As the crisis mounted, William E. Simon, deputy secretary of the treasury in the Nixon administration, was appointed ?energy czar.? In that post, wrote Simon years later, ?I myself became an illustration of a free-market principle ? [namely] that government planning and regulation of the economy will ultimately lead to shortages, crises, and, if not reversed in time, some form of economic dictatorship…. Years of incoherent government intervention strangled energy production, domestic supplies diminished, artificial shortages emerged, a foreign embargo on oil precipitated a crisis, there was a violent public outcry for an instant solution, an energy ?dictatorship? was established to allocate the rare commodity ? and I, incredibly, became the ?dictator.?… There is nothing like becoming an economic planner oneself to learn what is desperately, stupidly wrong with such a system.??

The dictatorship Simon was appointed to head had been decades in the making. ?I was shocked to learn the degree to which our energy supplies were stagnating and struggling futilely against regulatory shackles,? he recalled. ?In the oil realm, demand was rising constantly; but domestic exploration and production were declining sharply, and from year to year we were growing more dependent on imports. All the elements of an impending energy catastrophe were visible.”

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