There is no substitute for abundance. A country that produces more food and steel and aircraft and microprocessors is going to be, ceteris paribus, better off than one that produces less. A country with a larger share of its population working is going to produce more than a country with a smaller share of its population working, as has been the unhappy trend in the United States during the presidency of Barack Obama. All the blue-ribbon panels and price-control trickery that the progressive hive-mind can dream up will do little or nothing for the quality and affordability of health care compared with increasing the supply of doctors, hospitals and clinics, pharmaceutical manufacturers, makers of medical devices, and the like. “Less is more” might work in the context of the aesthetic of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or the poetry of Robert Browning, but in the economy of real things, more is more. And the new Republican majority in Congress is well positioned to implement a more-is-more philosophy in a critical economic sector: energy.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of energy in the U.S. economy: The energy market affects almost every company and every industry, from AAL to AAPL, and we have an abundant supply of it, from oil and gas to coal and other sources. Getting government out of the way and allowing those industries to flourish even more fully than they have is a project that is, unlike some of the more ambitious items on the conservative wish list, well within reach, even with President Obama’s veto pen potentially standing between bill and law.
A little history for context. The immediate postwar U.S. economy was in many ways an atypical and unsustainable situation, given that the country’s commanding position in manufacturing — some 60 percent of the world’s industrial output — was predicated in part on the fact that the rest of the world was trying to rebuild its factories after the ruinous war. That wasn’t going to last forever, but manufacturing wasn’t the whole story, either.