Political candidates, and others assuming knowing roles, talk incessantly about what the government should do about energy supplies and prices. As if any one of them can or should do much at all.

The best and almost the only smart thing government can do is meddle on the fringes. As long as politicians run our democratic government, Congress and the president will look for ways to help or hinder certain energy producers depending on perceived public whim, but when it comes to profoundly affecting something of central impact, like the availability and price of gasoline, the best they can do is stay out of the way.

This means government should not interfere with oil exploration except for the most agreeable reasons, not because officials know with any precision what the effects might be on supply or price but merely because non-interference is good policy in itself. The list of unacceptable places should be aggressively short.

Too many people today think oil drilling should be restricted to focus on alternatives. This is vacuous talk. Alternative fuels can be pursued just as effectively in the context of a freer oil marketplace, and all of society will be better off for the freedom.

Drilling dissidents often speak of the subsidies oil receives, but even if one wants to campaign vigorously against those subsidies, that’s no reason to interfere with the marketplace.

Shall we divert those subsidies to, say, wind power?

Well, wind itself has plenty of public subsidy, without which it would not exist. Oil, on the other hand, is a viable energy source preferred by the public everywhere and essential to our very global way of life. Shall we try to disjoint that very equation because we don’t like oil in some intellectual context? In a debate, I think the proposition for oil subsidies would be just as easy to defend as subsidies for any other energy medium.

In my dreams, I imagine an economy free of subsidies, but I might as well pray for time to stand still while I live forever. The best we can do is interfere as little as possible, avoiding such foolishness as private company windfall taxes and prohibitions on ordinary ways of doing business, like drilling for oil.

And while we’re at it, let’s avoid restrictions on how nuclear plants are financed, and international trade, and any smoking at all in bars and restaurants and any number of other examples of government mischief we might name. It’s a rear-guard action, generally ignored by most public officials who arrive in office believing their duty is to marshal their newfound power to change something - meaning, almost always, to narrow our freedoms.

Finance is the art of passing money from hand to hand until it finally disappears.

- Robert W. Sarnoff

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