Folly's corrective.

The following analysis applies to our energy problems. Congress and the American people have done all in their power to prevent the development of our own vast energy resources but, far from there being a healthy corrective, the Congressional breast beating is over supposed oil company rapacity and not 35 years of Congressional neglect, thumb sucking, and obstruction.

Every successful society has devised ways of separating incompetent or systematically unlucky people from the control of valuable resources. (That's why civilized nations provide children and legally incompetent individuals with guardians and trustees.) . . .

A society's economic success is increased if it has sure and quick ways to accomplish this separation, however painful to those who suffer losses. . . .

* * * *

Economist Peter Linneman nailed it more harshly in "Making Sense of the Current Capital Markets Disarray." He observed: "As for the idiots who lent (often without down payments or documents) to the idiots who bought speculative homes, they deserve to lose. . . ."

Our pressing danger is not that many folks will go broke, but rather that opportunistic politicians will bail them out and insulate them from past and future folly.

And with such dismal failure in the area of energy -- and others -- we continue to treat Congress as though it were a confabulation on the order of a second Philadelphia Constitutional Convention.

"House of Pain: Why Failure Is Important." By John Baden, TCS Daily, 10/26/07.