Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s demand for a waiver to the ethanol mandate is welcome news. But he fails to mention his personal responsibility for the RFS mandate in the first place.
The economy relies on distributed and dynamic information. This information is unavailable to politicians in faraway capitals. Yet, central planners believe they know what is good for us. Friedrich Hayek called it “the fatal conceit.”
Created by the Goodlatte-supported 2005 Energy Bill, the RFS Mandate was intended to reduce dependence on overseas oil and make life better for us. Seven years later, Americans now burn nearly 40% of our corn crop in our engines. Gas prices are high and food prices have skyrocketed. The program is funded, as most of our federal spending, by more borrowing from China.
We don’t know if Goodlatte understands the bureaucrat’s disease of “fatal conceit,” but it is abundantly clear that he suffers from it.
Karen Kwiatkowski resides in Mount Jackson.
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