Pro-free market candidates don’t promise price targets on gasoline

If you needed evidence that Michele Bachmann is just another opportunistic demagogue — and not a very bright one at that — you need look no further than her promise to bring gasoline prices down to $2 a gallon.

There are two ways for the price of gasoline to fall that far right now. One would be if the economy plummeted further and demand fell dramatically. The other is if the government artificially imposed price controls. Let’s be very clear about this. A president cannot control gasoline prices — unless that president is going to use coercion.

Bachmann claims she will achieve her populist miracle by opening up new areas to drilling. I think that’s a good idea, but the amount of oil that can be taken from those areas is a drop in the bucket compared to world demand and U.S. demand. It’s not enough to shave prices at all, much less as much as she’s claiming.

There are two possibilities.

First, Michele Bachmann might be stupid enough to believe what she’s saying. She might be so ideologically sold on the idea that drilling will solve all of the problems that she’s unwilling to look at the actual numbers and see that it won’t.

Second, she might know she’s lying and she simply wants ignorant people to vote for her because they want the impossible.

Personally, I suspect it’s the second, with a touch of denial rolled in because of desperate devotion to something for ideological reasons. Even if you still believe in the majoritarian system, this is insanity. It’s the same kind of demagoguery that’s gotten us to the point where we are. It’s the same kind of insanity that keeps leading politicians to promise outrageous things.

They promise things to you that aren’t possible — even if they know in their hearts that they can’t deliver — for one simple reason. They want to win. If you’re not smart enough to figure that out for yourself and pay attention to which ones are making promises that can’t be kept (which is almost all of them), you deserve whatever you get.