The following editorial has been produced by the Ayn Rand Institute's MediaLink department. Of course not. Rather, they urge Americans to do with less, to lower their living standards, to live in a self-denying manner.
Conservation is essentially the moral code of self-sacrifice applied to current energy problems.
President Bush agrees with this approach, ordering energy conservation at federal offices in California and endorsing a range of energy saving tips for homes, work sites and industrial plants. But in fact, Bush and Cheney and Gov. Davis should repudiate conservation as a policy because it is both impractical and immoral. It is immoral because conservation repudiates the American Dream. The United States became great because it embodied a moral code of rational self-interest, the principle that men should be left free to create abundance in pursuit of their own happiness. The country grew to immense prosperity because it rejected the Dark Ages code of self-sacrifice and deprivation.