This tendency to reduce all beliefs and values to wants and preferences also seriously distorts the nature of the human being. This distortion treats people at all times as consumers. People, at least in so far as the economist or policy maker in concerned, are simply the locations of a given collection of wants. People care only about satisfying their personal wants, and the role of the economist or public official is to determine how to maximally attain this end and not to judge its worthiness. A view such as this was no doubt involved when Vice President Cheney introduced the administration's energy plan by acknowledging that while conversation might be an admirable personal virtue, it was an insufficient basis for sound public policy.