Tweet [1]
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 [2],” 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 [3] (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996), p. 103