The Vicious Cycle: Government Warps Markets Until Government Stops Warping Markets

A Market After Government Gets a Hold of It 

 Seton Motley, Contributing Author: The pernicious effect of government warping markets is absolute - and the evidence is obvious and everywhere.

When 300+ million Americans (and when 8+ billion worldwide are able to) make their own decisions, markets constantly morph to accommodate those decisions - and the maximum amount of success and happiness is achieved.

When government sticks its prodigious proboscis into the private sector, things quickly go sideways and upside down. When government makes decisions for us - the market is mutated into a grossly less efficient government-accomodation model. The examples are myriad.

Green energy - which is neither green nor energy - is a fabulously terrible one. “Sustainable” energy isn’t sustainable unless and until it no longer requires government rafts of cash and policy favoritism to stay afloat. It must - all on its own - produce energy at least as prodigiously and cheaply as traditional sources. You know, the actually sustainable ones.

Government-propped-up ethanol has been a decades-long disaster.
Ethanol Uses More Energy Than It Makes

EPA Acknowledges Ethanol Damages EnginesGovernment pouring its money and favors on something makes it less agile, athletic and quick to adapt - that something gets quite comfortable in the Leviathan-provided hammock.The American Ethanol Industry Needs to Innovate to Avoid DisasterThis was written forty-plus years into the ethanol experiment. Ummm…way too late - that SS Disaster has long since sailed.

When the government acts, it doesn’t do so in a vacuum - actions always have reactions. And when the actions are government-level bad - so too are the reactions.
75,000 Protest Tortilla Prices in Mexico

Water Shortages Leading Right Back to Ethanol

Ethanol Fuel Faulted as 'Unsustainable Subsidized Food Burning'And government action crowds out private sector action. What company wants to get into a shoving match with the Leviathan?The world’s biggest sugar producer has lost its appetite for sugar.

Cosan, which controls top producer Raizen Energia in a joint venture with Royal Dutch Shell, is cutting investments in sugar cane amid a global glut of the sweetener and Brazilian government policies that hold down the price of ethanol, Chief Financial Officer Marcelo Martins said….

“Reinvestment in the sector will be made only if returns become satisfactory, and we don’t see it happening now,” Martins said at Bloomberg’s office in Sao Paulo…. Government-induced over-production and under-pricing making the market…unsustainable. When there’s been this much government for this long – even the biggest private companies bail.

Unintended government consequences. The Leviathan crowding out the private sector. Anyone still surprised by any of this is willfully ignorant – or has been really, really sleepy the past century-plus.
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Seton Motley is the President of Less Government and he contributes to ARRA News Service. Please feel free to follow him on  Twitter  /  Facebook

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