Here’s a letter to the Weekly Standard:
You report that “Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturing company much ballyhooed by the Obama administration, declared bankruptcy. The company had received $535 million in September 2009 from a Department of Energy grant program funded by the stimulus” (“Green Jobs in the Red,” Sept. 12).
No surprise here. From Pres. Obama on down, none of the politicians speculating with taxpayers’ funds on “green” business ventures – and none of the pundits spellbound by their own imagined genius at knowing how to improve an unimaginably complex economy such as ours – has any material skin in the game.
Too bad that too few Americans, when presented with the latest Glorious Vision or Beautiful Plan, are as clear-eyed as is the economist Deirdre McCloskey, who writes “If you are prudent and bourgeois, not a romantic aristocrat or a gullible peasant, you say to yourself ‘Why is he telling me this? Why has he not put his money where his mouth is?'”*
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux* Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Vices of Economists / The Virtues of the Bourgeoisie (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), p. 103
