Ted Bromund: charge of the light brigade shows how US gets it wrong

It’s not easy to be controversial about something as banal as a bulb. But in 2007, in a characteristic bit of nanny-state activism, the Bush Administration backed a measure that effectively banned incandescent light bulbs.

Like a lot of green legislation, the law was about paying off special interests, not saving energy. Environmentalists hated the incandescent, while makers of fluorescent bulbs wanted to sell more of them. Unfortunately, the American people were not interested in doing this, because fluorescents cost more.

So the greenies and industry partnered up and got a law that forced Americans to buy the bulb they liked, the one that made them the most money. Even as an energy-saving strategy, this is not a cunning plan. Undoubtedly, the incandescent will in time brown out, just as the market for buggy whips died off after Henry Ford invented the Model T.

And that’s the point: competition works better than government fiat.

The way to get rid of old technologies is to keep them on the market so inventors have a reason to come up with a real improvement. Giving a new technology a free ride by banning the old alternative eliminates any incentive to make sure the new is actually better than the old.

Initially, the bulb ban was a bipartisan folly. But after they won the House of Representatives in 2010, Republicans turned against the ban.

And that was where Chu got involved. In a conference call with reporters, he defended the ban by saying: “We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.”

His comment perfectly sums up the elitist, arrogant, expert-worshipping mentality of modern liberalism.

Every day, Americans spend billions of dollars on things that are not strictly necessary. And all of these choices use energy.

Last weekend, for example, I walked to the local farmers’ market and bought peaches from West Virginia. The farmer drove them into Washington, DC, in a small truck. It would have been more efficient to ship them in bulk to a big grocery store. Why shouldn’t the government stop me from wasting money and energy like this?

I’ll tell you why. Because this is supposedly a free country, and my own money is exactly that: my own money. A government big enough to try to make sure we make the efficient, correct choice all the time is big enough to make sure we don’t actually get to make any choices at all. It will simply pick the choice it likes and outlaw the alternatives. Governments are actually quite bad at picking winners, and even worse at admitting mistakes. That’s partly because experts know a lot less than they think they do.

Take the still-unfolding saga of the US Justice Department’s Operation Fast and Furious. This programme was supposedly intended to solve the problem of guns being bought in the US and smuggled illegally into Mexico.

The number of smuggled guns is invariably wildly exaggerated; still, it is a serious violation of US law and an obvious illustration of the weak controls on America’s southern border.

So the Justice Department, operating in the best tradition of Baldrick, hatched another cunning plan. It would allow people it knew to be working for Mexican gangs to buy thousands of guns while it watched on hidden cameras, after which it would allow them to smuggle the guns into Mexico while making no effort to track them.

Then, after these guns killed many Mexicans and at least two US agents, it would trace them back and realize that it had watched them being sold in the US, thus providing no useful intelligence whatsoever.

Even now, after Republicans in the House of Representatives have exposed part of this operation, it is impossible to understand how anyone expected it to achieve anything. Many US officials were appalled by it from the start, but it rumbled on for over a year. The Justice Department still refuses to admit that anything much was going on, and it has fired the whistleblower who exposed this fiasco and supplied Congressional investigators with documents that were completely blacked out.

This is a scandal. US officials were condoning illegal arms smuggling into a friendly neighbour, which led directly to the death of agents under their command. And yet the New York Times had published 10 times as many stories on the News of the World as it had on Operation Fast and Furious.

Yes, phone hacking by journalists is wrong. But it is not nearly as wrong as the government getting good people killed pointlessly. And yet the story that gets covered is the one about Murdoch, liberal bugbear, and not the one about incompetent big government.

Governments are far from cunning. In that, they are like most everyone, except more so. The problem is not that people in government are particularly stupid, or more evil than normal. It is that they have more power than anyone else, and they think they know what to do with it.

The light bulb we need most isn’t a fluorescent. It’s the one that goes on when people realise that government can’t do it all, and shouldn’t try to.