This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, December 10th, 2007.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The debate surrounding fuel economy standards revolves almost exclusively around how much they should be raised

And not if the government ought to be regulating fuel economy at all

Kato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor comments on the state of the debate.

The conventional debate surrounding cafe standards is almost exclusively about how much

cafe standards ought to be raised and not whether or not we should have them at all.

Could you talk about the debate as it stands now?

Well, that's a fair characterization.

The underlying assumption is that government must do something

to reduce fuel consumption.

The question is why. What

evidence do we have that market actors are over-consuming fuel? Now for a lot of

people in Washington or in public policy the idea that you could defend current levels of fuel use

seems pretty bizarre and alien to them right but of course we know that zero fuel

use isn't what we're shooting for if it were we just banned the internal combustion

engine and mandate Flintstone cars.

But we don't do that.

Nobody's serious would do that because we know that there is a certain level of energy consumption

that's worthwhile.

Okay, what's the optimal level of energy consumption?

Well, according to

...