Insanity isn’t just inheritable. Judging from what’s happening with America’s energy policy, it’s clearly communicable:

Soon, if the Obama administration has its way, we’ll move seamlessly from the diminished light bulb to the energy-efficient vacuum that will take 90 minutes to clean a carpet that now takes five, and an energy-efficient hair-dryer that will require an hour to dry a head of hair now dried in three — in order to “put more dollars in your pocket” as Secretary [of Energy Steven] Chu likes to say. — Belladonna Rogers, “The End of the Light Bulb As We Know It”, PJ Media, November 13, 2011

It’s certain “more dollars” are going into somebody’s pocket. Last July the House of Representatives tried to repeal the law that, among many other stupid things, makes the sale of hundred-watt incandescent light bulbs illegal as of January 1st; but it was special interests with deeper pockets than the average American citizen has that carried the day:

The most tragic part of this tale is that it didn’t have to come to this. No sooner had the Republican Congress announced it would vote to repeal the 2007 law this past July, than the light bulb lobby swooped in to protect the manufacturers’ interests — not, of course, those of the incandescent bulb-loving public.

[The] manufacturers … had begun producing the new bulbs, and feared the rollback of the standards would undermine their investments in developing energy-efficient bulbs. Bulb-maker Philips began an aggressive lobbying campaign, meeting with lawmakers and staffers on Capitol Hill, urging them not to roll back the light bulb law.

The result:

The Senate voted against the repeal, and Obama would have vetoed a repeal, but the manufacturers’ heated lobbying was not in the public interest — of course.

There’s a greater negative impact stemming from this idiotic law, however, than simply an economic one:

. . . part of the meaning of freedom is freedom of choice. Every green American who wants to read by mercury-ignited compact fluorescent bulbs is free to do so. Every environmentally-motivated citizen who desires energy-efficient halogen bulbs should enjoy that choice, too. But many of us desire incandescent bulbs, just the way Thomas A. Edison invented them.

Rogers’s full article is here.