Making energy unaffordable for all

There is no sure test to tell a promising idea from a crackpot scheme. But nothing focuses the mind better than the prospect of losing one’s shirt if mistakes aren’t quickly detected and fixed.

The private sector can make just as many mistakes as government — more, given that there are still more of us than there are of them.

But when the Edsel and “New Coke” and the smokeless cigarette turned out to be hare-brained blunders, they were gone in a hurry, as corporate executives raced to preserve their bottom lines and (when possible) their jobs.

When government gives birth to an abomination, on the other hand, perverse incentives quickly assert themselves. Bureaucrats actually build careers demanding more and more money to “fine-tune” their own failures.

“Rotating old-age pension funds” and other unsustainable Ponzi schemes led to jail sentences for those who tried them in the private sector 70 years ago. But no one dares suggest the government version — “Social Security” — be thrown on history’s scrap heap next to “My Mother the Car.”

Now the same party that gave us Social Security has declared it’s time to “do something about energy.” But are the individual senators likely to have to sell their homes and move into some little garden apartment if all their grandiose schemes go bust?

At first glance, the naive observer might expect Congress to start by holding public hearings and pointing out that America’s air and water are cleaner than they’ve been in 50 years — that the cleanup trend actually started before the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and there’s no evidence mankind’s modest carbon dioxide production is having any deleterious impact on climate, whatever.

Instead, Senate Democrats began debate Monday on a “sweeping energy bill.” And it’s a doozy. They aim to reduce dependence on imported foreign oil and encourage the increased use of “biofuels.”

“After 6 1/2 years of the Bush presidency, our bill puts the common good ahead of corporate greed,” announced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., setting a high tone for the proceedings.

For starters, Democrats want to increase consumption of corn-based ethanol — even though it costs as much in energy and environmental degradation to produce the stuff as it saves at the pump — from a projected 8.6 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons by 2022.

To do this, they’re going to relax import restrictions on low-cost Brazilian ethanol, no matter how loudly greedy corporate domestic producers like Archer-Daniels-Midland may shriek and moan … right?

Well, no. Apparently this is one case where corporate greed will fare just fine. No breaks for the Brazilians.

Next, to help hold gasoline prices down, Democrats are girding up to run roughshod over their spoiled “NIMBY” environmentalist constituents, who have blocked the drilling of new domestic oil wells offshore and in Alaska, as well as the construction of much-needed new oil refineries … right?

Well, no. Instead, economic geniuses such as Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., propose various “anti-price-gouging” schemes that threaten private gasoline suppliers with fines or jail if they raise their prices “too high” — a step which (as any Economics 101 student can tell you) will replace overpriced gasoline during any supply crisis with … long lines, and/or no gasoline at all.

Next, although consumers have shown they prefer larger, safer, more powerful cars, the senators in their wisdom plan to order manufacturers to achieve “corporate average fuel economy” of 35 miles per gallon by 2020 — and to bump that number up by an additional 4 percent every year after that. Apparently, the senators believe the best way to rescue the ailing American automotive sector is to require Ford and General Motors to manufacture millions of cheap little crash-hazard golf carts that will sit unsold on their dealers’ lots.

It was considered amusing when French economist Frederic Bastiat in 1845 parodied the hubris of legislators with his “Petition of the Candle Makers” — in which he depicted lobbyists for that industry insisting the Chamber of Deputies extinguish the sun, as constituting unfair competition to their enterprises.

Today, United States senators actually believe they can wave their magic wands and cause motor vehicles to achieve average fuel efficiencies of 50 miles per gallon by 2030 — and no one laughs.