Sempra Buys a Bazillion Solar Panels...

Reader and friend Simon M. passes along this news about Sempra (our local electric utility) buying 1.1 million solar panels; there's more detail here.  Simon suspects lower prices and subsidies are at work.

Well, solar cell prices certainly have come down, rather dramatically.  And there are subsidies involved.  But incentives aren't what's driving this purchase: it's mandates.  Specifically, the California Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) – which, amongst other things, mandates that 33% of all energy supplied by power utilities come from renewable sources by the year 2020.  This is what's known to the bureaucracy as an “unconditional mandate”, which means exactly what it sounds like.  The utilities must provide that percentage of power via renewable sources regardless of the cost, regardless of the reliability, regardless of the impact on utility rates, regardless of any reason to use conventional power.  Sempra is reacting to that mandate.

A third of all power coming from renewable sources is an incredibly high fraction to achieve in such a short term, especially given that it takes up to 20 years to build new power plants in California (note that the Copper Mountain project is in Nevada!).  Some large organizations (can you say Google?) have given up on building solar power plants in California because of the lengthy and risky approval process.  As Sempra and other utilities noted at the time, this could only be achieved by spending huge amounts of money in capital investment – and that investment money is going to come from the rate-payers (that is, the folks like you and I who buy power from Sempra).  This need to finance capital is why the power from Sempra's all-PV Copper Mountain facility will cost significantly more than power from conventional plants.  Oh, and the rate-payers also get to pay for the costs of Sempra disentangling themselves from contractual commitments already made for future conventional plants, too.

This is one of the issues that's driving us out of California – in this case, a piece of regulatory madness that's guaranteed to drive up electricity costs, but not guaranteed to deliver any tangible benefit (all that political rhetoric notwithstanding)...

Regulation is the Enemy of Free Enterprise...

Another excellent mini-documentary by Reason.TV.  This one is about the bus industry, and how the government killed it once with regulations, brought it back to life with deregulation, and now is killing it again with regulations...

These People Are Going to Control Our Healthcare...

Imagine for a moment that you are a magician who performs at churches, schools, and even people's homes.  In one of your acts you employ a rabbit.  It's the only animal you use in your act.  You have no employees.

Sounds like a perfectly innocent small business, doesn't it?  The kind of business that you'd think would be completely free of government regulation and paperwork.

Wait a minute.  You must be thinking that you live in the old America, the one founded by the liberty-loving Founding Fathers.  That's not today's nanny-state America, the one enabled by low information voters.  No, siree!

In today's America, that magician has to file a “disaster plan” for his bunny.  It takes eight pages of bureaucratese just to describe what that disaster plan must contain. 

Yes, I'm serious.

Quote of the Day...

From Jay Lehr, writing in the Wall Street Journal (via reader Simi L.):

After decades of federal subsidies—almost $24 billion according to a recent estimate by former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm—nowhere in the United States, or anywhere else, has an array of wind turbines replaced a single conventional power plant. Nowhere.

And the left wants the same government that brought us this debacle to run our health care.  It's easy to predict (but very sad) that at some point, our Obamacare bureaucrats will most likely spend billions on something most of us would immediately recognize as snake oil.  Homeopathic “medicine” is a good candidate...

Government Efficiency...

Do you harbor some lingering belief that government is the most efficient way to get big jobs done?  This story should cure you of that mental illness.

The outline:

• The federal government has long had a “Lifeline” program that provides free phone service to poor people.  This program is paid for by a charge on your phone bill.
• The program originally provided free land lines, but was recently extended to provide free mobile phones (the notorious “ObamaPhone” that was the subject of a viral YouTube video last year).
• Mobile phone retailers make money by giving away these free mobile phones.  They're supposed to follow federal guidelines about who gets the phones, but there's no enforcement and the financial incentive is for them to give more away, not fewer.
• People approach the phone retailers, tell them that they're going to resell (“flip”) the phone to raise money for drugs, shoes, whatever, and the retailers still give them the phones.

Personally, I find this completely unsurprising.  Of course that's what happens; it's almost as if someone designed the program like that.

A business, operating with profit motive, would never behave in such a stupid and inefficient way with our tax dollars.  Only the government has that capacity.

Something for you to think about...  When you think of the tax dollars that you pay to both the federal government and the state government, what percentage of that do you think is utterly wasted (like above)? 

For the federal government, I'm guessing around 50% or 60%.  For the state (California), I'm thinking more like 70% or 80%...

Your Tax Dollars At Work, Part 546,232...

Forgive me...

Yet Another Reason to Leave Southern California...

We're living in a fourth amendment exclusion zone...

Reality Smacks Lefty Upside His Pointed Little Head...

On Friday, Matt Yglesias published a short article detailing how the tentacles of government bureaucracy made it crazy difficult to start his own small business.  If you recognize his name, you're probably chuckling already – because Yglesias is a well-known lefty blogger and commentator, one who can be relied on to support everything that smacks of big government.

As you might expect, the “rightosphere” has been having a lot of fun with this.  At The Spirit of Enterprise, for example, we have this:

I love when progressive dudes in designer glasses actually have to deal with the government in order to do something and are blown away by the stupidity, waste, and burden of it all. It is as if they have only read journal articles about the theory of regulators and never encountered them in the wild.

More such reactions in these search results...

Why Europeans Come to America for Healthcare...

While pitching government-run healthcare, Progressives are fond of citing longevity statistics that purport to show longer lifespans for Europeans (and Japanese) living in countries with government-run healthcare.  Why would us lunkhead Libertarians and Conservatives be opposed to living longer?

The Progressives are much less fond of explaining why well-to-do individuals from the self-same countries choose to fly to America for their serious health problems.  Why would they do that?  And how can this behavior be reconciled with the statistics on longevity?

The answer lies in the way those longevity statistics are collected, and with cultural differences between the countries.  A very simplistic way to put it is this: if you take away deaths caused by cars and gunshots, then Americans live longer than anywhere else on Earth.  In particular, Americans who have long-term health issues (such as cancer or diabetes) have far better outcomes than non-Americans.  Those are the things our healthcare system deals with, and it deals with them better than any government-run system does.

Well, for now, anyway.  Obamacare is about to “fix” that, unless we manage to get it repealed.

There's a great post on this subject at CoyoteBlog, with much more detail...

Run, Run, Run Californians!

The ship of California State is sinking.  Guess what's happening?

You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

Naturally, New Jersey is first with this likely-to-be-growing trend.  They have banned smiling on driver's license photos.  Really!

Why Governments Fail...

A private business whose product is rejected by consumer generally has but two choices: fix the product or go out of business.  A government, on the other hand, generally finds it easier to tell the consumer to STFU.

Rope.
Tree.
Politician.
Some assembly required.

EPA Fraud...

You've probably seen those claims about all-electric vehicles getting 75, 90, or more “miles per gallon”.  Where do those numbers come from?  Are they actually meaningful?

Short answer: No.

The Government Dependency Index...

The Heritage Foundation has taken a stab at measuring the degree to which Americans are dependant on government assistance.  Even better, they've computed this index over time, from 1962 to 2010 (the most recent year for which they have data).

The general idea is to provide an objective metric that reflects the totality of government-provided assistance of all types.  There's an old saying in the business world: “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it!” – this represents the first attempt at an objective measure of something I (and many others) would dearly love to manage.

My first reaction to seeing this chart was this: that the index has increased by at least a factor of 15 within my lifetime.  That factor is assuredly substantially higher, actually – because this chart leaves off the first decade of my life, and the most recent two years.  Ouch!  And no wonder the government's meddling seems all-pervasive to me when compared with our government when I was a youth.

My second reaction was this: how did the Heritage Foundation put this together?  Fortunately for all of us, their methodology and supporting data is readily available on their web site.  The article announcing this index is chock full of interesting (though often quite depressing) compilations of information.

I would love to somehow require everyone to read and comprehend this article before voting in November...

Shadow Government Statistics...

Here's a fascinating site whose objective is to undo all the obfuscation the U.S. government has applied to its financial statistics.  Key indicators (such as the unemployment rate), when they move in a politically unsavory direction, tend to be “reformulated” to paint a rosier picture.  One side effect of this is that it's almost impossible for us to compare statistics today to past statistics.  This site computes today's statistics the same way they used to be computed, to give us a consistent picture.  For example, if the unemployment rate were computed today the same way it was in 1990, it would be about 16%, not the 9% being reported today...

It Could Have Been Worse...

This is why I can't get too excited by last night's budget deal.  It's crumbs, folks, and not very tasty crumbs at that.  I'm pleasantly surprised by Boehner's ability to negotiate, and completely unsurprised that the Democratic leadership couldn't get it's intellectually bankrupt people together.  All I'm saying, though, is that this could have been much worse.  That's not at all the same thing as saying it was good...

Anti-Appropriations Committee?

I don't know enough about the inner workings of Congress to know whether this idea would actually be effective at cutting government spending.  But it sure sounds good!

Banning Traditional Ammunition?

The Obama Administration's EPA is seriously considering it.

It's almost like they want to be thrown out of power...

Oh, This is SO Confusing!

Google's unemployment index has done it again.  Confusalated me, that is.  What the hell does the recent jump and fall mean?  I have no idea.  The most recent unemployment numbers from the government roughly correspond with the peak of two weeks ago, but those government numbers are completely bogus, having been rather arbitrarily adjusted.  Something I would really like to see is a simple chart showing (number of people working in the U.S.) / (number of adults in the U.S.) over time – but I have been unable to locate this data.  Instead, the government apparently thinks we're all mushrooms (they keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit)...

Uncle Sam, VC...

Why centralized big government is bad, the venture capital edition...