Helium will run out because the world's biggest capitalist doesn't believe in free trade

Professor Robert Richardson shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for his 1972 discovery of the property of superfluidity in helium-3 atoms. And he is a worried man.

"There is no chemical means to make helium. The supplies we have on Earth come from radioactive alpha decay in rocks. Right now it's not commercially viable to recover helium from the air... But if we do run out altogether, we will have to recover helium from the air and it will cost 10,000 times what it does today," he says in New Scientist.

Helium isn't just useful to turn your voice squeaky and amuse children at parties. 22% of the annual total world production of 32 million kilograms goes into cooling the superconducting magnets in MRI scanners. 78% is used to pressurise and purge pipelines, in the maintenance of controlled atmospheres and in welding.

It's quite important stuff. And, in 25 years, we'll run out.

In 1925 the US government set up the National Helium Reserve outside Amarillo, Texas. US natural gas fields have an unusually high concentration of helium which makes it the most productive place for extraction. By 1995 the government had over 1 billion cubic metres of gas and had incurred a debt of $1.4 billion for its collection and maintenance.

The easiest thing to do would have been to increase the price of helium to cover these costs. Instead the US introduced the "Helium Privatization Act of 1996". That sounds noble but it ain't. What it involves is the US selling off all its remaining helium at bargain-basement prices and then scrapping the remaining plant.

This wouldn't be too dramatic if the US didn't also produce 80% of the global helium supply.

It's the easiest thing in the world to allow prices to rise in response to market scarcity. Female chimpanzees will mate with males who give them the most fruit. In response, males steal desirable treats, such as papaya, from farms in order to woo coveted females.

Human beings even get in on the act given a paucity of desirable goods.

A 100 kilometre traffic jam into Beijing has left thousands of drivers stranded. Ever helpful, local traders have rocketed up prices for noodles, boxed lunches and snacks as they wend their way through the idle vehicles. One trucker contemplated his meal with evident disgust, "Instant noodles are sold at four times the original price while I wait."

In Niger, Save the Children is complaining that traders are hoarding scarce grain. "These traders are using market fluctuations to make a profit at the expense of ordinary people," says Josh Leighton, food security and livelihoods officer at Save the Children.

Yes, Josh, they are. The famine is not the result of the speculators. The speculators are ensuring that a scarce resource does not run out and goes to those who value it the most. Selling food for less than it costs means that, like helium, you will soon have nothing. Higher prices are a signal and you should be listening, not whining.

Which would you prefer: cheap party balloons for a few more years, or MRI scanners in hospitals?

The price mechanism is probably the greatest invention of human history. How else do you think innovation happens if not through the spur of rising prices and profits?

It is not through the benevolence of Apple, Facebook, or Amazon that we get our slick new iPad, free social media platform, or exciting new ereader, but to these companies' obsession with their continuing profitability.

The surprising thing is that the US, a nation supposedly a capitalist "red in tooth and claw", is so bereft of comprehension of these factors when it comes to their helium supplies.

But then, with subsidies to farmers, motor manufacturers and other favoured industries, the Americans aren't really capitalists, are they?