Here then, is a practical guide to the Obama administration’s nonsensical solar policy: Washington gives tax breaks to Wall Street to fund LLCs [limited liability corporations] that buy solar panels from the Chinese to “help” the American solar industry, while the ITC [United States International Trade Commission] threatens to levy a tariff on those solar panels, which would raise the price of solar energy to U.S. homeowners. In short, Wall Street pockets the money and consumers get higher solar-energy prices.

We should stop reflexively indicting Wall Street “greed” and focus instead on Washington as the disruptive force in one market meltdown after another. Solyndra, the poster child of the Law of Misguided Subsidies, borders on irrelevancy compared to the full impact of bad economic policy.

Starting at about the 5:30 mark, the owner made some comments that motivated me to blag about it. Regarding high-fructose corn syrup vs. cane sugar:

Everything prepared in this country has corn syrup in it, and it’s totally unnecessary. The largest single crop in the world is cane sugar. It’s larger than corn and wheat put together. It takes three times less sugar to sweeten with than it does corn syrup. I mean, take a look around at the diabeetus. You’ll never get an allergy from sugar. You’re going to get an allergy because there’s a spore in corn syrup that cannot be refined out, and people have allergies to corn products. So why would you use corn as a sweetener?

Once a year, Coca-Cola makes a kosher Coke, just before Passover. The kosher one will be cane sugar, it’ll have a yellow cap, it’ll have a U in the upper left-hand corner with a circle around it, and the label will still say “corn syrup”; it won’t be changed. Try the two side by side and then tell me. The one with the cane sugar just goes “Pop!” and it explodes and the flavor just “Wham!”, it’s delicious. And the one with the corn syrup is like [blows raspberry with tongue].

Regarding big businesses vs. small businesses:

Big business loves big government. They just take the marketplace up, eliminate all the little guys, they run them out of business, and then they jack the prices up and control the market. But you look at the candy section, it’s Nestle’s [sic] Hershey’s, and Mars, or you look at the soda pop market, it’s Coke and Pepsi. My thought had always been that what I wanted to do was do business with other businesses my size. To help them become unique businesses. And that’s exactly what’s happening. And what’s really interesting about it is that out of all the things that we sell wholesale, one business a mile away from the other…what they’re selling is totally different. One restaurant we sell to, they love the floral sodas, and another place, they can’t give them away, but they’re doing the Red Ribbons. And I’m going, “Isn’t this interesting, that everybody has found their own level and their own niche, and they’ve done it on their own.” The important thing is to set yourself apart and provide your customers with something that nobody else has.

Regarding the California Refund Value (bottle recycling) law:

Who do you think passed the RV laws? … It wasn’t written for the consumer, and it certainly wasn’t written to keep this country “green”. It was written so Coke and Pepsi wouldn’t have to wash a bottle, and they wouldn’t have to make recyclable bottles [I think he means "reusable", as in refillable?], and they could transfer the cost to the consumer.

I called the recycling center when I got started, and I said, “Listen, I want to put a recycling center in [my store]. They [the customers] bring them back to me, and I’ll give them the money, and I’ll sell them some more sodas.” “Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t do that because you have a recycling center two blocks away.” I said, “Yeah, they don’t give the full price, and I want to give the full price to the customer to get them back to sell them some more!” And he says, “Well, if you did anything like that, you’d be in restraint of trade. And you could probably get sued by the state.”

If we were really caring about the environment, we would have reuse, not recycling.

Wish I could go there. I don’t even generally like soft drinks, but I’d love to try some of those unique flavors, and I’d love to give this man business.

But America’s eco-consciousness, it turns out, is fickle. As recession gripped the country, the consumer’s love affair with green products, from recycled toilet paper to organic foods to hybrid cars, faded like a bad infatuation. While farmers’ markets and Prius sales are humming along now, household product makers like Clorox just can’t seem to persuade mainstream customers to buy green again.

Sales of [Clorox] Green Works have fallen to about $60 million a year, and those of other similar products from major brands like Arm & Hammer, Windex, Palmolive, Hefty and Scrubbing Bubbles are sputtering. “Every consumer says, ‘I want to help the environment, I’m looking for eco-friendly products,’ ” said David Donnan, a partner in the consumer products practice at the consulting firm A. T. Kearney. “But if it’s one or two pennies higher in price, they’re not going to buy it. There is a discrepancy between what people say and what they do.”
[...]
Indeed, outside a Whole Foods Market in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, June Shellene, 60, said she did not buy green products as often as she did a few years ago.

“People are so freaked out by what is happening in the world,” she said, before loading her groceries into a Toyota Prius. Of green products, she said, “That’s something you buy and think about when things are going swimmingly.”

As with the arts and with charity, the strength of a society’s conviction to and ability to support environmental conscientiousness depends largely on its economic prosperity. Investment in the arts, in charity, and environmentally friendly products and practices requires prior profitability, just like investment in business projects requires prior profits, and that’s not just business profits. It requires that people have substantial leeway in their finances, meaning that after taking care of their necessities, paying their debts, and putting away money for saving (which I guess you could call personal profit), they still have money left over to indulge in “environmental” charity or to “invest” in their and their descendants’ environmental well-being.

There are plenty of good arguments to be made over whether the conduct of business in the first place causes undue environmental harm and whether people’s priorities are skewed because they put so many things before environmental conscientiousness. But those wouldn’t change the facts that people do make certain sacrifices when money is tight or the future looks less bright and that individual profitability is necessary for many people to invest in products or practices that cost them more in the present (monetarily) but (are believed to) provide more benefit in the long run (environmentally).

This reminds me of what Lew Rockwell once wrote: “Crush an economy and you crush civilization.”

This post does have a point. I really liked this post from a blag called The Whited Sepulchre. It rants against “locavores” who want to grow all their own food or buy it from their neighbors and, presumably by extension, to buy most everything in their lives locally or make it themselves, and yet still live something resembling a 20th- or 21st-century life.

Adbusters supports something called “Buy Nothing Day”

(It’s on November 26th. You’re supposed to purchase nothing. Don’t support your neighbors, your friends, or anyone but yourself. Don’t swap your own stuff for anyone else’s. Regardless of their intent, that’ll be the result.)
[...]
I was kind of enjoying their (ahem) unique point of view until I got to this quote. It’s from a guy named Bill Mollison, founder of something called the Permaculture Movement.

“We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.” – Bill Mollison

Oh for the love of God. Where to begin, where to begin.

We are more secure than we’ve ever been because we can’t look out our kitchen windows and see our entire food supply. If the view from your kitchen is your only food supply, and something happens to the area in front of the kitchen window, you’re in deep, deep shit. Google the word “famine” when time permits.

But if you have cheerfully taken part in the capitalist evils of globalization, you don’t have to worry as much. Iowa could waste its entire wheat crop by converting it to enthanol or some other useless boondoggle, and it will hurt me. But there’s always Nebraska. And Canada. And Russia. The Ukraine. As long as those places are growing wheat, and as long as someone in our government doesn’t shut down the supply of wheat (to protect American jobs), then I’ll probably be okay.

As long as some raving locavore doesn’t require me to live off what’s visible from my kitchen window, I’ll be okay.

But wait, Mr. Bill Mollison, founder of the Permaculture Movement, there’s more. I’ve got more for you. Where are you going to get your kitchen, the kitchen you’re going to look out from to view your wheat, your bananas, your strawberries, your lowfat decaf triple-skinny mocha, your carrots, lettuce, arugula, your mineral supplements and your chicken, fish, and occasional slice of roast beef? Where will this kitchen be produced? The kitchen itself. The wood, the brick, the sheetrock, the heat and air vents, the electrical wiring, the ducts, the oven, the stove, the sink and the water faucets? The refrigerator? Pots, pans, and George Foreman Grill? Does that have to come from your front yard?

Will you need to grow the trees for wood within view of the damn kitchen, just to feel safe? Are you going to set up a kiln to make bricks out of local mud? Mr. Mollison, have you ever looked at the different locations that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand blindly coordinates in a united effort to put ceramic tile on your countertops and your floors? Are you going to go off into a blind lefty panic if some of that stuff is manufactured by little dark people who don’t look like you, you racist son of a bitch?

Sorry about that. I can’t stand racism masquerading as compassionate save-the-earth do-goodism. Back to the topic at hand….

Let’s get to the window itself, that window Mollison is looking out of to see his garden and his wheat field and chickens and goats and fish tank and brick kiln and lumber forest and all the other things required to make Bill Mollison feel safe from the efforts of other people in strange places with funny names.

Bill, do you have any idea, any idea at all, what goes into making a damn window? Do you want all that going on in your front yard? Or is food the only thing that makes you break out in fantods if it’s handled by Mexicans? Is it ok if Mexicans or Canadians, or people from across the county line make your window?

“We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.” – Bill Mollison

Ok, we’re getting to the end of that insane sentence. “We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window….and see our friends working nearby.” Hell, is there going to be room for them if Bill Mollison requires all of this industry in his front yard? Or are they all going to be Bill Mollison’s employees?
What will the view have to look like from their kitchen windows if they have the same phobias and anxieties that afflict Bill Mollison?

Do you think we might all be better off if we allow everyone else in the world to compete for the honor and privilege of producing our food, kitchens and windows? And we can give them what we produce in return? And maybe, just maybe, they can one day have a kitchen of their own? With windows?

I think the fact that locavore morans like Bill Mollison don’t go buy a few acres of woods and live off the land with their moran hippie friends is strong evidence of my assertion that they want to live a 20th- or 21st-century lifestyle while still growing and making just about everything on their own. What is stopping them? Land is cheaper than housing. I bet there are enough of them to form a community of idiots who think that that life would be anything but toil, misery, and disease. Why not go practice what they preach? Because they enjoy the amenities of modern semi-capitalist life and the benefits the worldwide division of labor brings, that’s why. Maybe they want to remain active participants in the modern world so they can increase support for the State-backed enforcement of their locavore lunacy on captive victims. Anyone who thinks that a logical extension of locavorism would allow people to be much more than hunter-gatherers or, perhaps, Medieval serfs simply isn’t paying attention.

Three days after the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began on April 20, the Netherlands offered the U.S. government ships equipped to handle a major spill, one much larger than the BP spill that then appeared to be underway. “Our system can handle 400 cubic metres per hour,” Weird Koops, the chairman of Spill Response Group Holland, told Radio Netherlands Worldwide, giving each Dutch ship more cleanup capacity than all the ships that the U.S. was then employing in the Gulf to combat the spill.
[...]
In sharp contrast to Dutch preparedness before the fact and the Dutch instinct to dive into action once an emergency becomes apparent, witness the American reaction to the Dutch offer of help. The U.S. government responded with “Thanks but no thanks,” remarked Visser, despite BP’s desire to bring in the Dutch equipment and despite the no-lose nature of the Dutch offer –the Dutch government offered the use of its equipment at no charge. Even after the U.S. refused, the Dutch kept their vessels on standby, hoping the Americans would come round. By May 5, the U.S. had not come round. To the contrary, the U.S. had also turned down offers of help from 12 other governments, most of them with superior expertise and equipment –unlike the U.S., Europe has robust fleets of Oil Spill Response Vessels that sail circles around their make-shift U.S. counterparts.

Why does neither the U.S. government nor U.S. energy companies have on hand the cleanup technology available in Europe? Ironically, the superior European technology runs afoul of U.S. environmental rules. The voracious Dutch vessels, for example, continuously suck up vast quantities of oily water, extract most of the oil and then spit overboard vast quantities of nearly oil-free water. Nearly oil-free isn’t good enough for the U.S. regulators, who have a standard of 15 parts per million — if water isn’t at least 99.9985% pure, it may not be returned to the Gulf of Mexico.
[...]
The Americans, overwhelmed by the catastrophic consequences of the BP spill, finally relented and took the Dutch up on their offer — but only partly. Because the U.S. didn’t want Dutch ships working the Gulf, the U.S. airlifted the Dutch equipment to the Gulf and then retrofitted it to U.S. vessels. And rather than have experienced Dutch crews immediately operate the oil-skimming equipment, to appease labour unions the U.S. postponed the clean-up operation to allow U.S. crews to be trained.

A catastrophe that could have been averted is now playing out. With oil increasingly reaching the Gulf coast, the emergency construction of sand berns to minimize the damage is imperative. Again, the U.S. government priority is on U.S. jobs, with the Dutch asked to train American workers rather than to build the berns. According to Floris Van Hovell, a spokesman for the Dutch embassy in Washington, Dutch dredging ships could complete the berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the U.S. companies awarded the work.

This doesn’t prove the impossibility of governments doing something efficiently or effectively, because the Dutch government (and those 12 other governments whose help the idiots in the Obama regime refused) apparently have fairly fast and effective ways to mitigate an oil-spill catastrophe. And while it’s true, as Sheldon Richman reminds us, that environmental catastrophes are more accurately attributed to government failure than market failure, all the governmental failures involved in allowing the BP spill to happen and delaying the cleanup efforts do not prove that freedom can permit no catastrophes and no environmental damage. This sorry episode does prove, however, that Obama’s hopelessly incompetent and union-cozy minions are no better than any other regime’s bureaucrats and will bring us nothing resembling “hope” or “change”.

See? It’s happening! The green bubble is expanding! The Imperial Federal Government is diverting resources from one bubble and pushing them into another. The Obama regime thinks it can and should stimulate economic growth, and it thinks it can and should make the United States energy-independent. It is already in the process of printing money and taking money from people who earned it to give to people who will satisfy the regime’s political/environmental criteria. Additionally, a lot of people believe in this crusade and are fooled into thinking this politically driven allocation of resources represents real growth and wealth-creation. It does not. The savings do not exist to fund these new technological endeavors, nor do the fundamentals of profitability that will make these businesses worthwhile. This is inflation- and politics-driven “investment” in a sector that the free market does not deem worthy of such investment right now, and the market will have the last word.

Because of Barack Obama’s short-sighted and politically motivated inflation of the green bubble, we will see rising energy costs in the long run, stifling of potentially sound and viable energy technologies, more centralization and government control of energy resources, propping up of unprofitable companies, and more bankruptcy, unemployment, and government plans to “help” when this bubble bursts.

I know a quarter of a billion dollars is small beans compared to the twenty or so billion dollars the federal government recently gave—oh, sorry, “loaned”—to GM and Chrysler, but these purchases will only increase the calculated demand of Detroit vehicles (or, at least, the “green” ones), which will only push up their prices, just as the federal government and the Federal Reserve did with real estate earlier this decade.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save (CARS) bill, a.k.a. “cash for clunkers,” introduced in the House by Betty Sutton (D-OH). It would give a $3000 to $5000 tax credit to anyone who traded in an eight-year-old vehicle for a car that met certain fuel-efficiency standards. This U.S. News and World Report article gives some details about which American-made or American-assembled cars are expected to qualify for a tax credit under that program. (Note that they aren’t all Big Three products.) It hasn’t been signed into law, but I predict something like it will be.

Also, don’t forget that the federal government will throw more money at the Big Three; it is unrealistic to assume they can remain profitable for long, if at all; artificial stimulation of sales will constitute a small portion of Obama’s interference with their restructuring and refocusing. More money, more incentives, more subsidies, more edicts from on high.

It is far from over. This is only the beginning of the auto bubble. It will be inflated while the Big Three stagger on the inadequate legs provided by the government, and when the bubble bursts because demand isn’t high enough and Americans can’t afford to keep buying cars—de facto or de jure nationalization.

The government has blamed the shortage of water on drought and climate change. And while droughts may be created by a shortage of water, water shortages are created by an abundance of government rein.
[...]
Instead of economical pricing there is political pricing, where pressure groups and special interests are given “rights” to use water during droughts, and at subsidized pricing. Businesses are able to use water for irrigation in the name of boosting GDP, while individuals are asked (or forced) to consume less and less. Government as the friend of the little guy is simply a myth.

Of course one may argue that water is a scarce resource, and, therefore, naturally there may be shortages. Yet all resources are scarce; water is no different from wheat or copper in this respect. Shortages do not exist in a free market because of the price system, including the profit-and-loss mechanism.