Re: The Great Ethanol Scam

"Ranieri" <nah> writes:

"Jason Earl" <jearl@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

Besides, ADM isn't really to blame for our current farm subsidies,
ADM's involvement is merely part of the market reaction to a mistake
made quite a while ago. The roots of our corn subsidies lie in the
government trying to increase production for sale to the Soviet Union
in the 70s. You can blame "big business" if you want, but that
doesn't make it ADM's fault.


Actually the ethanol subsidies are a different issue than the farm
subsidies to which we've grown so accustomed. If you have some time
and want to get pissed off, here's a report from the Cato Institute.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-241.html

Yeah, I realize that ethanol is a bit of a special case. I actually
worked for a while for an ethanol producer :). The company actually
made french fries, but there is a lot of high starch content waste in
making french fries, and the government was basically throwing money
at this sector. Sure, making ethanol wasn't profitable without the
subsidies, and it was unlikely to ever become profitable, but it was
an issue that makes lots of numbskulls feel like they are doing
something for the environment, or for reducing our reliance on foreign
oil, or whatever. So apparently the politicos think that its money
well spent.

For the most part, however, it's basically the same old stupidity. A
whole group of people with little grasp of economics basically have
decided that burning gasoline is evil. The problem is that politics
is a horrible way to solve this sort of problem. Politicians will
basically never solve a problem if they can get away with merely
appearing to be working on a problem :).

The market has all sorts of incentives to develop alternatives to
gasoline, but instead of simply letting the eggheads look at
alternatives that are likely to provide competitive substitutes the
government is pushing money into those areas that it *wishes* would
work. Subsidies are stupid. Heck, if the government really wants to
change the fuel we use the way to do so would be to raise taxes on
gasoline until the market could come up with alternatives that could
compete at the new higher price.

Jason
.

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