One clever political trick is to convince people you accept an appealing principle and then act in direct violation of that principle. That way, you gain the rhetorical benefit of espousing a principle while gaining the practical benefit of breaking it.
One of the holiest principles of American conservatives is the free market. It is advanced as a cure to economic ills and often described in ways that sound like it possesses magical powers. As might be imagined, thinkers have debated the merits of the free market of capitalism. Both Adam Smith and Marx praised it while others were rather critical of it, especially the forms that involve an essentially unregulated market.
Not surprisingly, one standard ritual for any Republican candidate is to praise the free market and promise to fight for the freedom of this market. But they seem too often engaged in an empty performance as the allegedly free market is not free. Rather than competitors competing on a level playing field without unfair advantages, the existing system consists of mechanisms of advantage that ensure competition is anything but free.
One of the great castles of advantage is occupied by fossil fuel industry. From this castle, propagandists for the industry rail against subsidies for the competing renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. To be fair and balanced, some conservative thinkers have argued for eliminating government support for all energy industries based on the free market principle. To also be fair and balanced, this is after the fossil fuel industry has enjoyed decades of subsidies and other state provided advantages. As an obvious example, the fossil fuel industry was built, in part, using oil extracted from public lands.
But one can consistently argue in favor of support for an industry while arguing against the support of another. If there were a relevant difference between the two industries that would require that the state support one industry to level the playing field, then the difference could be justified. To use an analogy, an athlete who is missing his legs should be allowed to use prosthetic legs so he can compete with other runners. However, giving mechanical enhancement (such as enhanced running shoes) to an able runner would be unfair. Likewise, an industry that needs governmental support to be able to fairly compete against other industries that were established and supported by state support could justly also receive state support. As such, if it could be shown that the oil and gas industry needed to retain its government support to compete against alternative energy, then that support could be justified. Obviously, the same would also apply to the alternative energy industries—if they need the support to compete on a level playing field against the fossil fuel industry and its state support, then they should receive such support.
This, of course, assumes such support is acceptable. After all, another professed conservative principle is that the state should not take the hard-earned money of taxpayers and give it to those who have not earned it. While this principle is usually embraced when the state is providing support to the disadvantaged, it is usually ignored when it comes to state support to the advantaged, such as tax breaks for the wealthy.
While it might be claimed that the oil and gas industry needs the state welfare it enjoys, this is an odd claim. After all, the top five companies in the oil industry have made about $1.3 trillion in 2021-2025 with the big US fossil fuel companies making about $600-800 billion in the past 10 years. As such, they hardly seem to need state support.
As noted above, some conservative thinkers have contended that the energy market should be made into a free market, although they usually just say that renewable energy sources should not receive subsidies while remaining silent about fossil fuel subsidies. However, doing this would not level the playing field. After all, the oil and gas industries have enjoyed state support since 1918. While the exact numbers can be disputed, it is estimated that the oil and gas industries received about $31 billion in state support each year. In contrast, the renewable energy industries received far less support, and this has been slashed and eliminated under the Trump regime. It is hilarious to hear conservatives attack solar and wind for not being viable without subsidies while they remain silent about how the fossil fuel industry was built on and is enriched by public support. But to be fair and balanced, some conservative pundits might be speaking in good faith ignorance about the history of state support for fossil fuel. But this is something they should look into if they are going to condemn state support for developing alternative energy.
Even if the state support of energy industries was eliminated, the playing field would not be level. After all, fossil fuel companies still have decades of state support and billions of dollars in advantages over the alternative energy companies.
To use an analogy, to call for a “level playing field” by condemning public support for alternative energy industries would be like calling for a “fair boat race” by forcing all competitors to row after some of them have been pulled for miles by powerboats and others are just a little bit out from the starting buoy. While everyone would now be rowing, it would hardly be a level playing field or a fair competition.
Obviously, the analogy does break down. In a boat race, the competitors could be returned to the start to begin the race anew. In the case of the energy industries, the oil companies cannot be “pushed” back to its starting point to give alternative energy companies a fair competition.
But it might be argued that while decades of state welfare for the energy industries was not a free-market system and gives them an unfair advantage, since nothing can be done about the past, the right thing to do is to restore the free market now and let the competition play out. This is analogous to how white supremacists like to argue against DEI efforts while ignoring centuries of established advantage.
Perhaps the alternative energy industries can still make a go of it, despite being at a tremendous disadvantage (like in the movies in which the underdog wins against all odds) and being denied the support that enabled the fossil fuel industries to become viable. Of course, this would be like making a competition “fair” by eliminating training for all athletes and then having the trained athletes compete against the untrained newcomers.
This analogy does suggest a potentially fair solution. To level the playing field, the alternative energy industry would need to receive support comparable to that enjoyed by the fossil fuel industries. This could be done by shifting the support from the fossil fuel industries to the alternative energy industries. Once the playing field has, in fact, been leveled in a few decades, then the support for the alternatives can be withdrawn and fair competition can finally begin. To go back to the boat analogy, the new competitors would be allowed to be pulled by a motorboat for the same amount of time and then they could row fairly against each other. In the case of the training analogy, the new athletes would receive comparable training to the old and then they could compete fairly on a level playing field. We would then have a free market, rather than a system that has given the fossil fuel industries an incredible advantage over the competition via past and current state welfare.
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