T. Boone Pickens and Energy Public
Policy
by Robert
Bradley Jr.
“[A]s my father liked to tell me, ‘Son, a fool with a plan can beat a genius with no plan any day.’ Right now, when it comes to America and our effort to achieve greater energy security, we’re a foolish nation without a plan.
If it were up to me, America’s energy plan would have ….”
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine the can design.”
- F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors
of Socialism (1988), p. 76.
T. Boone Pickens, the author and marketer of three national energy plans
(see yesterday’s post), is a “man of system,” to use Adam
Smith’s phrase from the mid-18th century.
Pickens’s grandiose scheme to use the powers of government to implement
wind-for-natural-gas in electrical generation and natural-gas-for-oil in
transportation (Pickens I) inspired Carl Pope, then head of the Sierra Club, to
state back in 2008: “To put it plainly, T. Boone Pickens is out to save
America.” [1] Plans II and III dropped wind (when business
Boone did) to just push natural gas in the transportation market.
To plan or not plan–that is the wrong question in the
realm of human action. Purposeful human action is planning. A central plan enforced
by government (which by definition has a legal monopoly on the initiation of
force) precludes planning on the individual and group level done by voluntary
means.
Thus T. Boone Pickens has fundamentally misconstrued the question of
planning which is who will plan: the market through private
property, voluntary exchange, and the rule of law or government through its
“experts” and legal monopoly on coercion.
Early Warming: Adam Smith
One of the oldest fallacies of economics is that the only plan is the
central plan, devised by experts and implemented by common-good government.
Adam Smith warned against the “man of system” in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments (1759) presciently recognizing that the quest to correct
alleged market failure was prone to two other types of error: analytic failure
(expert error) and government failure. In his words:
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own
conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal
plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part
of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any
regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may
oppose it.
He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great
society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a
chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no
other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but
that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a
principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the
legislature might choose to impress upon it.
If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game
of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be
happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on
miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of
disorder. [2]
Hayek on Planning
Perhaps more than any other 20th century intellectual, F. A. Hayek
differentiated between coercive planning and market planning by individuals and
groups of individuals–and why the latter was preferential.
Some salient Hayek quotations follow:
“The argument for liberty is not an argument against organization, which is one of the most powerful tools human reason can employ, but an argument against all exclusive, privileged, monopolistic organization, against the use of coercion to prevent others from doing better.” [3]
“The more the state ‘plans’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.” [4]
“It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it.”[5]
“All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant.” [6]
“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. To the naive mind that can conceive of order only as the product of deliberate arrangement, it may seem absurd that in complex conditions order, and adaptation to the unknown, can be achieved more effectively by decentralizing decisions and that a division of authority will actually extend the possibility of overall order. Yet that decentralization actually leads to more information being taken into account.” [7]
“Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad.” [8]
Conclusion
On one level, the Pickens plans can be criticized in specific energy
terms (such as fighting the ghosts past of Arab OPEC oil in his “energy
security” case for government-sponsored natural gas transportation).
But on a another level, the idea that the market is “planless” compared
to government planning is both wrong and dangerous. The danger is that
“planning” is the open sesame for big government and a slippery slope to
serfdom. “From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often
but a step,” warned Hayek. [9]
——————————————–
[1] Carl
Pope, Sierra Club. Quoted in Dean Calbreath, “Pickens Pitches Plans to Shift U.S.
Away From Oil,”San Diego Union Tribune, June 25, 2008.
[3] Hayek, The
Constitution of Liberty (1960), pp. 88–89.
[4] Hayek, The
Road to Serfdom (1944), p. 114.
[5] Hayek, The
Constitution of Liberty (1960), p. 82.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Hayek, The
Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), p. 76.
[8] Hayek, The
Constitution of Liberty (1960), p. 83.
[9] Hayek, The
Road to Serfdom (1944), p. 62.
No comments:
Post a Comment