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Helium, Birthday Balloons, and the Free Market

Wow!  Wow!  Wow!  Somebody found some more helium in Tanzania!
We were running out of helium, you know.  Childrens' birthday balloons
all over the country were coming down from the ceiling with no chance to replace them.

Balloons float, or rise, because the helium inside them is lighter than air.
If that is a bit complicated, imagine filling a birthday balloon with water,
and tossing it up to the ceiling.  It wouldn't float up, but the floor might.

Helium is not used just for birthday balloons:
it is also used to make super-conducting magnets,
for cooling the space station, and for MRI machines.
Those are all useful things to do, and even interesting,
but it is easier to make a buck blowing up balloons at the supermarket.

Hydrogen gas is even lighter than helium, and there is a lot of hydrogen,
but hydrogen burns like a mad banshee, and helium doesn't.  That is why the Hindenburg burned a big hole in the sky in 1937, and why the Goodyear blimp, inflated with helium, takes pictures of golf tournaments and football games.

Hydrogen burns.  Helium doesn't.

One might think that if helium was in such short supply, that
we would not use it for inflating children's birthday balloons,
but conserve it for scientific experiments, and medical analysis,
but that is not how rational market-driven capitalism works.
There is a market for balloons, and a profit in it, so sell balloons!

You don't think so?  Where do you think the balloons come from?
Discovering a new, although finite source for helium does not change
the fact that if there is a buck to be made, someone will make it,
and shortage be damned!  The market says that shortages are regulated
by raising the price of balloons, not by artificially regulating the use of helium.

Let us pause here!
This isn't about helium, is it?
It is about our economic religion:  laissez faire capitalism.
"Let it be" capitalism.  "Leave it alone" capitalism.

Should you ever think that engaging a religious zealot about--
oh, whether there really is a god, or a devil, or harps in heaven--
is a hopeless and acrimonious way to destroy a dinner party or friendship,
you ought to try suggesting to a capitalist that the market is not infallible.
You will think that you have suddenly dropped into a Republican primary race!
Laissez faire capitalism is not a doctrine to be questioned!
Doubting its fallibility is like doubting god:  it will make you
a Doubting Thomas, or an Atheistic Communist, or Evil Ignoramus.

We have come to think that government exists to protect unfettered profit-making.  We are lottery ticket buyers at heart, committed to the belief that we will win $100 million and then everything will be OK.  There might not be a heaven, but there is a Las Vegas, and a lottery ticket, and that means that if someone can make a buck filling balloons with helium, even if we are running out of it, then leave him alone!  Let it be!

Our present crisis in politics, here in the USA, or in Great Britain, is that we think that too much government is getting in the way of the market; of the wonderful urge to be one of the guys to get rich.  If that means using up the helium, burning all the oil, gouging out a copper mine cavern where our only jaguar lives, or letting someone paying pitiful wages in Asia sell us their toys and steel and cameras, so be it!  If that means that our neighbors lose their jobs and houses and hope, that is their tough luck!  That is life!  The smart bastards and the lottery winners survive!

It isn't trade that is destroying us:  it is that in a world that is figuratively shrinking, that is inexorably bound together with a common fate, we think government exists to protect a market that is willing to sell helium for balloons, when it ought to be asking how best to arrange market activity, and how to take care, not just of the people who are making all the money, but of those who are being hurt, who are willing to work, but whose jobs and balloons are not there any more.

Well, what would a rational person do?
Leave the Common Market?
Corner the balloon market?
Listen to the ignoramuses who think coal is the answer?
Free the market so it can do its thing?

Or . . . shape how the market works, and for whom?

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