Idea 9: Eliminate Corporate Welfare
It has been a while since I have thrown an idea out there so I thought I would mention another one today. That would be to eliminate corporate welfare
In a speech at the G20 summit Obama applauded efforts to end subsides for fossil fuels saying “Third, we agreed to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels”. That sounds like a great idea…a conservative one in fact. Unfortunately Obama ended the sentence by saying “so that we can transition to a 21st century energy economy” meaning that these subsides would be transferred to those that he and his friends in Congress deem worthy. He has already put his plan into full force giving out billions and billions of dollars for ‘green energy’ through things like the stimulus bill. This is certainly the wrong answer. Like with other economic issues, we seem to not learn anything from our mistakes. The government has tried to pick winners and losers with energy and other businesses for decades and they have proven they are not very good at it. Their anti-capitalist attitudes prevent them from just letting the free market work its course. We have tried ethanol and it has not worked as seen with this research. Spain’s adventures with subsidizing green energy is another great example we should learn from. They spent billions on green energy and it has not produced any positive results…unless you consider spending $800,000 per green job while losing 2 jobs for every green energy job that was created a good thing. All in the name of alternative energy accounting for 1% of Spain’s energy production. Dr. Calzada has testified before Congress warning us of repeating his country’s mistakes, but we do not seem to be following his advice. Instead the Department of Energy has funded research (with your tax dollars) trying to prove the real life results of Spain’s experiment wrong.
Of course the energy sector is not the only place that is effected by corporate subsides, but it is a major player. The bottom line is that as long as the government tries to pick winners and losers ($41,000 GM volt anyone), they will continue to undermine the free market system; a system that has proven itself to be the most efficient distributor of our limited resources. The government spends somewhere around $60 billion a year on these subsides. I would recommend we eliminate all subsides over the course of 4 years, not just the ones for industries that politicians want to demonize so they can distribute them elsewhere. Who knows, we may even get rid of some special interests…that happens when government gets out of private business.
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Unfortunately the ONLY way free enterprise will have half a chance is if we are able to get rid of most Democrats and MANY Republicans. As a society, we have drifted so far from a free enterprise system it might take a full out civil revolution (hopefully not) or a revolution of the voters who (finally) wake up and see the error of the past SEVERAL administrations and the path we all have taken away from our constitutionally formed and directed form of governance. (That was one heck of a run-on sentence, wasn’t it? ) So many people have tried to “do the right thing” or “be fair and impartial” and that has lead us to a point where we are being lead by someone with no real-world experience, who didn’t even grow up in our society and can’t seem to find his documentation (sounds familiar, huh?). We are stuck with an Attorney General who volunteered to defend murdering terrorists, but can’t seem to stomach prosecuting Black Panthers for voter intimidation… guess its a good thing they weren’t republicans.
Like I mentioned in some recent posts, it really it is something that took hold during the late 1800s, early 1900′s and has gradually made its way into government and gotten worse and worse, whatever their good intentions might have been. They pushed it through our education system and that I believe is the key. Education. With that I believe we can slowly take our country back just as they have taken it from the people.
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