THE SECOND COMING OF ADAM SMITH

"As a free marketer, I ..." begins a letter to the Wall St. J. (9/26/88) by Amory Lovins, and ends with "Let's admit the market's failure, confess that Congress did something right and . . . use a mix of taxes on inefficient new cars and rebates to efficient ones to continue and expand CAFE's enormous benefits."

CAFE stands for Corporate Average Fuel Economy [stand-ards], by which car manufactures must sell a mix of cars averaging to a certain maximum fuel consumption. If you need a Cadillac badly enough when the quota has been exhausted, you can get one by buying a GM equivalent of a Honda. Lovins is here basing his case on two fundamental tenets of the Free Market: First, that the price mechanism (of fuel, in this case) is inferior to the wisdom of the sages who made it to Capitol Hill by shrieking, lying, wearing funny hats and kissing babies; and second, that whatever is not for-bidden shall be compulsory.

Other areas are waiting to be thus belabored. Over 9 million US motor boats pollute the air, deplete the ozone layer, warm the global greenhouse, and may cause facial tic in crocodiles (Never been refuted! Can we afford to wait till the full proof is in?). Yet the number of environmentally benign rowboats is under 2 million. Time to legislate equality! Congressional rebates for large holes drilled into motor boat bottoms! A free market demands that the consumer's irresponsibility of buying what he wants be stopped cold. Coercion is the watchword of the Lovinsite free marketeer.

But when I talk about the Second Coming of Adam Smith, I mean a yet bigger demagogue: Sen. Timothy Wirth of Colorado.

He has just sponsored a 131-page Public Policy Study: Harnessing Market Forces to Protect Our Environment. "Regu- latory policies need to be supplemented by market-based strategies .. re- moval of market bar- riers . . . removal of unwarranted subsidies . . . pollution charges, tradable permits, market oriented policies . . ."

Pinch me, am I dreaming? When this man's votes in Congress are summed up in dollars, he comes out as one of the biggest spenders in the history of mankind. When they are summed by the ADA, he gets a kiss on both cheeks for his high scores. For donkey's years he was elected by Boulder, a city that vies with Berkeley, Calif., for first place in radical insanity. An erst-while stalwart anti-nuke, he now clamors for nuclear power.

Well, everybody moves toward the center at election time, you may say. No: he is not up for re-election this year.

But like his colleagues in Fat City, the man is simply every inch a politician. While he represented Boulder, he ran to the left of Leon Trotsky; now that he is a state senator, he sends speeches on how to revitalize the uranium industry to carefully selected addresses (of which AtE is one). Should he find it profitable to apply for the post of a politician in Saudi Arabia (where it is not the custom to have elections), he would marry two more wives.