Doctors Obamastein and Granholmstein Create the Perfect Economy

I did not watch the State of the State address. I did not listen to it. Sorry Nick, but I didn't even follow the live blogging on Right Michigan. None of this out of apathy but rather a head cold and the drowse that corrective over-the-counter medications can have on an old fart being recruited by every AARP outfit in the lower 48.

Early to bed and early to rise however, and I was blessed to hear one quote of Ms. Granholm's on NPR this morning.

The demand for wind and solar power in this country is about to explode. President Obama has announced ambitious plans to double our nation's use of these renewable energy sources in just three years. As the nation's demand for renewable energy goes up, so, too, does the demand for the technologies and products that are critical to the new energy industry. We will seize upon this surging demand for renewable energy to increase the supply of good-paying jobs in Michigan.

This new energy industry is being completely driven at the behest of government. That is, lawyers, environmental advocates, and benevolent bureaucrats are creating a demand for product that the free market has not determined is necessary.

There is little real market drive behind the new industries that Granholm wants to chase, mind you, just the legislation of nervous hand wringing advocates backed by large sums of dollars invested in lobbying and political campaigns. Oil is selling for $41 a barrel today and we have billions of barrels untapped under American control. There is already a natural gas glut as new fields and tankers come on line. And coal? It is perhaps our largest proven energy resource. Yet, Granholm is doing her best to hamstring energy companies from bringing coal powered energy producers on line.

Why shouldn't Michigan invest billions in chasing energy solutions for which the market does not see fit?

A few years ago the busybody government, without the actions of the free market, decided that ethanol was the way to go. A huge amount of money was shoved into bio fuels around the nation. Factories were subsidized. Farmers were subsidized. Consumers were punished. Brazil was told they could stick their more efficient sugar cane ethanol where the sun don't shine. Iowa, historically the largest producer of corn among the states, the epicenter of the ethanol craze, quickly built the infrastructure necessary to meet the government created market. When all the factories went on line the state began, for the first time, to be a net importer of corn rather than an exporter.

Corn was diverted from the food chain into the energy chain as people starved in Africa. Today, the government orchestrated ethanol industry is in free fall with several Iowan ethanol plants already in bankruptcy with others on the brink. All of those dead kids are still dead.

What are we then to make of the next economic sector that Granholm and her advocate supporters want Michigan to harness, the one that she predicts will explode as government puppeteers try their best to create facsimile economic conditions favorable to its "explosion?"

Every indication is that the sector can only grow and thrive in Granholm's experiment under the most perfect of laboratory conditions. How many trillions of dollars will need to be redirected from the free market to a government controlled market to keep this gargantuan charade operating?

When Barack Obama declares that energy costs will "necessarily increase," he is directly owning up to the additional dollars consumers will have to kick in to please the owners of the laboratory. Wind turbines will be built and solar panels will be assembled. Highly subsidized ethanol plants will come on line.

All of this so that Doctors Obamastein and Granholmstein can create the perfect economic conditions from assembled parts of industry and science that would never coexist in the real world any more readily than a criminal's brain might find its own innocent path into the skull of a monster.

I anxiously await the results of this experiment.