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McCain Says Capitalism Can’t Solve U.S. Energy Problems |
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George Orwell would have a field day with the McCain campaign. On the one hand, McCain praises the free market as the answer to every problem and damns Obama for his big government mindset. The same McCain sees no contradiction in offering a $300 million government reward to the inventor of a battery that can “leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”
Let’s leave aside, for the moment, the fact that there are no commercially available plug-in hybrids today and the other problems the Detroit Free Press notes with McCain’s challenge. What struck me was McCain’s view that capitalism and free markets can’t solve this problem. Personally, I think that’s great if McCain is willing to move beyond the blinkered view that rejects anything but “free market” solutions (which aren’t always what they purport to be) to problems we face. But I also think it is important to note McCain’s hypocrisy–why is it ok for him to propose a government solution to this problem but it’s creeping socialism when Obama sees ways for government to solve other problems?
Here’s what I’d like to see the media ask McCain: why do you think the free market won’t drive entrepreneurs to invent the battery you call for–why is it necessary for the government to subsidize this project?
While I certainly agree that any condemnation of Obama by McCain for big government or market distortion is hypocritical, I am not of the opinion that free markets can meet our energy needs on their own. Maybe in 100 years, assuming all other market distortions were removed (such as direct subsidies for producers of existing fossil fuel-based technologies) the market could solve our energy problems, but we don’t have that kind of time. The government should take an active role in funding R&D into clean and renewable energies, subsidizing early production, protecting emerging technologies from open competition, using public procurement as an incentive to be green, etc. Other countries (e.g. the Netherlands) went this route and it worked very well for them. And really, this is how fossil fuel-based technologies became so dominant so quickly — decades of government preference.
I 100% agree–my only objection is to McCain’s hypocrisy. I think he has no business attacking Obama’s supposedly “big government” approach in light of positions like this. In fact, my real point is that the “big government” critique is mindless sloganeering
The free market is the only hope we have for progress.
What solutions do governments promote? Those that are most likely to increase their own political power. Their solutions have nothing to do with reality.
They don’t ask themselves “What can we do which will have benifits which outweigh the costs” — that is, which will profit society.
They ask themselves “What can we do to trick people into voting for us”.
Why? Because the money they waste is not their own, and the benifits of success (if they ever had any) would not go to them either. What goes to them? Votes and Political Power. So that is what they maximize.
Only the free market seeks to maximize production and minimize costs. This is not because people who work in a Market environment are stronger, faster, or better than those who work for the Government. It is because it is only by maximizing production and minimizing cost that they can make money, and that is what they are there to do.
Consider ethanol, which has already proven itself a disaster economically (raising the price of food and consuming more energy than it produces). A classic Socialist solution, which produced exactly what it was designed to produce: Farmers who were getting rich off it and would vote for more and more Socialism — that is, more and more power taken from us, and given to the government.
This is the magic of Socialism, and it works this way every time. Why do you think that millions of people starved in the “Workers’ Paradises” of the USSR and the PRC?