RON HART: Slim Pickens in D.C.: Look beyond Beltway

“It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.” — Ronald Reagan

The fundamental reason our nation finds itself in so many messes is that we somehow think politicians have the answers. To get elected, politicians know that they cannot tell us the truth on the issues; so it is not entirely their fault since — to quote Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men — we “can’t handle the truth.”

So why do we turn to elected officials, the ones who by definition just lie to us the most to solve our problems?

As it relates to our energy mess, I suggest that we must look outside of Washington for answers, to business people who have proven, in the competitive and fair free-markets, that they know what they are doing.

Evidenced again by Obama’s success, politics is the only profession, often compared to prostitution, in which the woefully inexperienced can succeed. At some intuitive level, I know why a young and less experienced prostitute would succeed, but I am puzzled as to why we think a politician with such a lack of experience would.

When it comes to the energy crisis, we have to go with proven experts and not college professor eggheads who could not survive the brutal scrutiny of corporate America. They hide in their tenured .edu or .org world of the global warming religion and are often shielded from reality.

We need to look at billionaire T. Boone Pickens’ energy plan.

I realized long ago that I am lazy and technologically challenged. I have actually awakened my kids to show me how to use my TV remote. But I accept that I do not know anything about this, something Washington will not admit.

To paraphrase Ronald Reagan again, the problem with Washington politicians is that they refuse to acknowledge what they don’t know. The only thing government creates is more government.

Since so many politicians get elected vilifying — through their tried-and-true class envy ploy — business leaders around the country, it will be hard for them to yield their coveted “power” to those outside of Washington for any potential solution. Therefore, I hold out little hope that they will get the right advice on energy and other important matters.

The T. Boone Pickens plan makes sense to me for two fundamental, non-technical reasons. One, he has proven with his own money that he knows the energy sector. Having started out with nothing, T. Boone Pickens is now 80 and worth $ 3 billion. Now I know that makes him an enemy of the Democrats who will have none of that self-sufficient, don’t-need-government bravado, but it still means something to me.

Second, he and other business leaders are willing to put their own money into it. Remember that? Something foreign to Washington politicians, who have not paid for their own lunches in years, is their own money. It really makes you pay attention to details and results when it is your own money at risk — which, at the end of the day, is why capitalism trumps government-run programs every time.

Here is just a short comparison of what business has brought to our standard of living versus what government has. Business has brought us the PC, automobiles, affordable housing, the airplane, cell phones and Victoria’s Secret models. The government has given us FEMA, the DMV, the metric system, the wars on drugs, poverty and Iraq, The Bridge to Nowhere, the Y2K scare and a $9 trillion debt that we all owe.

We really need to look to private enterprise, which has a stake in a successful outcome, for answers. If T. Boone Pickens believes clean wind power can reduce our dependence on foreign oil from $700 billion a year to $400 billion, then we need to listen. He wants to build wind farms that he thinks can supply 20 percent of our power needs.

His plan is at www.PickensPlan.com.

My only suggestion to him would be to build the wind farms where a lot of hot wind blows consistently: the U.S. Capital Building in Washington, D.C.
 
Ron Hart is a Southern libertarian columnist who writes a weekly column about politics and life. He worked for Goldman Sachs and was appointed to The Tennessee Board of Regents by Lamar Alexander. His E-mail: RevRon10@aol.com