One of my favorite libertarians takes on one of my favorite examples of government overreach:
Though anti-populist in the extreme, the bulb ban in fact evinces none of the polished wonkery you'd expect from sophisticated technocrats. For starters, it's not clear what the point is. Why should the government try to make consumers use less electricity? There's no foreign policy reason. Electricity comes mostly from coal, natural gas and nuclear plants, all domestic sources. So presumably the reason has something to do with air pollution or carbon-dioxide emissions.
But banning light bulbs is one of the least efficient ways imaginable to attack those problems. A lamp using power from a clean source is treated the same as a lamp using power from a dirty source. A ban gives electricity producers no incentive to reduce emissions.
Nor does it allow households to make choices about how best to conserve electricity. A well-designed policy would allow different people to make different tradeoffs among different uses to produce the most happiness (“utility” in econ-speak) for a given amount of power. Maybe I want to burn a lot of incandescent bulbs but dry my clothes outdoors and keep the air conditioner off. Maybe I want to read by warm golden light instead of watching a giant plasma TV.
[. . .]
The bulb ban makes sense only one of two ways: either as an expression of cultural sanctimony, with a little technophilia thrown in for added glamour, or as a roundabout way to transfer wealth from the general public to the few businesses with the know-how to produce the light bulbs consumers don't really want to buy.
Or, of course, as both.
That's former Reason magazine editor Virginia Postrel, writing at bloomberg.com about the coming ban of 100-watt incandescent bulbs -- yes, it's really coming at the end of his year. She notes that she has a stash of the forbidden bulbs; I'm working on mine, too.
She also obeserves: "Of such deals are Tea Parties born." Yeah. And, by the way, why hasn't somebody introduced a reversal of the ban just to get all the statists on record now that so many people know about it and are so outraged?
