theory of dignity.

Obsessive environmentalism and the animal rights movement are two such substitutes. We must avoid them if we do not desire a new era in which human technology has reverted to the Stone Age and the government decides that a border collie deserves more health rations than a baby does.

James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis holds that the earth can be thought of as one giant living thing.

Just as our bodies are composed of many living cells, the earth is composed of many living things.

A radical extension of this hypothesis would hold that killing any member of Gaia is tantamount to killing any human being. The animal rights movement has grown in tandem with the environmentalist movement, as both seek not merely to preserve the wilderness and wild animals of the planet in order to safeguard further human development, but also because they believe that cutting down trees, slaughtering livestock animals, and producing so-called greenhouse gases hurts our “mother,” planet earth, and her children.

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The animal rights movement is arguably the more radical of the two movements, however, because it seeks to wipe out an entire source of resources that humans have been using for thousands of years.

The animal rights movement does not necessarily include humane societies, which attempt to limit sadistic uses of animals, because it holds that animals actually have rights. Let me be clear that sadistic uses of animals—such as pointless

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We, the Editors of the SLUH Review, apologize to all of our readers for assenting to the publication of an article which did not include a citation, and was taken from the work of another person. The decision to include such an article was intellectually dishonest, and therefore harmed the integrity of the Review. The writer who submitted the article has resigned his position as Senior Editor, and we assure all those associated with Saint Louis University High School the editors have discussed at length the measures necessary to maintain the highest standards of academic honesty in the future.

Sincere apologies, The Editors of the SLUH Review Logan Hayward Joe Esswein

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