[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.…

“To turn the noun ‘resources’ into the verb ‘resourcing,’ to discard entirely the notion of a resource ‘glass’ that is somewhere between full and empty, requires one more analytic step—a step that Zimmermann failed to take.”

In 1972, just two years after the first Earth Day, a team of scholars from MIT published a 200-page book called The Limits to Growth. Using the emerging instrument of computer models, they created a worldwide stir by suggesting that science had now put numbers to a few self-evident truths. Non-renewable resources are fixed; the consumption of such resources must eventually end; any civilization based on such consumption must collapse. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis called the work “likely to be one of the most important documents of our age” (January 28, 1972).

Of course, the scholars acknowledged that they were dealing with variables.…

“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.