WRONG 'LESSON' [sic]. That's just the idiocy we see now (along with other, starry-eyed, smaller-minded sentiment) behind “alternative energy” mandates, not to mention unrealistically high fuel efficiency requirements for automobiles. Government doesn't deserve “credit” for “spurring innovation.” The best it can hope to do is to be the convenient scapegoat (with a wink and a nudge by all concerned) when all know that there are cost-effective safety measures that can be added to automobiles, for example, but it doesn't pay any producer to be the first to introduce them, making their products more expensive and losing sales.

A general, broad, ambitious inference from that extended to encompass all kinds of nice lib dreams is invalid. Not to mention often harmful.

Even nowadays, we aren't rushing to buy curly compact fluorescent light bulbs. Nobody has any right to compel me to buy them, incidentally.

And if we had an advance where it really counts outside the home, in street lighting, the result is not necessarily going to be limited (stupidly and sickly, even) to retention of existing lighting levels outdoors with substantial reduction in power consumption. A real improvement would make it feasible to greatly increase the amount of illumination outdoors for the same costs we pay today. That direction is where real progress turns, just to name one example.