Via FT.com / UK / Politics & policy – Call for more intervention on energy:
An “interventionist” approach by the government will be needed if security of energy supply is to be guaranteed, a report commissioned by the prime minister will conclude on Wednesday.
Malcolm Wicks, the former energy minister appointed by Gordon Brown as his special representative for international energy issues, will say that “the time for market innocence is over” and that the government needs to do more to safeguard electricity and gas supplies.
…
“The era of heavy reliance on companies, competition and liberalisation must be re-assessed,” he said. “We must still rely on companies for exploration, delivery and supply but the state must become more active: interventionist, where necessary.”
Oh dear. At this point it is worth indicating more or less any part of my reading list, but consider, for example, this from Mises in Economic Freedom and Interventionism:
The Middle Way
Many politicians and authors believe that they could avoid the necessity of choosing between capitalism (laissez faire) and socialism (communism, planning). They recommend a third solution which, as they say, is as far from capitalism as it is from socialism. In imperial Germany this third system was called Sozialpolitik; in the United States it is known as the New Deal. Economists prefer the term used by the French, interventionism. The idea is that private ownership of the means of production should not be entirely abolished; but the government should “improve” and correct the operation of the market by interfering with the operations of the capitalists and entrepreneurs by means of orders and prohibitions, taxes, and subsidies.
But interventionism cannot work as a permanent system of society’s economic organization. The various measures recommended must necessarily bring about results which, from the point of view of their own advocates and the governments resorting to them, are more unsatisfactory than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter. If the government neither acquiesces in this outcome nor derives from it the conclusion that it is advisable to abstain from all such measures, it is forced to supplement its first steps by more and more interference until it has abolished private control of the means of production entirely and thus established socialism. The conduct of economic affairs, i.e. the determination of the purposes for which the factors of production should be employed, can ultimately be directed either by buying and abstention from buying on the part of consumers, or by government decrees. There is no middle way. Control is indivisible.
It is interventionism that produces all those evils for which a misguided public opinion indicts laissez-faire capitalism. As has been pointed out above, the endeavors to lower the rate of interest by means of credit expansion generate the recurrence of depression. Attempts to raise wage rates above the height they would attain in an unhampered market result in prolonged mass unemployment. “Soak-the-rich” taxation results in capital consumption. The joint outcome of all interventionist measures is general impoverishment. It is a misnomer to call the interventionist state the welfare state. What it ultimately achieves is not improving but lowering the common man’s welfare, his standard of living. The unprecedented economic development of the United States and the high standard of living of its population were achievements of the free enterprise system.
But nevertheless, here we go…
