Example 597 of why big corporations are not advocates of smaller government

Matt Purple has written an article for the American Spectator that provides a classic illustration of the dangers presented by the concentration of power in the hands of those who build their careers at the crossroads of business and politics. The context? Government-supported ethanol production.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute's Tim Carney dug up a study by scientist Marcelo Dias de Oliveira. Oliveira looked at ethanol's broader environmental picture -- its ecological footprint, if you will. Between the land destroyed by crop planting, the water consumed, and the resultant air pollution, Oliveira found that ethanol does more damage than good to the environment.

This is the sort of cockamamie policy that crony capitalism produces. Currently the government spends $6 billion per year on subsidies for a fuel that isn't environmentally friendly and caused a global spasm of starvation.

Amusing sidebar: When my father, Old Paco, was a revenooer, chasing bootleggers in the mountains of North Carolina, he captured one noted moonshinist, who was subsequently convicted and sent to jail. Old Paco ran into him many years later, and, to his unending amusement, found out that the fellow had been granted a permit by the yankee government to produce ethanol. Whether any of it actually made its way into a fuel tank somewhere was something about which the “retired” whiskey maker was smilingly reticent.