Record Diesel, Empty Tables

The news that diesel in the United States has reached an all‑time high, climbing sharply since the war in Iran and now surpassing even the peaks reached after the invasion of Ukraine, is not merely a curiosity of trade, like the rise of the price of claret. It is a signal which runs along every road and rail, through every warehouse and market stall. Diesel is not bought only by truckers and parcel carriers; it is bought, in effect, by anyone who eats bread that travelled, vegetables that were cooled, or medicine that was moved in haste. The visible buyer is the transporter; the invisible payer is the consumer, and among consumers, the labouring poor pay most.

When I wrote of the price of corn in The Wealth of Nations, I remarked that whatever affects the carriage of goods affects the subsistence of the people; fuel for modern carriages is only another form of the same necessity. We are told that the average price of gas has never before surpassed four dollars on a festive day, and that diesel now approaches six; such figures are less important than their motion and their cause. A war that constrains oil, a blockade that narrows the Strait of Hormuz, raise the cost of moving everything else. The rise in fuel is swiftly translated, by the higgling and bargaining of the market, into dearer food, dearer clothing, dearer work.

The United Nations’ World Food Programme warns that many tens of millions may be pushed into acute hunger, as conflict and adverse weather raise the cost of grain, sugar, fertiliser and freight together. Here is the true measure of a nation’s wealth, which I took to be the real consumption of the great body of the people, not the nominal revenue of a few merchants of fuel. If fifteen to thirty percent of the cost of food is fuel, as some grocers report, a violent motion in that single element will be felt in every household. The rich man complains that his delivery is dearer, but pays it; the poor man finds that refrigerated food escapes his reach altogether. For him, the price signal is not an elegant instrument of calculation; it is a verdict.

In such a moment, every interest hastens to the legislature with a plan. Carriers ask for special relief, refiners for special favour, farmers for special protection against foreign grain, all in the name of the public, and each in pursuit of its own. In The Wealth of Nations I observed that people of the same trade seldom gather without contriving some advantage at the expense of the rest; the principle has not altered because the tavern has become a conference room. Any proposal that would restrict new entrants in transport, guarantee profits to existing refiners, or exclude foreign food in order to spare domestic producers the discipline of competition, ought therefore to be received with the most suspicious attention. The cry will be of national security, but the effect may be only a conspiracy against the public.

Yet it would be a shallow reading of my work to suppose that the sovereign has no part to play. In that same book, I assigned to the state the duties of defence, of justice, and of those public works and institutions which, though highly beneficial, could never repay a private undertaker. Peace in the sea‑lanes, roads and ports that permit alternative routes when old ones are blocked, the impartial enforcement of contracts in energy and food, and a modest support for the instruction of the people, so they may adapt to dear fuel with better methods, are all within this proper sphere. The irony here is painful: the very exercise of force that claims to protect the nation’s interest in oil has, by raising its price, diminished the real income of that nation’s poorest citizens.

From the moral side, which I treated in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the impartial spectator contemplates this scene with mixed sentiments. He cannot, without the greatest sorrow, consider that a disturbance in some strait known only to map‑makers should mean an empty pot in a distant kitchen, or that a quarrel among states should translate into a child’s stunted growth. Yet he is also aware that the affairs of nations are not so easily composed as the prices in a market stall. He distrusts the man of system who, affronted by high prices, would fix them by decree, command farmers what to sow, or divide energy rations from the great chess‑board of his own fancy, forgetting that every piece has a motion of its own.

What, then, remains? Not grand contrivances, but the slow work of peace, the patient widening of the market by restoring safe passage, and such temporary, well‑targeted relief as preserves the lives and industry of the poor without hardening into permanent privilege. A world in which fuel flows more freely, in which fertiliser again reaches the fields and grain the ports, will by degrees permit the division of labour to deepen once more, and with it the natural progress of opulence. When that comes, the same price system that now carries the shock of war will, under a gentler and more invisible hand, quietly carry the fruits of peace into the most modest pantry.