By Andy Duncan
History continuously displays the hilarity and ineptitude of government interventions. However, every now and again even I am surprised by just quite how stupid and fatuous government ministers can be once they have sucked up the enervating Kool-Aid of state power.
For instance, in this morning’s Telegraph newspaper I discovered that the British government – in a land famous for rain-drenched umbrellas and cancelled village summer fêtes – has decided to cover 75,000 acres of ‘their’ territory in solar panel electricity ‘farms’, all to be paid for by everyone else. Once the farms are built with the aid of generous subsidies, much of that finding its way into the Luxembourg bank accounts of all the sponsoring politicians and lobbyists, the taxpayers will then be fleeced again to pay these solar farms NOT to produce electricity in the summer, the only real time of year when these farms might actually be useful.
Confused? Just check out your own local government. I’m sure they’re being just as idiotic and personally greedy in all departments, mixed into a frothy bribe-drenched cocktail of malice, aggression, and arrogance.
Getting back to my own local bunch of vain corrupt fools, first we have the Stalinesque/Hitlerite zeal of a striding pygmy colossus:
“Greg Barker, the energy and climate change minister, has disclosed that it is his “ambition” for 20GW of energy to be produced by solar panels in 2020 – effectively a ten fold increase in the number of solar farms currently built or being planned.”
Then we have a dash of the usual Robespierrian/Napoleonesque insanity:
“The warning suggests that solar farms will, like wind farms, have to be paid not to produce electricity.”
Next up, we’re treated to some Lilliputian/Blefuscuan tin-pot jingoism, carefully choreographed with a smattering of pompous bureaucratic mandarinese:
“Addressing Intersolar, an industry conference in Munich, the minister said he was determined to make Britain “a hub for global solar firms” and said no country in Europe had “more potential for future solar deployment”. The expansion “ambition” comes as generous subsidies – ultimately added to household energy bills – are being offered to solar developers under the Government’s Renewables Obligation scheme.”
And then the incredible and remarkable coup de grâce:
“However the disclosure of the Government’s plans for such a large expansion of solar energy raises the possibility that solar farms will also have to be paid to shut down during the summer months, when they produce the most electricity.”
You might want to re-read that bit again. I had to.
Would that ever happen on the free market? To ask the question is to know the answer.
All of this madness is of course backed up by the one-world governmental tax-raising meme scam of ‘global warming’, on a planet where temperatures have been steadily dropping for a decade inside a highly-volatile interglacial period.
No doubt, as we enter the next overdue ice age – when what little sunshine remaining in Britain becomes increasingly interrupted by even more by grey skies and rain – if the tax farms of England, Scotland, and Wales are still ruled over by the thousand-year Mafia known as the British government, they’ll perhaps have covered every last inch of this island in useless solar panels just in time for all that wasted silver to be permanently covered in snow.
However, putting all of that aside, we must continue to let these clowns rule over us, of course, because without their angelic guiding hands we would be unable to have any roads.
Dear Sirs: This sentence from your excellent article about the Basel III capital requirements reveals the true source of the problem: “That there are bank capital rules at all stems from the issues a country faces when it provides deposit insurance.” So why not just eliminate so-called “deposit insurance” and end the controversy? Many programs call themselves “insurance” that are no such thing. Deposit insurance is one of them. One of the cardinal rules of any true insurance plan is that the insured has no control over what triggers benefits. Think tornado insurance, for example. But banks have tremendous control over what will trigger deposit insurance benefits. First of all, it is not the deposits that one is insuring but the loans and securities. When these default or lose value the bank cannot meet its deposit obligations. Deposit insurance rewards banks for taking more risk in the hope of higher returns. If it works out, the banks make lots of money. If it doesn’t, deposit insurance relieves them of their liabilities. This is a classic case of “moral hazard”, whereby the economic agent assumes more risk when all or part of his losses will be born by others. End deposit insurance and end all manner of regulatory burden. But then, what would all those regulators do? Find a real job? Naw. Patrick Barron
... needs to be read by as many Members of Congress as possible.
