When Obama bundlers get special government subsidies they didn’t deserve, I don’t see the main lesson as being one of corruption in the Obama administration. I think the main lesson is the nature of government intervention in the economy.
Jim Antle has a good article in the latest American Spectator magzine that delves into Obama’s green-jobs green-energy agenda and how it inevitably yields these ugly messes. The piece provides a good catalogue of green subsidies to politically connected companies. Antle also clearly states some important general ideas:
CRONY CAPITALISM has become an epithet on both the left and the right. Both Ralph Nader and Sarah Palin have condemned the practice. It is a concept that is as unpopular at Tea Party rallies as it is in the makeshift campgrounds of Occupy Wall Street, one of the few points of agreement between the powdered wig and the Birkenstock sets. “The American people do not like Friendly Fascism,” TAS editor-in-chief R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. writes in a forthcoming book. “They do not even like corporate cronyism.” Yet it is less clear what this stance means for most people in practice.
Most liberals still believe targeted government investment in renewable energies and other emerging technologies is both environmentally sound and essential to a positive, jobs-creating economic program. They don’t see how the corporatist intersection between government and big businesses like GE and GM, which they distrust, is related to the green jobs movement they think is a worthy public endeavor. Similarly, many conservatives still wrongly conflate a reflexive defense of business-no matter how dependent on government a particular business may be-with defending free markets.
Most liberals still believe targeted government investment in renewable energies and other emerging technologies is both environmentally sound and essential to a positive, jobs-creating economic program. They don’t see how the corporatist intersection between government and big businesses like GE and GM, which they distrust, is related to the green jobs movement they think is a worthy public endeavor. Similarly, many conservatives still wrongly conflate a reflexive defense of business-no matter how dependent on government a particular business may be-with defending free markets.
