pjmedia.com By Stephen Green
Iran, the ninth-largest oil producer in the world, doesn’t have enough energy to keep the lights on or the factories humming — and that’s just one element of the country’s growing polycrisis.
“The country was virtually shut down to save energy” for most of last week, according to a weekend report in the New York Times. Even President Masoud Pezeshkian can’t hide the scope of the country’s energy troubles. “We are facing very dire imbalances in gas, electricity, energy, water, money, and environment,” he admitted in a live TV address this month. “All of them are at a level that could turn into a crisis.”
“Businesses, schools, universities, police stations, supermarkets and government offices are all shut. 17 electricity plants have been shut down,” Ashley Rindsberg posted to X on Saturday. “A citizen who lived through both the 1979 revolution and the Iraq-Iran War says he’s never experienced this level of chaos.”
After decades of neglect and mismanagement, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps has taken increasing control of the country’s energy production and exports in recent years. Letting the military run things has worked out about as well as you’d expect. “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert,” Milton Friedman quipped, “in 5 years, there’d be a shortage of sand.”
Sometimes, it takes a bit longer than five years, but in the end, government meddling ends with either shortages of necessary goods or surpluses of unwanted goods — or both.
President-elect Donald Trump will reportedly restore his “Maximum Pressure” sanctions on Iran, dealing yet more blows to the country’s shaky economy.
In foreign affairs, Tehran has suffered one humiliation after another…
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