The West's Wrong Turn on Natural Resources - WSJ.com

 

Joseph Sternberg: The West's Wrong Turn on Natural Resources - WSJ.com

 

For all that talk about a new knowledge economy, things still matter a great deal in this world. And whether it's the steel beam holding up the floor of your office, the gasoline you put in your car or the circuitry in your new iPad, "things" mean natural resources. So it's worrying that one of the major policy trends emerging in recent days is that the capitalist West is cutting itself out of the resource game.

The danger is that if [democracies] won't supply minerals to the world on market principles, others—like China—will step into the gap with other ideas.

Without giving too much credence to China alarmists, it is still possible to say the world is better off if resources are in the hands of transparent companies that will trade on market principles free of the risk of excessive government interference. The third and worst alternative is to stay on the current track of crippling Western resource reserves while also blocking capital from the willing investors that remain.

Yes, companies will continue to extract resources in the West even under the taxes (though the outright drilling ban is another story). But those bad policies will make a major difference at the all-important margins of the market, which drive pricing decisions. The choice for Western policy makers now is simple: They can clamp down on their resource industries for domestic political reasons and hand pricing and supply power to nonmarket and nondemocratic governments. Or they can allow their own companies to run a truly global resource market capable of meeting the world's need for things.