If you want a slippery slope example, you\u2019re witnessing it. An auto bailout would set a disturbing precedent, resulting in even more private companies clamoring for government sponsorships. A number of companies today could make the case that their respective industry is vital for the economy and begin requesting billions of dollars in bailout subsidies. And if an ethanol bailout follows an auto bailout, who knows who will be next in line.<\/p>\n
Ethanol has been receiving preferential treatment for thirty years and has proven to be unsuccessful. Even after decades of special tax breaks and subsidies, ethanol still provides only a small fraction of America\u2019s energy needs. The government\u2019s initial goal to kick start the ethanol business has morphed into the government trying to pick winners and losers among energy sources and has ultimately created a dependence mentality for the ethanol industry. It\u2019s time to let ethanol stand on its own two feet or die.<\/p>\n
And to make matters worse, ethanol isn\u2019t doing any of the things it intended to do \u2013 ethanol literally is making matters worse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Raising food prices, contributing to the global grain crunch, polluting more, depleting the aquifers, and <\/em>begging for handouts?<\/p>\nIf it were a bum, we’d put it in treatment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s an apocryphal saying – it’s often incorrectly attributed to De Tocqueville – that goes “a free society can only survive until the people discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury”.\u00a0 Apocryphal or not, it’s coming to vivid, horrifying life all around us. We’ve bailed out the negligent financial industry and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}