Rand's Rant Against Green Bulbs
The Senate Energy and Natural Resources (ENR) Committee got a dose of libertarian wackiness at a recent mark-up hearing that was strikingly reminiscent of the bizarre tirades that Glenn Beck doled out daily on his now defunct television show.
The ENR Committee was voting on S. 398, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Jeff Bingaman (NM) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) to strengthen energy efficiency standards for appliances and some other consumer products. This legislation, which has strong industry support and sailed through the committee last year, was thought to be non-controversial.
This year is different. Tea Party favorite Rand Paul happens to be on the committee.
Paul objected to the legislation, and speaking of the efficiency standards in the legislation he said, "I think that to be consistent with a free society, we should make them voluntary."
Paul offered an amendment to remove the government’s authority to enforce the standards. Then, Paul escorted his colleagues into the Twilight Zone.
According to an account in Energy & Environment Daily, Paul launched into a sermon about Ayn Rand's 1937 novel Anthem, which depicts a dark future where the concept of individuality has fallen prey to the evils of collectivism and socialism.
Paul described a scene from the novel in which the protagonist, called Equality 7-2521, discovers the incandescent light bulb. Paul recounts that Equality 7-2521 naively thinks that electricity and the brilliance of electric light would be an advantage for society. But when he takes the light bulb to the society's elders, they crush it "beneath the boot heel of the collective."
Paul then instructed his fellow senators that in the novel, "the collective has no place, basically, for individual choice," and adds, "Now, I'm not suggesting that this collective is against electricity, per say, or individualism ... but I am suggesting that we're against choice."
How long will it be before Paul is bringing blackboards into the Senate ENR hearing room and is drawing diagrams purporting to show that Senators Murkowski and Bingaman are agents of a Middle Eastern caliphate plotting to stop America from using its coal?
At least two of Paul’s fellow Republican Senators were belting down his tea. After Paul’s amendment failed, Mike Lee (UT), another tea party fave, and John Barrasso (WY) joined Paul in voting against the bill.
Assertions that efficiency standards restrict consumer choice are simply wrong. Extreme arguments that efficiency standards are the agenda of a supposed “collective” that seeks to impose totalitarian rule on America are the product of a cultish, delusional ideology that fails to connect to the real world.
Paul’s logic would seem to oppose virtually any mandatory standards. I suppose automobile manufacturers should never have been required to install seatbelts, asbestos should still be allowed for building insulation, and we should have wasteful high flow toilets even in the arid West where water is scarce.
In 1974, Governor Ronald Reagan signed into law the Warren-Alquist Act establishing the California Energy Commission and authorizing the commission to set appliance efficiency standards. Then on March 17, 1987, President Reagan established strong federal standards by signing the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act into law.
We have heard consumer choice arguments for years in rants by Rush Limbaugh and others against even the most modest increase in automobile fuel efficiency standards. Does anyone today really believe that consumer choice has been hurt by having these standards? It actually cuts the other way. Without these standards, consumers would not have available the many fuel-efficient vehicle options from which they can choose today.
Rather than restricting consumer choices, standards prompt manufacturers to invest in technology R&D that results in a range of better products. Manufacturers simply don’t behave like deer caught in the headlights, as some would have us believe. Prompted by standards, they innovate.
For example, the assertion that incandescent lighting standards will result in the Easy Bake Oven children’s toy being taken off the market is a false scare story. The toy manufacturer is coming out with a better product -- an Easy Bake Oven with a built-in heating element that is more efficient than a 100-watt incandescent light bulb, which makes for a more efficient toy and one that is more convenient for parents and children (no light bulb to burn out and replace every 1,000 hours.)
What Senator Paul’s hand-wringing about the “collective” (and perhaps black helicopters) ignores is that we are not islands unto ourselves. Our energy choices have impacts on others, and on society as a whole.
Using energy wastefully increases energy demand, which in turn requires construction of power plants whose costs show up in all our energy bills. Using energy wastefully results in environmental impacts that harm public health and the environment, and using energy wastefully hastens an inevitable decline in the availability of fossils fuels.
There is nothing conservative or prudent about waste. Nor is there anything conservative or prudent about the notion that we do not need efficiency standards to help secure our energy future.
Radical libertarians, like Senator Paul, who want to champion individuality above all else, either possess utopian ignorance regarding the fallibility of man, or have taken short-sighted, live-for-today selfishness to its liberal extreme.
Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, once wrote: "Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit." His American protégé, Russell Kirk instructed that “Every right is married to a duty, every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility."
If you happen to stumble upon a blackboard while walking the halls of Congress, I suggest you erase the conspiracy diagram and replace it with these wise words, or this, also from Kirk:
To check centralization and usurping of power ... we require a new laissez-faire. The old laissez-faire was founded upon a misapprehension of human nature, an exultation of individuality (in private character often a virtue) to the condition of a political dogma, which destroyed the spirit of community and reduced men to so many equipollent atoms of humanity, without sense of brotherhood or purpose.
If Congress would heed the rational conservatism of Burke and Kirk, and ignore the ranting of the radical libertarian fringe, I’m sure a lot of American individuals would breathe a collective sigh of relief.