Holman Jenkins has a wonderful column in today’s Wall Street Journal on the politics of ethanol. He’s absolutely right in saying that the US corn/ethanol industry isn’t opposed to OPEC, but rather wants to become part of it.
Jenkins refers to the investment that’s pouring into various biofuels initiatives. This is similar to the efforts by capitalists to find new energy sources in the 1840s as whale oil became ever more costly. Luckily, politics stayed out of the energy market back then. Today, with politics intruding into just about everything, we’ll probably waste huge amounts in subsidizing economically inefficient but politically well-connected ventures. Here we have yet another excellent example showing why we’d be better off with a laissez-faire minimal state.
