It seems there’s an extra dose of right-wing perspectives and conservative punditry on the New York Times op-ed page these days.
Yesterday it was a Heritage Foundation fellow lecturing the Democrats on proper and improper ways to mix religion and politics; today it was conservative legal scholar Charles Fried going to bat for Samuel Alito. But the capper, also today, was a strange essay by a pair of Cato Institute fellows arguing that the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve should be liquidated.

Now, this is something that Big Oil has always dreamed of. From a strict free-market economics perspective, there’s even something to be said for it. The reserve certainly holds the potential for distorting the oil market, and if you live in a dream-world in which that market exists outside of the international political system, with all its unpredictable non-economic dynamics, then you will find this a laudable goal. Certainly, in an ideal world — one in which, say, we had a government that understood how important it was to move us away from an oil economy — who’d want the public sector to waste its resources stockpiling oil?

But the piece, by Cato’s Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren, is full of fallacies. It seems that, on the one hand, the reserve is so insignificant in size that it can’t really help the nation in a pinch; yet, on the other hand, the reserve is so vast that it distorts the fundamental economics of the oil industry.

If we just do away with the government reserve, they tell us, private industry will do the job for us. “Economists agree that every barrel of oil we put in the public reserve displaces oil that might otherwise have gone into private inventories,” they tell us, then add: “How much displacement occurs is unclear, but there is little doubt that it’s significant.” But wait, they just said that unnamed “economists” agree that every barrel of oil in the public reserve displaces private inventory. That’s not “unclear” at all. Are they even reading their own words?

What the Cato guys completely miss is the first word in the reserve’s name: strategic. The reserve was created in 1975, and anyone who was of news-consuming age then (as I was, and as I must assume these “senior fellows” were as well) will know why. The reserve was created to help the U.S. avoid being blackmailed by foreign oil suppliers. It should have been accompanied by long-term conservation programs and other measures. But its primary rationale was national security, not good economics.

In the wake of 9/11 you’d think such concerns would be at the forefront of conservative thinkers’ arguments. But corporate free-marketry trumps national defense every time when the likes of Cato and Olin are paying your rent. So Taylor and Van Doren tell us (a) oil embargoes can’t hurt us any more because the market’s so globalized; (b) a real catastrophe, like al-Qaida taking over Saudi Arabia, might be “worrisome,” but the reserve wouldn’t be big enough to help us in such a case (this is really an argument for a bigger reserve, but never mind!); (c) we really shouldn’t worry because even anti-American regimes wouldn’t be stupid enough to bankrupt themselves by refusing to sell their oil.

These writers evidently believe that they have explained all possible futures, and yet every one of their scenarios imagines rational economic actors in every role. Before 9/11, you could write that off as amusing folly; today it constitutes tragic stupidity.

There must be an argument going through someone’s head at the Times that goes like this: Their newspaper is under assault from the right, most recently because of its exposure of the Bush administration’s illegal-wiretap power grab; so it must achieve the impression of “balance” by presenting these op-ed voices from the right. But really, to balance the Cato people you’d have to find some wild-eyed leftist arguing that, say, all oil companies should be nationalized tomorrow.

The greatest achievement of the right over the past decade — oh, setting aside the seizure of “all three branches of government” in the wake of a disputed election, the plundering of the Treasury, and the derailing of the war on al-Qaida — is this: By a wide swath of American opinion-makers, “balance” is understood to mean that the usual welter of mainstream American voices needs to be weighed down by a gang of beady-eyed ideologues on right-wing think-tank payrolls who can barely construct a sensible argument.

Over the weekend the New York Times business section published a slightly damp kiss for Intuit, the maker of Quicken. I wouldn’t have paid the piece much mind except for two things, one trivial and the other less so.

The photo for the piece showed Intuit execs who were, according to the caption, “working out problems in software.” But if you looked at the picture you actually saw two guys moving Post-it notes around a whiteboard. In previous posts I’ve noted the unexpected value that software developers have found in this low-tech information-management and project-planning tool; I even found my own use for them in outlining my book. More evidence: Stickies rule!

More importantly, I have to say that this paean to Quicken left out one huge problem with the product. I’ve used Quicken for something like 12 years now to manage my finances, carrying my data from an early Quicken for Windows over to Quicken for Mac (in the mid 90s) and then back the Windows in the late 90s. I’ve found that the Windows version has steadily, if slowly, improved since I finally settled on it. I tend to upgrade about once every four years. When I recently upgraded from the 2002 edition to the 2005 version I was thrilled to discover that the helpful but slow-moving wizards at Intuit had finally, after all these years, made it possible for you to merge transaction categories without requiring you to go back and manually reassign each transaction (something no sane person with years of records would ever undertake, making merges effectively impossible). Progress!

My Mac-based wife wants to get her Quicken into better shape and reorganize some of those barnacled categories, so we upgraded her version from 2003 to 2006. Intuit charges twice as much for the Mac version — and, for your extra dough, throws in only half the features. Now there’s a business model. Among other things, the category-merging feature that Windows users enjoy, and that was the whole point of our upgrade, is not available on the Mac. (Macintouch offers a host of other gripes from Mac hands.)

The whole experience has left me disgruntled and eager to explore the variety of Quicken alternatives on the Mac platform. And the Times piece, by praising the company’s revitalization of the Quicken product line without noting how poorly it treats its Mac customers, did a small disservice to this small but passionate and legendarily vocal population of users.