Vernon Ehlers: “If we impose a cap on the price of energy, we are simply encouraging people to buy more energy and waste it because the…”

“If we impose a cap on the price of energy, we are simply encouraging people to buy more energy and waste it because the price is so low they can afford to waste it. That furthermore discourages the production of more energy because if the price is capped, a company cannot make money producing more energy. So price caps are doubly a bad idea. They discourage production and encourage waste and make the problem worse. I remember when my wife and I first married and we lived in apartments, and then we moved into an unfurnished house and had to buy a refrigerator. We shopped around and looked at many models and narrowed it down to two different models, one for $250 and one which cost $500. Remember this was roughly 1962. So then I did an analysis of the energy use of the two refrigerators, and I said we have to buy the $500 one. The difference was efficiency of operation.”