Attempts to plan the U.S. energy sector are classic cases of socialism
American advocates of socialist energy resort to crude nationalist appeals
The green agenda serves the interests of Big Business
Why would the United States seek to apply the Zimbabwe model to energy, one of its most important industries? Although it sounds unbelievable, the American crusade for “energy independence”—a centrally planned economic exercise if ever there were one—promises exactly that.
Resource nationalism is a prominent feature of the oil industry. In fact, most of the world’s major oil companies are arms of national governments. “The 13 largest energy companies on Earth, measured by the reserves they control, are now owned and operated by governments,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Saudi Aramco, Gazprom (Russia), China National Petroleum Corp., National Iranian Oil Co., Petróleos de Venezuela, Petrobras (Brazil) and Petronas (Malaysia) are all larger than ExxonMobil, the largest of the multinationals. Collectively, multinational oil companies produce just 10% of the world’s oil and gas reserves. State-owned companies now control more than 75% of all crude oil production. The power of the state is back.”1
The U.S. government is nearly alone among the world’s oil producing nations in not owning or having owned a large oil corporation. But even in relatively free-market countries such as the United States, the state is deeply involved in the energy industry. And in the emerging capitalist powers, oil often is the exception to the rule of free-market reform. Ian Bremmer reports in Foreign Policy,
Brazil’s emergence as an investor-friendly, free market democracy has been one of the world’s most encouraging stories of the past several years. As Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez perfects his Castro impersonation, Ecuador and Bolivia follow Chávez’s example, and Argentina’s economy flounders, Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has maintained responsible macroeconomic policies—while redistributing wealth to narrow the still-considerable gap between the country’s rich and poor. But as he begins his final year in office, a huge off-shore oil find has emboldened his government to deepen state control of the energy sector, clouding the investment picture. Lula now looks likely to win a legislative battle over the future of Brazil’s oil sector. State-owned oil company Petrobras will then hold exclusive rights to operate all new exploration and production in off-shore fields that are believed to contain one of the world’s largest deposits of crude oil discovered in recent years. Brazil’s government will then control all activity in the new fields, making the big decisions on project operation and management. Over time, Petrobras will become a much larger but less profitable and less efficiently run enterprise.2
President Lula does not in most ways resemble Hugo Chávez, nor does he wish to. But the Brazilian liberal and the Venezuelan thug are alike in that they each run an oil company or two. Their American counterparts—would-be energy socialists who may be found in both parties—will not attempt to directly take over Exxon or any other U.S. oil company. Instead, they intend to direct the entire American energy industry from Washington, D.C.
In some ways, America’s oil socialists are more audacious in the scope and depth of their plans than are their South American, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern brethren. Hugo Chávez simply wants to control Venezuela’s oil companies in order to produce more oil, sell it in the international markets, and use the proceeds to fund his police state at home and his adventuring abroad. In contrast, the American oil socialists believe they can reshape the entire U.S. energy sector—which means reshaping the entire U.S. economy, to say nothing of the global energy markets—so that it produces a cheap, plentiful, non-polluting source of energy that operates in accord with their political interests. It’s the sort of project that would have made Trotsky blush and Hayek’s head explode in frustration, though it enjoys wide support from both the American people and from mainstream politicians of both parties.
Here it’s worth reiterating a point made early in this book: socialism is not principally about redistributing wealth or income from the rich to the poor. Socialism is about politicians planning the economy. Politicization of the economy, not redistribution, is the hallmark of socialism. Redistribution, while an economically complex and morally fraught issue, is a normal part of practically every modern welfare state.
Socialism, properly understood, is something quite different. And while a high degree of redistribution necessarily accompanies socialist planning efforts, that redistribution often channels wealth and income from the poor and middle classes to the wealthy—particularly those who are either members of the political-planning class or who can exploit connections to that class for their own benefit. It’s worth keeping in mind that the erratically socialistic management of the U.S. agriculture industry mainly benefits individuals with a net worth of more than $1 million and giant agribusiness conglomerates such as Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. In the case of oil socialism, those looking for a place at the planners’ feeding trough include Oklahoma oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, as well as Al Gore and his business partner David Blood, who are heavily invested in “alternative energy” operations that stand to benefit from (and which are only economically viable when accompanied by) massive government subsidies.
“Al Gore, the former US vice president, could become the world’s first carbon billionaire after investing heavily in green energy companies.”
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The Telegraph, 2007
Like the various socialisms of South America and the Third World, American oil socialism is characterized by resource nationalism, fiercely nationalistic rhetoric, politicized central planning, and political mandates that entirely ignore the mind-boggling complexity of the economic and production issues at hand. Its supporters call it “ending America’s addiction to foreign oil.” Its critics call it, rightly, socialist poppycock.
The Das Kapital of American oil socialism is U.S. senator Jeff Merkley’s remarkably vapid proposal titled “America Over a Barrel: Solving Our Oil Vulnerability.” Senator Merkley, a left-wing Democrat from Oregon, is about the 642nd American politician to make an “over a barrel” joke on the subject of oil, but his proposal is far from funny.
Given what we have seen of the normal, predictable trajectory of socialist enterprises, it promises to impose hundreds of billions of dollars—perhaps trillions of dollars—in unnecessary costs on the U.S. economy, to inflict deep structural damage to the energy industry in the United States and abroad, and to entrench government central planners in every imaginable aspect of the American economy, from obvious ones such as car and road design to less obvious ones such as logistics engineering, the design of office chairs, immigrant-farmworker programs, and more. A look at “America Over a Barrel” shows just how far gone into central-planning fantasies an American politician can get when left unsupervised.
Merkley begins with the common and preposterous notion that American oil imports present some sort of special national-security risk. His commercials on the subject have, ironically, emphasized images of Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmedenejad, two oil socialists who very much share Merkley’s views on how to manage the energy industry. This is pure, dishonest pandering, of course; the senator is not otherwise notable for his interest in national-security issues, nor for the robustness of his national-security positions. (He has been an advocate of surrender in both Iraq and Afghanistan, supports closing our terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, accuses U.S. forces willy-nilly of engaging in torture—you know the type.)
He writes that America is “dangerously dependent on foreign oil imported from the Middle East.”3 Notice the rhetoric there, the unnecessary repetition of foreign, imported, and Middle East—in case you’ve missed the point, Merkley will keep making it. In truth, America imports more of its oil from Canada than from any other country, with Mexico in second place. But it’s hard to make people fear Canada, a country whose last act of national aggression was committed in a hockey rink. The Saudis are a real menace to the world, and Hugo Chávez is an annoyance, but we buy comparatively little oil from them. And even if we did not buy a single drop of oil from them, oil is a fungible commodity in high demand on world markets. If the Saudis had to send their tankers east instead of west, it would be no skin off the emir’s nose.
But that kind of saber-rattling, even from a saberless sap like Merkley, is essential for selling oil socialism—it distracts Americans from the fact that Merkley & Co. are attempting to do for the oil sector what Chávez has done for Venezuela’s oil industry, what Mugabe has done for Zimbabwe’s farms, and what generations of political management have done for U.S. public schools.
America is no more “dangerously dependent” on Middle Eastern oil than we are “dangerously dependent” on Far Eastern steel, Taiwanese computer chips, Vietnamese textiles, or Indian call-center operators. It is true that our economy would shut down without oil and that energy is critical to our national defense. But steel is also critical, as is concrete and information technology. Not to mention that all of that, when it comes to government purchases, is heavily dependent upon the goodwill of the foreign central banks that do so much to finance our national debt—a real source of national vulnerability that Merkley and his ilk have long ignored. Something to keep in mind for perspective . . .
The senator’s case for oil autarky depends, as so many similar ideas do, on the myth of the national economy. “In total, the United States sends $1 billion a day overseas to fuel our oil habit,” he writes.4 That is not true, unless one believes that “the United States” is synonymous with Valero and Conoco Philips, the two largest refiners of crude oil in the country. Refiners buy a lot of crude, and they import a lot of the crude they buy. They do that for the same reason that Dell puts Korean- or Taiwanese-made components in the computers it assembles in Texas: because companies source their materials from the cheapest places they can, which keeps prices low and profits high. In practically every business, this is understood as a normal and desirable fact of life; it makes the economy efficient, which contributes to creating wealth, jobs, and a higher standard of living for Americans (and the rest of the world, too, a fact that should not be treated as unimportant).
But when it comes to oil, the normal rules of economics do not seem to apply, at least so far as the politicians are concerned. Of course, they will learn—the hard way—that there is no getting around the realities of supply and demand. Not that they will not try.
On top of the phony national-security argument, Merkley and the oil socialists pile on arguments about environmental concerns, which are significant in the energy industry. Both oil and coal impose real environmental costs, in extracting them and in burning them. But if Merkley wants to stop importing oil, that’s going to mean a lot more oil rigs operating in U.S. waters and in U.S. territories, meaning that the United States will bear more of the cost of oil’s environmental repercussions, rather than less.
His answer to this, of course, is a five-year plan, one that will see the United States suddenly using considerably less oil—a country in which, today, nearly 100 percent of the transportation energy comes from oil and in which practically the entire electricity supply comes from hydrocarbons (coal and natural gas). That is to say, his plan amounts to: magic! Maybe Hugo Chávez can show Merkley how to pull a national power grid out of his hat.
Merkley calls his version of the Soviet five-year plan a “comprehensive and diversified strategy to reduce our dependence on oil outright, with a goal of eliminating the need for any oil imported from outside of North America.”5 You’ll notice he’s leaving himself a little wiggle room there—no imported oil, except from the countries that already are our largest oil suppliers. The oil socialists show a real talent for that sort of rhetorical sleight-of-hand; one influential faction, Energy Independence Now, published a widely cited report in which it boasted that the new heavy-duty truck standards it has been pushing would save “the equivalent of more oil than we imported last year from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Mexico, Kuwait, Nigeria, Brazil, Iraq, and Angola combined.”6 And that is true—over the lifetime of the trucks, which could run more than a decade. Comparing one year’s worth of oil imports to the lifetime fuel consumption of America’s entire heavy-duty truck fleet distorts by many orders of magnitude the scale of those “savings.” (Not to mention that the laundry list of oil exporters excludes the biggest one: Canada.)
That sort of dishonesty is the stock in trade of oil socialists, or as we could call them, the Committee for Energy Autarky.
Of course, no single-issue socialist worth his red socks could present THE PLAN without der commissars, and the senator proposes the creation of a “National Energy Security Council” to serve that role.7 Again, the rhetoric is worth noticing: not a National Energy Council but a National Energy Security Council, making fuel-efficiency standards and subsidies for corn-farmers’ ethanol operations the moral equivalent of war. (Note how American socialism is almost always national socialism.) And those central planners at the National Energy Security Council would have a second-tier commission to back them up, the Energy Information Administration (which already exists).
The creation of the central-planning authority is, in Merkley’s argument, strictly political. It exists because similar pushes for energy autarky have come to naught when, as he writes, “the nation’s focus turned elsewhere or the political winds shifted.”8 In other words, if the people’s elected representatives fail to produce the policy outcome desired by Merkley and his central planners, then those plans must be made impervious to the “political winds”—which is to say, to democracy. Creating a central bureau to protect THE PLAN from the “political winds” of democracy has long been a concern of central planners; Lenin called his approach democratic centralism—“Lenin’s deliberate misnomer for mindless obedience,” as former secretary of state Zbigniew Brzezenski put it.
Merkley proposes that actions taken in 2010 and 2011 should come to fruition in 2016. Naturally, like most five-year plans, this one relies largely on numbers that have been plucked out of thin air. The Obama administration, for instance, has proposed tightening fuel-economy standards for passenger vehicles by 4 percent a year through 2016. That 4 percent is a questionable enough number—it seems calculated only to judge the standards just over 35 miles per gallon by 2016, a meaningless political target. But even those 4 percent standards, impractical and counter-productive as they may be, are not enough for Merkley—he proposes 6 to 7 percent a year as a “reasonable goal.”9
“Their ‘New Socialism’ doesn’t need to capture property. It is content to control the economy through taxation and regulation and the attitudes of our citizens by the establishment of a culture through the power institutions of our society: the media, the education establishment, and powerful business interests. Moreover, the ‘New Socialism’ seeks to create a conventional wisdom that discredits all alternative thought.
“The liberal focus on ‘green energy’ and ‘green jobs’ are another means of taking control, for there is no free market involved, only government controlled ‘green energy’ and government-created ‘green jobs.’ And ‘cap and trade’ programs are put forward to control our economy in a way never before seen.”
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Jim Gilmore, Human Events, 2009
Interestingly, Merkley, like an errant fifth-grader, feels no need to show his work. Where did that 6 to 7 percent number come from? It’s a total mystery. Actually, it’s not a mystery—it didn’t come from anywhere. It was made up, arbitrarily, as so many central-planning goals are. It is rooted in nothing other than politics.
The senator has studied nothing other than politics his entire life (bachelor’s in international relations, master’s in public policy) and has nowhere near the knowledge or expertise—probably not even the quantitative skills—to evaluate whether those goals are in fact “reasonable.” Nor does he have the expertise to judge whether the staff he has hired and the experts he has consulted to formulate his plan (assuming he did so, rather than just making it up as he went along), have produced a reasonable plan. Much less does he have the ability to foresee what unintended consequences such an agenda might impose on the U.S. economy.
But not to worry; he writes that his plan will only call for the incorporation of “technologies that pay for themselves.”10 It would be fair to note that Congress historically has not excelled at identifying initiatives that “pay for themselves.”
Lest you think that Merkley has limited himself to trucks and cars, know that he also has “non-road” vehicles in his sights; in other words, he’s targeting planes, trains, and automobiles. Actually, make that planes, trains, and automobiles, and bulldozers, and lawnmowers (really, he has a plan for revolutionizing the lawnmower industry; wonder if he’s ever mowed a lawn?), and ships, and boats. Also streetcars, light rail, and bicycles. (If you’re walking, he has some thoughts on that, too.) Let’s hope he does a good job with the bulldozers—America will need a good one to push this plan out the door of Congress.
At times, Merkley is refreshingly candid about his central-planning ambitions. He calls for “transportation planning requirements,” he writes about expanding the capacity of this industry, reducing the capacity of that industry, “smart commuter planning programs,” creating a central-planning council to help “the President coordinate the government’s work to meet the nation’s . . . energy goals,” and he imagines “programs and authorities” that will—I kid you not—“create value for agricultural waste” through “local, regional, and national planning efforts.”11
The senator, in fact, seems to realize that his energy autarky calls for his central planners to intervene in practically every aspect of American life. He wants to interfere in businesses’ personnel decisions to encourage telecommuting; he wants more walkable communities, meaning that existing communities will have to be redesigned; and in order to make neighborhoods safe for walking, he seeks to deploy additional law-enforcement resources—in the name of “energy independence.”
That is a magical idea, “energy independence”; you’d think that using the police to make neighborhoods safe enough to walk through would be a priority independent of its far-removed impact on America’s consumption of Middle Eastern oil. But these central-planning mandates have a way of becoming all-encompassing. If energy autarky gives a senator a license to tell you whether to come into the office or work from home, it’s a license for anything—which is why politicians like it.
Similar to Merkley’s argument, Energy Independence Now emphasizes that we must have “national policies in place” to enforce energy autarky. “We cannot get to this zero emissions future without enacting strong policies,” they insist.12 Amping up the nationalistic rhetoric, they write that it will take a nation devoted to the cause, a nation that demands a sustainable path forward and refuses to let industry interests dictate our future. In reality, of course, those “industry interests” largely support the green agenda; when you’re taking hundreds of billions of dollars in grants, incentives, tax breaks, and other political favors to the table, you can be sure that the business lobbies will show up—especially lobbies for industries like ethanol, wind power, and solar power, whose goods and services would mostly fail if the government stopped propping them up with massive subsidies and intrusive mandates.
In the case of energy autarky, lurking in the background is the powerful figure of Oklahoma oilman-cum-alternative-energy-prophet T. Boone Pickens. In 2010, I had the unique pleasure of sitting down with Mr. Pickens to discuss his plan for mandating, through an act of Congress, that 18-wheel tractor-trailer trucks operating in the United States switch from using gasoline to using compressed natural gas. Under the Pickens plan, Congress would force the trucks to be retrofitted and force new trucks to run on natural gas, too. It would also dip deep into taxpayers’ pockets to subsidize that transformation; the subsidy would run to $65,000 per truck—considerably more than the average household income of the United States.
Five minutes into our conversation, my skepticism having become apparent, Pickens declared, “Well, you must be in favor of foreign oil. You must be in favor of the Saudis.” His opening gambit, when challenged, was precisely the same as Senator Merkley’s: frame this unwieldy central-planning campaign as America vs. bin Laden. And like the environmentalists (and central-planning advocates of all sorts), Pickens is willing to use some questionable data and analysis in his argument. One of his favorite factoids (and a favorite of the environmentalists) is this: “America uses a lot of oil. Every day 85 million barrels of oil are produced around the world. And 21 million of those are used here in the United States. That’s 25% of the world’s oil demand. Used by just 4% of the world’s population.”13
It is true that the 4 percent of the world’s population who live in the United States consume 25 percent of the world’s oil. They also produce 25 percent of the world’s annual economic output. When one compares energy inputs to economic outputs, there is a close symmetry between consumption and production in the United States. What is remarkable about the United States is not that so few people consume so much, but that so few people produce so much of the world’s wealth. States with central-planning regimes, or those with a legacy of central-planning regimes, do tend to consume much less energy (and much less of everything else) on a per capita basis than do Americans. There is a word for that: poverty. China’s 2009 per capita GDP was about $6,600—less than the typical New York City resident earned in three weeks (and those numbers come from 2009, after the financial crisis had sent New York wages down by a whopping 23 percent).
“[T. Boone] Pickens controls Mesa Energy, which plans to spend up to $10 billion building a gargantuan wind farm in rural Texas whose value would be greatly enhanced amid the national effort that 80-year-old Pickens is proposing. His BP Capital hedge fund is heavily invested in natural gas as well as oil.
“It’s amazing how many of the hundreds of news articles written about the proposal in the past two days have failed to mention Pickens’ vested interests, while the Associated Press quoted him as making the following preposterous statement about his plan: ‘I don’t have any profit motive in this. I’m doing it for America.’ Back in April he was more candid when speaking to the Guardian about his wind farm investment: ‘Don’t get the idea that I’ve turned green. My business is making money, and I think this is going to make a lot of money.’ ”
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Phil Mattera, “Pickens’ Self-Serving Energy Plan,” 2008
So the truth is not that Americans are energy hogs. It’s that Americans are the engine of the world’s economy, producing more wealth annually than any other nation on Earth—in fact, producing three times as much wealth as the No. 2 or No. 3 producers, China and Japan.
T. Boone Pickens is hardly a revolutionary leftist. And neither are most of the partisans of American oil socialism. So, why would they support the Sovietization of a major sector of the U.S. economy? You can be sure that Pickens did not favor the nationalization of healthcare or the banks.
Senator Merkley, as a member in good standing of the party of Big Government, clearly stands to gain tremendous amounts of power and prestige from the socialization of the energy industry. And Mr. Pickens? He just happens to own a whole bunch of natural-gas operations, with a major sideline in wind-generated power. Funny he should have chosen natural gas, and not some other flavor of unicorn-juice, to be at the center of his plan to remake the U.S. energy industry along lines amenable to his own financial interests.
“Gas holdings?” he queried, when a reporter asked him about the issue during a conversation I attended. “Sure, I’ve got interest in gas companies. What else can I say. Yeah, that’s my business. I mean, that’s what I know. I’m a geologist, and gas and oil is it. . . . I do not want to be identified as a wind man or a gas man. I much prefer to be called an oilman.” Of course he does not want to be identified as a wind-and-gas man; to do so would reveal his self-serving arguments for oil autarky as the political flatulence they are. You can count on American energy socialism to achieve some real redistribution of wealth—to T. Boone Pickens, among others.
Another thing you’ll notice about the Committee for Energy Autarky: to a man, they argue for shifting American freight traffic from long-haul trucks to railroads. But, of course, we once used rail for shipping practically all of our long-distance freight. Why? When it comes to rail shipping, as with so much else in the transportation sector, what the Committee for Energy Autarky hopes to do is to undo what we did in our last great national foray into central planning of the transportation system: the construction of the federal highway system.
Practically every item on the Pickens-Merkley agenda—encouraging mass transit, discouraging long commutes, encouraging denser development to produce walkable communities, discouraging highway-bound trucking, encouraging reliance on efficient railroads—is a response to a problem that was created in no small part by the creation of the federal highway system, a gigantic, city-killing, community-undermining, expensive national boondoggle that was sold to the country—just like “energy independence”—as a national-security program. Indeed, the official name of our national highway system is the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways—the idea being that if the Russkies landed in Tucumcari, New Mexico, we’d have eight lanes of blacktop running out of Amarillo on which to meet them. (Or something like that.)
Transportation systems are often thought of as a definitive public good, but they are no such thing; the first paved highway in this country and the first turnpike were built by private enterprise. So were the railroads. Even the New York City subway system has its origins in private enterprise: Charles Harvey’s West Side and Yonkers Patent Railroad Co. built the first mass-transit train in the city, and other competitors soon followed suit. (Hong Kong’s subway is to this day privately run, at a profit, and it makes New York City’s rat-infested metro look like something from the nineteenth century—which it is.)
The U.S. federal highway system is a perfect example of what a politician with a Big Plan and Big Power is capable of inflicting on a country in the name of intelligent economic planning. By subsidizing the suburbanization of the United States, the federal highways effected a massive devaluation of urban and inner-city real estate, the effects of which are plain as day to anybody taking the time and exhibiting the gumption to drive through North Philadelphia or central Detroit.
The interstate highway running through practically any city in the country (other than the very special case of New York City) is a Berlin Wall of social and economic segregation. It was the taxpayer-subsidized creation of this system that allowed real-estate developers to build in ever-more-remote locations without forcing them—and through them, suburban and ex-urban home-buyers—to bear the actual costs they impose, which range from congestion and pollution to wear-and-tear on the roads, as well as social costs (such as higher rates of crime) in the newly depopulated city centers.
Of course, the highway system has its champions. Consider this report from the fortieth anniversary of the system’s establishment by David Field at Inside the News:
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in June 1956, the landmark legislation set in motion one of the greatest public-works projects in history. “The interstate system changed the way we live and the way we work,” says FHWA Administrator Rodney Slater. . . . The 44,546 miles of interstate highways turned a two-month transcontinental journey into a four-day road trip.14
You bet it changed the way we live and work—that’s what central planning is for. The question is: did it change them for the better?
The interstates became an engine of development, making possible the postwar suburban expansion and transforming the nation’s retail economy by creating shopping malls and spurring travel. In 1955, people drove 603 billion miles on U.S. highways; last year, they logged 2.3 trillion miles.
Construction of the system cost taxpayers about $329 billion in 1996 dollars, according to transportation consultants Wendell Cox and Jean Love, or the equivalent of $58.5 billion in 1957 dollars—not far from the original estimate of $41 billion. Repair of the nation’s roads and bridges will require $315 billion, says Darbelnet, citing federal estimates. The highway agency also says the government would have to spend about $72 billion a year during the next five years to upgrade roads and bridges—about $37 billion more than presently is spent on highway construction by federal, state, and local governments.
But critics say those figures are inaccurate. “The American people have paid about $130 billion for the interstate system,” counting taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel, argues Fay. Motorists pay 18.3 cents in federal tax on every gallon of gas, of which all but 4.3 cents goes into something called the federal Highway Trust Fund dedicated to maintenance and repair. Truckers pay 43.33 cents a gallon, with a similar 4.3 cents set aside for deficit reduction.
To mask the true size of the federal deficit, however, every president since Richard Nixon has held highway spending below the level the trust fund would support. “Where there is a user fee that will generate $30 billion in 1996 alone, there is no excuse for not dedicating those funds to safer roads and bridges,” says Fay.15
In short: it’s an expensive misallocation of transportation resources—one that’s used to help hide the federal budget deficit, to boot. It is a perfect example of the unintended consequences of attempts at central planning; if Eisenhower could have foreseen the massive costs that his highway system would have imposed on the United States—the direct economic costs of building and maintenance, the indirect economic costs born by American cities and the people who live there, the social costs associated with the billions and billions of dollars in sprawl subsidies paid out through the highway system, the ecological costs, the scarring of the American landscape—would he have done things differently? He probably would have: he did not do so much to save his country from the Germans only to give it a kick in the national shins when he got home.
We got it wrong—massively wrong—the last time we tried transportation socialism. What reason is there to believe that advocates of “energy independence”—with their shaky facts, their dodgy data, their tired and familiar rhetoric about “national security”—will get it right? T. Boone Pickens has drilled a lot of dry wells in his day, but he did that with his own capital. How likely is it that a man who has gotten so much wrong in his own business is going to get it right—exactly right—when it comes to the incomprehensibly complex business of the entire nation? That’s the problem with central planning. That’s the problem with socialism.