Record Diesel Prices Are a Test of the Trust We Place in Power

On a recent Friday in your year, I am told, the average price of diesel in the United States reached an all‑time high, around $5.85 a gallon, after fuel prices had already soared since a new conflict with Iran began at the end of February. The narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s fertiliser and oil trade passes, is reported to be blockaded by both the United States and Iran. The same accounts speak of tanker traffic bottlenecked, of crude oil dearer, and of diesel and gasoline now above $4 at a holiday when, in former years, they had not crossed that mark. These are hard numbers, not speculative fears, and they fall first on those least able to bear them.

The World Food Programme warns that, joined with extreme weather, these disruptions may press another fifty million souls into acute hunger. Food prices, the United Nations says, have risen for several months, pushed up by wars and weather together, with wheat, maize, and even sugar dearer as shipping lanes are threatened. One hears that fuel may account for a considerable share of the cost of food, and that refrigerated goods are the first to rise when diesel does. Here, then, we are not dealing with a luxury, which men may forego, but with the very supports of life; and when those are endangered, political power stands at the bar of reason and must give an account of its stewardship.

When I wrote in the Second Treatise that political power is a right of making laws with penalties only for the public good, I meant to bind rulers to a narrow rule: they may touch the property of the people—by which I include their lives, liberties, and estates—only so far as free and equal men could rationally consent. That all men are by nature free and independent is, to my understanding, evident from the workmanship of one Maker, who sent no man into the world with a saddle on his back, nor another booted and spurred to ride him. Any claim to dispose of another’s substance, whether by tax, embargo, blockade, or corporate discretion, bears the burden of justification; liberty does not.

Reason, which is the law of nature, teaches that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. To the extent that soaring diesel and food prices push millions toward hunger, and perhaps famine, that law is plainly engaged. Yet harm alone does not prove injustice; scarcity may come from storm, not from oppression. The understanding must therefore distinguish: first, what proceeds from unavoidable calamity—such as the El Niño weather you describe—and secondly, what proceeds from human choice, especially the choice of those entrusted with ships, ports, and arms, who blockade straits and disrupt trade, or of those who hold command over energy markets and may profit while others starve. Where necessity ends and arbitrariness begins is the heart of the present controversy.

You report that the Strait of Hormuz is blockaded by armed powers, on whose decision—whether to open or to close that narrow gate—the livelihoods of farmers, grocers, and labourers halfway across the globe now depend. Here is prerogative writ large. In the Second Treatise I allowed that executive power may sometimes act without or even against the letter of standing law, where sudden danger requires a speed the law cannot foresee. But I added that such prerogative is tolerable only while it manifestly serves the public good and remains revocable at the people’s will. When two states close a vital passage, knowing that fertiliser and fuel will thereby be scarcer and dearer, the question is simple, though grave: is this truly for the safety of mankind, or is it an exercise of wills in which other men’s hunger is treated as acceptable collateral?

If rulers, under colour of security, may indefinitely choke commerce at a strait on which so many depend, and if great merchants may then raise prices in lockstep with that scarcity, all while giving no clear account to those who suffer, we approach that condition I once called a state of war between governors and governed. For in such a case, men find themselves subject to decisions that alter the very terms on which they sustain life, yet have no share in consenting to them, no known standing rule to appeal to, and no impartial judge to hear their complaint; instead, those who profit or gain strategic advantage become judges in their own case. If this were allowed to harden into a settled practice—a long train of abuses in commerce and war together—it would be usurpation, not government.

I do not say that every rise in diesel, nor every blockade, is already such tyranny. Storms at sea, misguided policies, and honest miscalculations may all play their parts; and where evidence is thin, prudence forbids hasty condemnation. Yet the present conjunction—record fuel prices, deliberate military obstructions in a vital waterway, and warnings that tens of millions may be driven into acute hunger—imposes a strict duty on peoples and their representatives. They must demand from rulers a clear demonstration that these measures are both necessary and proportioned to the common safety, and from great dealers in fuel a transparency that shows they do not take advantage of public dangers for private gain. If that demonstration cannot be made, then, by the terms of political trust itself, they are bound to seek redress and reform; for government is instituted to secure men from wanton harm, not to multiply occasions of it, and when it persistently does the latter, the appeal to heaven is all that remains.