One of the things I hate most about discussions on today’s “energy crisis” is how so many people take inventions and men’s ideas for granted. For example, when the issue of today’s gas prices comes up, it won’t be long until someone says that “we” need to think of a better energy alternatives. Everybody has an opinion of what those alternatives *should* be — wind, solar, ethanol, etc — but that’s about as far as their thinking will go. When it comes to researching and implementing their ideas, they pass. Leave that for the guys who know more, right? All they know is, the idea is good, it hasn’t been put in place yet, so something’s wrong. And for some, the solution is for someone (like the government) is to just make the good idea finally happen.

While driving from home tonight, I heard one of the worst examples of this on the radio. And no surprise, it was from John McCain. Today he gave a speech detailing how he thinks we can get through this crisis. His solution: Make the smart people figure it out! According to McCain:

Higher end auto companies like BMW, Porsche, and Mercedes employ some of the best engineering talent in the world. But that talent isn’t put to the job of fuel efficiency, when the penalties are too small to encourage innovation.

Here he’s pushing the idea that we have a lot of smart people who could solve our energy problems… if they were just put on that task. They’re not, though, so McCain continued:

But I am confident they can do more, and do it faster, in the interest of our energy security. And if I am elected president, they will. Whether it takes a meeting with automakers during my first month in office, or my signature on an act of Congress, we will meet the goal of a swift conversion of American vehicles away from oil.

In other words, the smart people could solve our problems but they’re not, so I’m going to make them do it.

The problem with this isn’t just that McCain wants to use government force to make people behave a certain way, which is already bad enough. He also thinks that “we,” as people that happen to live in the same country as so many inventors, somehow played a part in those inventions. And by taking action against the people that make the things that we need and enjoy, “we” will solve our problems. To reinforce this idea, he later says (emphasis mine):

Think of all the highest scientific endeavors of our age — the invention of the silicon chip, the creation of the Internet, the mapping of the human genome. In so many cases, you can draw a straight line back to American inventors, and often to the foresighted aid of the United States government.

So according to McCain, the inventions he mentions was not just a product of the inventor; they were also a product of us either providing aid or “incentive” (like a signature on an act from Congress) for their work. Want more inventions? Vote McCain, 2008!

Politicians don’t produce anything, individuals do. An individual thinks of the idea, an individual chooses to act on that idea, and the an individual does the work to make the product. If we want to foster that process, the best thing we can do is stay out of their way. And to take it one step further, if we want to be free to live our own lives we must respect those inventors by staying out of their rights. And to take it even one more step further, if we really admire inventors and producers for what they offer, we won’t feel resentment toward them.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people really don’t admire or respect the people that bring about the things we enjoy. They want the results of their work, but they don’t think they should have to meet their “arbitrary” demands. I think Ayn Rand put it very well in Atlas Shrugged (emphasis mine):

If you want to know what you lost when I quit and when my strikers deserted your world—stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be able to discover—ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent on performing the actions you learned from others—ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube—then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslave them.