The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 559
Going in, I had to say that there’s a lot that Robert Bryce and I seem to share.
His personal bio indicates that he leans towards libertarianism; I consider myself to be a conservative libertarian. He doesn’t believe in the man-made global
warming alarms, and neither do I. And he “believes wholeheartedly in the U.S.
Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” just like me.
But then we take divergent paths. In the “Author’s Note” section of the book
after the Praise Pages, Bryce talks about his change in perspective from thinking there should be major government involvement in energy to now believing
that the government should “quit meddling in the energy market.”
As a conservative libertarian I would normally eschew all government involvement in any enterprise. However, to now call off government involvement – and
its built-in political attachments – after all the government and political tutelage
that made the petroleum oil industry so dominant and petroleum oil-based fuels
our primary engine fuels, is either terribly naïve or horribly disingenuous. Gasoline didn’t become so prominent because it was the best fuel; it became the
primary fuel because of intentional (or unintentional-that-became-intentional)
government intrusion with alcohol in the form of onerous taxation, followed by
protection from alcohol in the form of national prohibition for 14 years. These
14 years were perhaps the most critical years in the development and growth
of the automobile industry, which became and remains the largest and most
important industry in the world.
For Bryce or anyone arguing the anti-alternative fuel position to now declare
that the government should back off from providing help that would allow domestically produced alternative fuel solutions to compete on the very lopsided
field that government involvement created to favor the oil industry, is comically
dishonest.
It’s not only comically dishonest, it’s comically unrealistic. Does Bryce really
expect that politicians who have watered at the money trough of the oil industry
for so many years will willingly go cold-turkey? It’s completely unlikely.
There’s an often-used analogy for why certain government controls and intervention is necessary, and it’s an analogy that even the most strident libertarians
have trouble arguing with. The analogy is the necessity for traffic stop lights. It
goes like this, if it wasn’t for the orderly control of any thoroughfare there would
be mass confusion and the free-flow of traffic would come to a grinding halt
because of accidents blocking the road. It is only by applying certain controls
that we can insure a generally freer traveling experience.
