Green Energy Proving Venture Capitalists are Smarter Than Government Bureaucrats.
President Barack Obama, with Assembly Manager Teri Quigley, drives a new Chevy Volt, during his tour of the General Motors Auto Plant in Hamtramck, Mich., July 30, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Robert Bradley Jr. in an article titled Electric Car Verdict: Another Government Subsidized Bust, at masterresource.org writes, “When government tries to pick losers and winners, it typically picks losers. Why? Because in the free market consumers pick winners to leave the losers to Government.”
Another reason Government can’t out perform the free market is because it doesn’t have a tenth of the knowledge that exists in the free market. Also, in the market, the individual who risks knows he takes the loss if he is wrong. When the Government picks a loser it tries to keep it propped up by subsidizing it with tax dollars. The wasting of scarce resources is kept at a minimal level in the market, because the activity stops and resources are liquidated and put toward a more productive use according to consumers desires. Government continues wasting scarce resources long after the activity had proven unproductive.
Government has tried to pick electric cars, wind energy, solar energy, and ethanol to name a few. They have subsidized all of these industries and the story is the same, they are failing even with the subsidies. We know the story of Solyndra (read about solar here), wind is laying off tens of thousands of workers because the subsidies are running out (read about wind here), corn ethanol is literally eating your seed corn (read about ethanol here), and electric ears were discussed above. At what point do we quit putting our faith in all-knowing Government, when time and time again they fail to produce their hoped for results, and rediscover the fact that free market enterprise is the dynamic process that has lifted billions of people out of poverty and is the only process that can keep us from falling back into it.
MasterResource.org is a great site to learn about the energy market.
Explore posts in the same categories: Econ. 101, Government and PoliticsTags: Electric Cars, Ethanol, Solyndra, Subsidies, Wind
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AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT 
October 1, 2012 at 12:31 am
Thank you for reading MasterResource and sharing it with your audience.
– Rob Bradley