"If What You're Doing Hasn't Worked..."

"...do something else." Right? Right?

Then what are we to make of this?

The same day the government blamed high fuel prices for February's inflation spike, President Obama unveiled his latest idea: Waste billions more taxpayer dollars on the same failed "green" energy programs.

Pump prices have climbed 40 cents a gallon since the start of the year, topping $3.60 a gallon. Obama complains that every time gasoline prices spike, "politicians dust off their three-point plans for $2 gas, but nothing happens and then we go through the same cycle again."

But the truth is that Obama's the one who keeps dusting off the same tired old proposals — the very ones that have failed repeatedly in practice.

He was at it again on Friday, peddling an "Energy Security Trust" idea at Illinois' Argonne National Laboratory.

This time he wants to take $2 billion from oil and gas royalties and spend it on research into "cutting edge discoveries" like advanced batteries that will "shift our cars entirely off oil.

It's tempting to conclude that Obama is an idiot -- that he completely misconceives the relation between political pressure and scientific advance. (He definitely knows nothing whatsoever about the sciences, or science as a methodology.) But he's not quite that stupid. Neither is he surrounded entirely by idiots, the impression left by his premier lieutenants in the Senate notwithstanding.

Myself, I think it far more likely that Obama's objectives, and those of his inner circle, are such that what he's done has worked by their criteria. That is: he and they have wanted exactly what has transpired -- a strangling, wallet-wringing shortage of fossil fuels -- and are working to deepen it further still.

After all, what else could more reliably make us "more like Europe" -- ?

The maxim "If what you're doing doesn't work, do something else" isn't just a fine practical guideline for getting to where you want to go; it's also a reminder of how to evaluate the motives of those who seem to be ignoring it. A word to the wise.