Says Finnish economist, and anyone else with a brain. The article also has an excellent quote in it from another source:
“If you turned the electricity off for a few months in any developed Western society 500 years of supposed philosophical progress about human rights and individualism would quickly evaporate like they never happened.”
In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, I didn’t live on the Gulf Coast, but was in Mississippi, around the middle of the state. We just had a glancing blow from the storm, but didn’t have power for over ten days. And it’s not cold in MS in early September, but it’s still really, really hot. And for those of you who don’t think you’ve got a problem if the electricity goes out or is restricted because you don’t have an electric vehicle, guess again. The gas pumps need electricity to work.
You’d ride around in your car, searching for a place that sold gas that had power (at least the air-conditioning worked in the car!). It would be a toss-up whether you should keep searching, or just go home and conserve what gas you had. Around day 5, I saw 2 guys nearly come to blows at a gas pump about who was next, in a fairly small southern ‘howdy neighbor’ town; heck, those guys might have gone to church together for all I know.
The point is, it doesn’t take much for people to start being quite unreasonable when they’re hungry, uncomfortable, or whatever. And that makes all this idiocy going on really scare me. And the U.S. is in better shape than Europe, at least so far.
