Elizabeth Dole and Kay Hagan continue to go round and round on energy policy, with neither one making a whole lot of sense. However, Libertarian Chris Cole got a fair amount of print:

“The price mechanism of the free market is an amazing thing,” Cole said. “Without deliberate attention by anyone, it devotes the most attention and resources to the most efficient source of energy possible.”

Cole’s said the federal government should neither encourage certain types of energy production through tax breaks nor discourage energy production through regulation.

“The less the government is involved, the more efficient (the market) would be,” he said. Cole offers equal measures of criticism to Hagan and Dole, and the Republican and Democrat do agree on some basic issues.

What a concept. Prevailing opinion is that government isn’t doing enough regarding energy policy, as opposed to doing too much as it is.

Update: Via Locker Room, Charles Krauthammer weighs in:

drilling requires no government program, no newly created bureaucracy, no pie-in-the-sky technologies that no one has yet invented. It requires only one thing, only one act. Lift the moratorium. Private industry will do the rest. And far from draining the treasury, it will replenish it with direct taxes, and with the indirect taxes from the thousands of non-subsidized new jobs created.”

Krauthammer also noted on Fox last week that any proposal to alter the Strategic Petroleum Reserve should certainly be accompanied by support for drilling, lest the country’s national security be jeopardized.