Annoying and inaccurate arguments

I was reading an entry on about the uselessness of the Department of Energy, and it rubbed me the wrong way in a couple of major ways.

At worst, DOE energy policies are wasteful, even harmful to the best interests of American consumers. Markets, not planners, are by far the most efficient way of both distributing energy, and insuring that Americans are making the best energy choices.

Consider markets for alternative energy sources. These sources will spring up when it’s economically viable for them to do so. Once fossil fuel prices float high enough to make the research and development necessary to bring new energy sources to the market profitable, we’ll get the moss-powered cars we’ve been waiting for. Federally funded research grants and development boondoggles from DOE amount to little more than corporate welfare for the auto giants.

I know very little about the DoE. They may fit this guy’s characterization, but I find it telling that someone who puts so much faith in the free market refers to the people that a government agency is intended to serve as “American consumers” rather than “American citizens”.

He’s correct that a, theoretical free market, with omniscient/precognitive consumers and a multitude of independent suppliers in competition would be the most efficient way to distribute energy or anything else. In short, if you live in a classical economic model, at equilibrium, with no monopolies or other market disfunctions, you’re sitting pretty. For those of us living in reality, it’s another story.

As for his argument that research grants are essentially corporate welfare, the man seems to be unaware of the crack he is smoking. And the idea that fuel prices reflect in any way, shape, or form, the true costs of fossil fuels, is more naive than a belief in santa claus. You shouldn’t be allowed past economics 101 if you have no idea of what the word “externality” means.

I wonder if this crackpot is at all steamed about the DoT interference in the market for obscenely inefficient automobiles by their policy of funding the construction of highways, while completely failing to fund rail development or maintenance.

Anyone talking about how Markets will make for the brightest future is either selling you something for their own benefit, or has been sold something and is trying to convince you (and thereby themselves) that they made the right decisions.