“Forgotten by many proponents is the justification for the PTC in the first place: to reduce CO2 emissions…. [Yet] … many utilities with large amounts of wind generation steadfastly refuse to release operating data for analysis. I suspect to do so would mean the release of empirical data to build the opposition’s case for insignificant CO2 reduction and poor operating economics. I was unable to find one study of existing wind energy installations that found the CO2 reductions predicted by AWEA.”
Robert Peltier, editor-in-chief of POWER magazine, is an honest broker. He understands the technical side of electrical generation as a professional engineer. He knows power generation in practice from his years of industry experience on the regulated and the nonregulated sides. He has taught the subject as a tenured professor.…
“The PTC was created in 1992 to get the wind industry off the ground. Yet 20 years later, we have little to show for it.”
When it comes to rent-seeking by business, Concentrated Benefits + Diffused Costs = Government Growth.
In “Regulatory Failure by the Numbers,” a simple hypothetical was given:
“While the benefits of a regulation may be enjoyed by a relative few, the costs are often spread out among many. If the per person cost of a regulation is only a dollar or two, no one has a financial incentive to travel to Washington to lobby against it.”
Economists in the 19th century understood the problem created by this incentive asymmetry, and Michael Giberson found this in a 1935 book explaining the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff:
…“Although .
“[T]rends of evolution can change, and hitherto they almost always have changed. But they changed only because they met firm opposition. The prevailing trend toward … the servile state will certainly not be reversed if nobody has the courage to attack its underlying dogmas.”
– Ludwig von Mises (see below)
Statism won at the top of the ticket earlier this week–and many places beneath. Limited-government advocates are feeling low and wondering if the dependency vote can be overcome in future elections to turn fiscal crises into new opportunities for economic freedom.
Small consolation: the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson beat the Green Party’s Jill Stein by a landslide. But the small parties combined received less than two million votes. Johnson’s 1.2 million votes–about 1.2 percent in the 48 states where he was on the ballot–compared to 400,000 for Stein. …