It's always a good idea for me to keep quiet unless I know how I'm going to respond to someone who's obviously more informed than me — but that dictum hasn't stopped the federal government from wading into automotive design, so why should I hold back. The House of Representatives has once more established itself as an authority on fuel efficiency, like medieval princes commanding their alchemists to convert iron into gold. It's hard to tell which is more galling: their ignorance, or their arrogance.

An energy bill approved by the House this week established new vehicle fuel-efficiency standards that require domestically built vehicles, including SUVs, to achieve on average 35 miles per gallon by 2020. This is a 40% increase in the so-called CAFE standard, or corporate average fuel economy, a regulatory approach that the government has been implementing since 1975.

Proponents of CAFE standards say that the oversight and direction they have established are responsible for the improvements in automotive fuel efficiency over the past three decades. It's impossible to know how true that is, but it defies reason to believe that no improvements would have resulted without the government input. The oil shortages of the 1970s, competition in the automotive industry, the costs and logistics of refining petroleum, changing state and federal environmental regulations — all these and more are part of the same pattern of fuel-efficiency improvement, and all are interrelated. To posit that the CAFE standards are apart and above all these is to insult thinking people.

But my frustration with the use of federal CAFE standards is more philosophical: I don't believe that legislators and other government officials have authority to guide technology. Beyond that, I think they are incapable of doing so competently.

Setting fuel-efficiency standards by the typical federal approach — lobbying, compromising, trading support — equates the work and accomplishments of experienced chemists, metallurgists, designers, and engineers with all the mundane tasks we assign to legislators. It derogates real achievements to the effect of baser persuasion.

It also assumes that automotive manufacturers cannot recognize the trends and developments in their own industry, and that car buyers cannot make choices for themselves.

Moreover, as long as we have CAFE standards we cannot have an intelligent debate, nor credible conclusions, about energy policies, nor the much wider issue of human impact on the global environmental.

And still, public officials who claim to be concerned about those matters are generally happy to continue using blunt instruments, like regulations, to adjust complex mechanisms, like automobiles. We should hope they never get the chance at the larger issues.