This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 5th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

Al Gore and T Boone Pickens both want to change how you get your energy to run your car heat your home refrigerate your food.

John McCain for his part wants to offer up hundreds of millions of dollars to spur development of new battery technology.

Don Boudreau, chairman of the George Mason University Economics Department,

and the Cato Institute adjunct scholar says that in all of these plans there lurks that

Hayekian fatal conceit.

Thomas Soul said something once that I repeat a lot,

reality is not optional.

We have to deal with it. And hope, although it's important for

inspiring human beings, hope itself is not much of a resource. And the way our

standard of living has improved over the generations is the way it will continue,

if it's going to improve, it's the way it will continue to improve the next few generations.

And that is incrementally with free and creative people, each taking small steps in their own ways,

sometimes cooperatively, sometimes competitively, not really knowing what the results are going to be and out of this mass of human decisions connected and tied by market forces to each other, they will emerge gradual improvement in our standard of living on all fronts, communications, energy.

The Gore type plan reminds me of the great leap forward in China.

It sounds good and we can marshal all sorts of glorious language to justify it, but glorious language and mere hopes of a politician,

no matter how sincere, are not sufficient to make those dreams a reality.

I don't know of any major change in human well-being

that was planned out in any specific ways and planned out any specific timeline.

You know, it's a form of ridicule now in the West to talk about the five-year plan to the Soviet Union.

They were always ridiculous, they always failed.

They led to more misery than they did to benefit.

...