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February 10, 2006

Isn't "Conservative National Energy Policy" an Oxymoron?

President Bush, citing America's "addiction" to oil in his State of the Union show, set a goal of reducing our oil imports by more than 75 percent by 2025 and listed a whole bunch of expensive, wasteful, counterproductive federal initiatives that he thinks will achieve this goal.

Had a Democrat offered up such a ridiculous, unconstitutional, big-government idea, conservative commentators would be up in arms. Instead, most applauded, saying it was about time we had a national energy policy.

One Republican Congressman, Maryland's Roscoe Bartlett, even wrote a column called "The Next Conservative Energy Policy," as if there had been a previous conservative energy policy and as if conservatives should believe that the federal government ought to have one. Bartlett bluntly states that we need an expensive, big-government solution:

Conservatives should recognize that unless we have a national energy conservation program with the commitment, breadth and intensity of the Apollo moon mission and the Manhattan Project to create the atom bomb, our country is unlikely to achieve the goal of replacing "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025" and even less likely to break our oil addiction.

Hey, Congressman Bartlett! How about just letting the market solve the problem? As the price of oil rises, people will naturally seek out alternatives. Letting the market work, however, would not help this clown look important and get re-elected, and so we will get bigger government yet again, if he has his way.

Posted by Mike Tennant at February 10, 2006 04:09 PM

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Posted by: Ali_Massoud at February 10, 2006 11:39 PM

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