Corn...worst source of ethanol ever

So the Atlantic says that the Tea Party has ended the ethanol subsidy.  As if! The only thing that has ended is the Tax Credit, the rules about the % of ethanol in gas are still there and probably more important overall.  The basic problem of ethanol being a terrible source of ethanol is not solved.  Apparently we have started shipping some ethanol overseas, I’d like to know how that happened, I suspect other subsidies. 

One problem with subsidy systems like that set up for Ethanol is that they become terrifically difficult to remove.  An entrenched special interest is created and they have a lot more pull than is generated by the general by very dispersed understanding that it’s a waste of money, the guys who know it’s a waste aren’t losing enough individually to make it worth while fighting the long war to overturn the subsidy.  So to a degree the Tea Party may have done good, concentrating the anti vote enough to do something, hopefully they can move on to other subsidies.

<<<Nuf Said on That Topic>>>

A link to Blomberg from the Atlantic lead to this article A Crisis of Leadership, Not a Crisis of Capitalism by Clive Crook :

With the world’s rich economies struggling and the leaders of the European Union intent on making things worse, the gravity of the economic crisis still confronting the West is hard to exaggerate. Nonetheless, it can be done.

According to what I read, we face not just the worst recession since the 1930s, but a challenge to the West’s entire economic order. The Great Recession exposes the poverty of orthodox economics. It constitutes an ideological crisis. It shows that capitalism itself is “fundamentally” flawed. If all this were true, I’d be a lot more worried about the coming year than I am — which is saying something.

A new year’s corrective is in order. Reports of the death of capitalism are greatly exaggerated.

What’s surprising is just how wrong those reports have been. Perhaps, as I write, the revolutionaries are organizing in secret, but I see no signs of a popular uprising.