Winds of Change

This is what happens when the government meddles with the free market - supply, demand, production costs, and consumer prices are all unnaturally affected, resulting in waste.  The government can't force demand for particular products or services to increase, or make cost-effective those things the market is not able to do on its own.  But this doesn't stop our omniscient government from trying.

In its grand strategy of forcing green energy to take over the marketplace, rescuing the globe from human destruction, the government subsidizes various companies and "invests" in green energy (government never really invests in anything - it just spends money).  Of course, just because the government says that wind power, for example, should be a cost-effective energy option for companies and consumers alike doesn't make it so.  And when the government's meddling fails, it fails big.

Taxpayers and consumers are now going to have to shoulder the burden of government's misguided market-steering in America's Pacific Northwest.  Wind farms there, built with government subsidies and maintained with tax credits, are now being paid to shut down.  The wind energy companies, which exist not on their own merits but only via government subsidies, are going to be compensated for lost revenues as well, in one instance to the tune of $50 million.  Left to its own devices, the free market would never have supported these wind companies, and resources would not have been diverted from useful means to wasteful ones.  Until it comes into its own as a cost-effective and efficient item for companies and consumers, wind power will have no valid place in the market.  By faking it, the government actually makes things worse, not better.

It's Solyndra all over again.  In fact, there seems to be a never-ending string of Solyndras - companies pegged by the government as the next big thing, surviving on handouts and pumping out products and services that have no real demand behind them.  And without real demand, the supply is the culmination of wasted resources.  It's paying a company to produce pink widgets, not because anyone needs or wants pink widgets, but because the government wishes people wanted pink widgets, because pink widgets, the government has determined, will cure our economic ailments once everyone owns one.  So the government takes money from us and redistributes it to a startup pink widget company to put out tons of unwanted pink widgets, with the idea that, although no one wants or needs them, the pink widgets will catch on because people will realize that their individual sacrifice will lead to a grand utopia where all our problems fade away from the wondrous economic healing power of the pink widgets.

It's why the Chevy Volt is a disaster - Chevy is only cranking them out because the government is paying them to.  But no one actually wants a Volt because they are expensive and take 10 hours to charge up a battery that will only last for 20 miles of driving, whereupon it switches to gasoline like every other ordinary car.  In essence, it's a terribly inconvenient gasoline powered car that instead of simply filling the tank, one must invest additional time, effort, and expense to charge a battery that causes more problems than it solves.  All in the name of making the world a better place to live - according to the government.

The government's job is to merely protect our rights in a free market, not to create a fake market.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/03/07/wind-power-companies-paid-to-not-produce/?test=latestnews?test=latestnews