[Editor note: Tomorrow, economist Michael Giberson will critically assess government ‘price gouging’ laws.]

As an economist, whenever I hear the word “shortage” I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually “price control.”

– Thomas Sowell, “Electricity Shocks California,” January 11, 2001.

Like Bill Murray’s weatherman character in the movie Groundhog Day, the American public is obliged to relive certain bad ideas again and again (and again).

Like the movie the idea of price controls for energy keeps coming back, but will we, like Murray’s weatherman, reexamine what leads us to relive such unworkable concepts? The latest contestant in this march of folly was posted recently in the Atlantic Monthly’s business blog.

The idea–called a buffer fund–is to establish a target price for retail gasoline (diesel, too, though they seem to have forgotten that part of the fuel supply) and use taxes or subsidies to maintain the target price over time.…

As a political economist of a certain age, I naturally had a certain amount of Marxist writing inflicted on me, and found one particular thought of great insight. In “The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” Marx commented that Hegel noted that history repeats itself, but neglected to mention that the first time was tragedy, and the second time farce. A decade ago, I published “The Farce this Time” about fears of peak oil, but since then, we have experienced another energy ‘crisis’ which has remarkably resembled a commodity price cycle but which, many pundits observe, is ‘different’ this time.…

“We have proved the commercial profit of sun power in the tropics and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun.” –  Frank Shuman, quoted in “American Inventor Uses Egypt’s Sun for Power,” New York Times, July 2, 1916.

Solar electricity is not an infant industry. The following Wiki information (verbatim) on the inventor Frank Shuman tells an important part of the story.

• On August 20, 1897, Shuman invented a solar engine that worked by reflecting solar energy onto one-foot square boxes filled with ether, which has a lower boiling point than water, and containing black pipes on the inside, which in turn powered a toy steam engine. The tiny steam engine operated continuously for over two years on sunny days next to a pond at the Shuman house.

Aaron Nichols on LinkedIn provided a history of federal solar tax subsidies, beginning with Jimmy Carter. His point was to show that the numerous extensions (15 by my count) were bipartisan. My point, instead, is that on-grid solar is inherently noncompetitive against free market energies. [Note: AN blocked me]

Solar tax credits were not “created by the Inflation Reduction Act” or “invented by the Biden Administration,” Nichols begins. He continues:

The first solar energy incentives were created in 1978 by Jimmy Carter’s Administration. They’ve even enjoyed bipartisan support and been renewed by Republican administrations! Here’s a high-level history of solar tax credits:

1978: The Energy Tax Act of 1978 set the first federal solar ITC at 10% of project costs. ​Congress extended and modified this credit through the early 1980s, eventually making a 10% solar ITC permanent in 1992​.…