Political Posturing

Radley's Fox column this week is about political posturing in the face of high gas prices. Politicians, typically, are pretty free market until the laws of supply and demand produce results that make their constituents jumpy. The best thing to do, of course, is let the market play out, alternative energy sources will become profitable and energy prices will go down.

The really perverse thing about all of this is that at the same time they're carrying on about high gas prices, the same politicians are talking about the importance of alternative energy and our "oil dependence." But alternative energy sources will emerge the day they become more efficient and profitable than gasoline.

So long as gas is cheap, gas will continue to be our preferred source of energy. Once gas grows scarce, and consequently more expensive, other fuel sources will become lucrative -- at which point someone will develop them, sell them, and get rich from them.

But politicians can't just sit back and let the market take its course. They need to control things. So even as they're bending over backward to keep gas artificially inexpensive (staving off market incentives to develop alternative fuels), they're giving billions of taxpayer dollars to research and development boondoggles (read: corporate welfare) to find replacements for gas. It's waste stacked on waste stacked on waste.