Edmund Storms wrote:
The complication I was addressing is based on the need to make a policy decision based on many conflicting possibilities. The number of these possibilities is increasing, as it always the case in every country, from classical Greek times to Germany under Hitler.
Honestly, I do not see this happening. Policy decisions and economics have been complicated throughout history. I do not see why they are more complicated today. There were often times in history when people could not tell whether policies were helping or hurting. The British experience with the East India Company and later with their colonies was so complicated that economists and historians still argue about whether the British made money or lost money on the deal, and it is even more difficult to determine whether the people in India benefited more than they were harmed. (There was no question that a small class of people in England made a fortune on the colonies.) Pre-modern Japanese governments gathered immense quantities of data from the population, and they micromanaged every aspect of the economy and millions of people's lives. The inventoried every major tree in the country. They specified the type of cloth that every class of person was allowed to make into clothing, how many suits of clothes people would be allowed to own. They spelled out how big their houses could be, how they were designed, what kind of wood was allowed in each type of house. They decreed what kind of dishes people of different classes and occupations would be allowed to use. They did not just make these rules; they enforced them, with inspectors, paperwork galore, centralized record keeping and so on. This was an incredibly complicated undertaking.
I assume that the US congressmen are smarter than they look, they understand that ethanol is an energy sink, and they voted for it because they are corrupted by payola from big agriculture. This is nothing new. The U.S. Congress has often voted for economically dysfunctional and unfair taxes and benefits. The ancient Roman legislators blocked the construction of better channels and improved freight landing docks and warehouses in Rome, because they want to keep a choke-hold on the importation of food at critical times of the year, to drove up prices. It is likely they were paid off by by corrupt shipping interests who wanted to gouge the public by keeping supplies tight and prices high. During the fake California energy crisis of 2000, Enron and other companies did the same thing, and the US fossil fuel companies accomplished exactly the same thing this week: they engineered an energy bill that rewards them with billions of dollars while choking off the development of competing technology and efficient automobiles. They even managed to slide in a provision that kills the development of energy-efficient overhead fans by nullifying standards set by the California legislature. (This is a gift to Home Depot -- a major contributor.)
It does not seem complicated to me. I would call it corrupt, dysfunctional, treasonous, and a lot of other nasty words, but not complex.
- Jed
