Solyndra was a solar panel factory that received 500 million dollar Government funding. When it was ready to flood the market with green energy, Chinese competitors halved the price, driving Solyndra to instant bankrupcy.
So it is not only the Chinese Government that is building empty cities and empty factories but America, with its infatuation with greenness, is spending money on white elephants. Governments are bad in industrial policy, as European Socialism demonstrated. Yet American socialists have learned nothing.
4 comments:
Socialists never learn - the rest of the population must learn (the hard way) never to let these fantasists near the levers of power (or more importantly, their wallets). Socialists have no real understanding of the sources of wealth or profit - to them it is just like a magical spring that gushes forth from the earth and when it dries up they are puzzled or angry.
The famous Heinlein quote comes to mind:
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck." "
America is now experiencing just such a run of "bad luck".
Solyndra is not just an example of mis-allocation of capital by government for political ends (in this case to advance the supposedly noble "green" cause) , but also it reeks of corruption - the owners of Solyandra were also big Obama backers.
Obama's original "green jobs czar" was found to be not only a normal American leftist liberal but a full blown Communist, which put him beyond the pale even in a "progressive" administration - American Socialists must always hide and pretend to be mere liberals.
It seems to me that with its climate and lack of oil, Israel should be a leader in solar power. I recall seeing solar hot water heaters in Israel as far back as the '70s. Truthfully, solar power makes no sense in a lot of the places where it is politically most popular - e.g the northern half of the EU - the sun hardly ever shines. Even where it is sunny, the payback on the panels usually is too long to make sense - If you have to spend $10,000 on something that produces $200 worth of electricity per year it will take you 50 years to recover your investment (longer than the lifespan of the equipment).
Solyndra thought that they had a technological advantage because their thin film panels were cheaper to produce than silicon crystal panels. Unfortunately, Chinese mass production drove down the cost of crystals - it did not require a crystal ball to see that that would happen (anything connected with silicon obeys Moore's Law) but they employed a static cost analysis and got clobbered.
K
This isn't necessarily an argument against industrial policy. Chinese industrial policy beat American industrial policy.
"This isn't necessarily an argument against industrial policy. Chinese industrial policy beat American industrial policy."
Agreed. And China's industrial policy is basically America's industrial policy from its founding until the middle of the last century.
Having an industrial policy is one thing. Having one based upon a narrow quasi-religious "green" ideology instead of the overall best interests of the country is another. The government can certain do things to promote trade, build infrastructure, etc. but I've very suspicious about their ability to pick winners in the marketplace - somehow these loans always end up going to Administration backers (and if you weren't one before, you will be, whether you like it or not, once the government has its hooks in you).
K
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