Unleash the economy!

So, about the President's State of the Union address last night. You should check the various news and pundits sites for what people are saying, but I have one comment.

Bush proposed a 22% increase in the budget of the United States Department of Energy. Supposedly this extra money will help develop nuclear, wind, and solar power to lessen our "addiction" (Bush's term) to foreign oil over the next nineteen years. First of all there are all the normal public choice economics type arguments to be made about this; such as I would expect that every actual attempt to follow this plan would be met with opposition by somebody, nineteen years is a long time for Americans to maintain a vision or plan, and the organizations using this money will be primarily focused on USING this money instead of providing results due to the distant time-horizon. I mean, in twenty years, who's going to remember that Bush proposed this initiative last night?

If the President really wants to lessen dependence on foreign oil, I say unleash the market. There is a vast amount of untapped information in existence, buried in the heads of a geologist here, a chemist there, or an engineer over the next mountain. This knowledge would never be fully utilized in a government program, but given the opportunity to make money from what they know...people with valuable information come out of the woodwork and the market gets to sort out whose ideas are really worthwhile.

How would the market be unleashed? Relaxing/removing various drilling and exploration restrictions. Reducing the time and money it takes to get a new petroleum refinery through inspections and regulatory red-tape (it's currently something like ten years and over two BILLION dollars). Make it more difficult for communities or states to block construction and operation of wind generating facilities and nuclear plants. Alternately, make it easier for the prospective owners to strike a deal with the affected landowners, and only with affected landowners. Not only should it be easier to get into or expand in the energy business, it should be brutally easy to get out of energy, ie go out of business without the government trying to prop you up.

If energy independence is truly top of the President's to-do list, I believe the market holds far more promise than does increasing government spending.