Watch out, because here comes big government on a big mission to grab your wallet at gas pumps, empty it to no avail except to make everyone’s life worse, and then applaud itself for saving the world.
All this is revealed, among other places, in a New York Times front-page story that tries terribly hard to make Wall Street look like the miscreant, even though the story’s own detailed evidence makes the government’s root culpability perfectly clear. The story is about ethanol, but if you look beyond the words, it is about government of, by and for special interests, pretensions of the powerful, and how the rest of us pay. That means you and me, brother, you and me, sister.
But let’s get back to ethanol.
A corn product you can mix with gasoline, it was supposedly going to help make us energy independent as it also helped save us from global warming. From that rationale grew subsidies, tariffs and mandates while a study showed anything meaningful would require ruination of great gobs of land.
Even Al Gore, whose concern about global warming knows few hand-wringing equals, arrived at a pooh-poohing disregard for ethanol, and the ultraliberal columnist Paul Krugman of the Times once conceded it was a factor in rising food prices that had led to riots in some poor countries.