Pat Dollard | Young Americans

(IBD)

Congress: Unwilling to allow any expansion of drilling in American territory, Democrats are instead focused on changing American lifestyles. It’s consistent with the goals of the party that wants to run everyone’s lives.

Sponsored in the House by Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer and co-sponsored by four other Democrats and one Republican,Connecticut’s Chris Shays, the Transportation and Housing Options for Gas Price Relief Act of 2008 is, like much of the nonsense dreamed up in Washington, misnamed.

It should be called the Central Planning and Potomac Manipulation Act of 2008.

Rather than dealing with the supply side by increasing domestic production of carbon-based fuels, the political left wants to use taxpayers’ money to meddle with the demand side.

But the public isn’t clamoring for a carbon-free, “sustainable” future. Voters want policymakers to solve today’s energy problems now through sensible market solutions.

Should this Gas Relief Act become law, it would authorize the federal apparatus to expand public transportation; provide incentives for workers to use mass transit, bicycles, carpools or their feet to get to their jobs; work locally to create walkable and “bikeable” communities; educate Americans so they can make the “right” transportation and housing choices; and establish “location efficient mortgages” to make it more affordable to own homes near public transit.

With the advent of $4 gasoline, Democrats began sensing an opportunity to drive the country closer to their vision of utopia.

These are the people — or in some cases representatives of people — who want $8 a gallon gasoline so we’ll get out of our cars, turn off our air conditioners, dim our lights, strangle our commerce and impose a global asceticism in a post-capitalism wilderness.

Of course, this spartan existence would be for the masses only. The elites will still be able to live their lives of opulence, just as high-ranking communists in the Soviet Union, the nomenklatura, had private Chaika lanes in Moscow streets that members of the working class — Marx’s proletariat — were forbidden to drive on.

Al Gore provided a clear example Thursday of how such privileges are granted to the privileged by the privileged.

Gore, who wants to push Americans onto bikes and buses, used a convoy of two Lincoln Town Cars and one SUV to arrive for and then leave from his carbon-free speech at Constitution Hall in Washington.

As an American, Gore has the right to be a hypocrite. Neither he nor our elected officials, though, have the right to compel a free people to live the lives the Amerikan nomenklatura has selected for them. Washington’s role is to serve the people, not the other way around.