If you want to know what I was blathering about here, consider President Carter’s hallucinatory speech:

Tonight I want to have an unpleasant talk with you about a problem unprecedented in our history. With the exception of preventing war, this is the greatest challenge our country will face during our lifetimes. The energy crisis has not yet overwhelmed us, but it will if we do not act quickly.

It is a problem we will not solve in the next few years, and it is likely to get progressively worse through the rest of this century.

We must not be selfish or timid if we hope to have a decent world for our children and grandchildren.

We simply must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources. By acting now, we can control our future instead of letting the future control us.

Garbage. The entire nation, and even the world, was going through massive suffering because politicians could not leave people free to make energy choices or trust the market to correct the problem. Yet did Carter face widespread opposition from the press because he was acting like a control-freak and an evangelist, who was causing exactly the sort of “bread line” ills for the nation as Breshnev was doing for the USSR at the time?

No. The opposition was saved for Reagan. Reagan let people buy and sell and and get motivated by high prices to find alternative sources of oil from OPEC and thus drive the prices back down. No preaching necessary. No saviors in Washington needed. No doomsday scenario. And where is the glory of that path?

Yet in a matter of just a few years all the shortages and economic problems were just a memory.

Sorry for ranting. Just feeling a little bit reactionary right now….