You can't fool the market forever

Matthew Parris in the Times of London:

This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it's the correction to a long run of irrational confidence.

Or, as Michelle Malkin put it back in September, the fundamentals suck. Parris rightly warns against heeding those who promise a "new economic model." As for the neo-Keynesian reaction, Glenn Reynolds says:

This is not so much a stimulus, as a massive transfer of wealth from the politically unconnected to the politically connected.

Mark Steyn has more. You know what I'm tired of? I'm tired of St. Hopey telling me that "the creation of a clean energy economy" is going to mean X-number of new jobs. OK, Mr. Harvard Law, riddle me this: "Who's buying?"

An economy implies supply and demand, so where is the demand side of this equation? There isn't any. Except for nuclear power, none of those "alternative sources of energy" you keep yammering about is commercially viable in the marketplace. Build all the wind farms and ethanol plants you want, they still produce energy less efficiently than coal or petroleum, and if it weren't for subsidies and regulations, nobody would even bother with that crap. But you and your buddy Al Gore and the other green freaks have ginned up a phony "crisis" that supposedly justifies all this, and you're deaf to reason.

"Investments," my ass. It's a goddamned swindle, is what it is. In the midst of a desperate economic situation, you're going to throw away billions and billions of dollars of borrowed money to subsidize non-efficient rackets -- and subsidize them permanently, since there is no way they could ever be fully viable in a market economy. It's an entitlement, in other words -- corporate welfare -- and if you ever told the truth about it, nobody would support it.

Borrowing money to subsidize the production of goods and services that nobody actually wants -- or at least, that they don't want enough to pay for themselves -- is a "clean energy economy" only if you count bullshit as a biofuel. It won't work.