Energy Policy

The supreme contribution government can make to energy production, we have always maintained, is to get out of the way.

How sweet, therefore, to read the DoE's "National Energy Policy Plan" of July 17, which says as much a little more politely. The very idea of presenting the report (mandated by Congress) seems to have been repugnant to the Reagan Administration, which inserted the word policy to emphasize reliance on market forces rather than government dictate, and made the volume pointedly slim.

The emphasis is squarely on decontrol, elimination of subsidies, and removal of regulatory uncertainties.

In nuclear power, "the administration is committed to reversing past federal government excesses and to providing a more favorable climate for efficient energy production, thus allowing nuclear power to compete fairly in the marketplace with other sources of energy supply."

Some relief from bureaucratic energy stifling has already been achieved, particularly the decontrol of oil prices, and the new policy statement raises hopes that the traditional obstacle to a free market, government interference, will be significantly reduced, at least in the executive branch.

But other enemies of a free market remain, above all a powerful class of income redistributors, entrenched in the opinion-molding positions of press and education. Their opposition to a free market is general; in the case of nuclear power, it takes the form of a fanatical witch hunt.

But a government's real job is to protect its citizens' freedoms, and in the field of energy they are threatened, above all, by the high dependence on oil flowing to the US from unstable sheikdoms through vulnerable life lines.

Here is yet another way to make America strong; and yet another way to make the de-industrializers squirm.

[More: S.C. Goldman, W.A. Schroeder: "The Geopolitics of Energy" Policy Review (Heritage Foundation), Summer 1981; W. Laqueur: "Hollanditis: A new stage in European neutralism," Commentary, August 1981.