Ron Paul talks energy at Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition - video, transcript

Ron Paul fielded two questions on energy policy at the October 22, 2011 Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition Presidential Forum in Des Moines, Iowa. The event was sponsored by the Iowa Energy Forum, an arm of the American Petroleum Institute sponsored America's Energy Forum.

Question #1: What is your comprehensive plan to shape your future administration’s energy policy, and please include how this vision differs from approach of the current administration.

Ron Paul: Well, my plan is we need to produce energy the same way we produce cell phones. We need to get the government out of the way. We need a lot of competition. And we need to deregulate.

I’ve been in Washington off and on for a good many years. I’ve met a lot of bureaucrats and I’ve met a lot of politicians. They don’t know anything about energy. Why should they make the plan? They have a responsibility for providing the right environment, and that is the market environment.

The point that I’m making about the cell phones. The markets, in spite of all our problems, the markets still deliver cell phones to us. Can you imagine if we gave a contract to the Department of Homeland Security to provide cell phones and they provided one company and they set the prices? It would cost a lot of money and the phones wouldn’t work.

So we don’t need a policy other than the policy of the marketplace. We need to understand property rights. We need to understand contract rights. We need to understand competition. But today – and of course the Obama administration doesn’t understand any of this, so I reject everything that they do because they interject, like putting on moratoriums and supporting regulations.

But the sooner you can get to the concepts of property rights and contracts – all of Texas energy was developed without government. When we came into the Union, we essentially had no government property. But out in the West now, where some of this oil shale and other things are, so much of it is on government owned land. We need to get this land in ownership of private property owners and then we need to get the government out of the way.

Question #2: If you could reverse one energy related policy decision from the last three years, what would it be and what would you have done differently.

Well, there isn’t one policy because the overall policy of interference, the policy that this administration has followed is intervention. He follows a whole philosophy of economic intervention, so you have to reverse the policy of Keynesian economic intervention and re-instill in the American people the concept and the understanding of how real free markets work and how money works.

So that is what needs to happen, but all the policies that result from intervention disturb the markets. And you can’t do that unless you have a lot of other things. In order to reverse that you have to deregulate across the board. You have to change the tax code. You have to have the sound money system. You have to have better trade policies. And all of these things would generate the type of energy that we need. 

Video of Ron Paul's remarks at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition (energy segment starts at 15:20):