My guess is that you suck up the disinformation from Fox and Rush.

Try some objective sources. You’re risking being perpetually incorrect….

… yet it seems that for the last century the govt has been picking winners. Oil, nuclear and coal all have been heavily subsidized for several generations and either we get rid of subsidies altogether to give alternative fuels a fighting chance or we subsidize alternative fuels just like any other fuel source. Conservatives need to make up their minds on whether they want to subsidize energy or not because on one hand they say no subsidies to alternative energy but on the other they are all for continuing to subsidize fossil fuels. The Ryan house proposal is just one more example of this hypocrisy.

1) the ideal of a ‘free market’ is rather absurd — you learn that in any econ 101 class — at least, i did. as you say, there are many preconditions required for a ‘free market’, and we don’t come close to having those.
2) the role of the govt is very much to step in and fix market failures to make the market act more like an ‘idealized free market’. for example, as you state, it should correct for social costs not internalized by industry (i.e. societal health, environmental, and energy security costs).

3) the whole idea that any form of tax on industry for the greater good is socialism is absurd. people throw around the terms socialism and free market like they’re black & white. doing step #2 above is not socialism. (also, notably, the countries with the highest quality of life in the world are several times more ‘socialistic’ than the US — but many in the US never even learn that.)

4) lastly, as you throw in here, subsidizing decentralized (some say democratized) electricity generation helps to break up monopolies and address market failures from those. hardly a tendency away from the free market.

2nd: when fossil fuel companies are making record profits and sitting on tons and tons and tons of free cash, redirecting subsidies from them to clean energy should not cost jobs. As profits have risen, actually, jobs in the FF sector have been cut — why? The FF companies have plenty of money, and by simple logic presented by the likes of Romney, they should have been hiring for years, not laying people off.

I think that often times fundamental realities of the current energy market missing in the “Anti-Government / Free Energy Market”-debate. Especially when people swing the “socialism” namecalling thingy. What’s missing:
(1)The socialisation of external costs by fossil energy sources in form of air, water and soil polution => leading to damages in other industries, property & health of private individuals that should be protected under the law. That’s a direct subsidy by society leading to record profits and a sign of market failure. Less law (regulation / government) won’t solve that.

(2)Valueing privatized profits above individual rights(health & property), that’s not the free market nor capitalism AND especially not democratic. That’s a sign of a mobster-economy in which society has to pay the dealers and keep quite in order to be supplied with the essential good of energy.

(3) The history of how the system & the corporations that dominate it came into existance. Huge powerplants, powerlines,…everything was build with public funds decades / centuries ago… then it was privatized (taken from the public). And throughout this process of concentrating power & controll over the energy sector, the corporations profitedfrom (1) & (2). In the begining of industrialization this process destroyed thousends of small & medium power producers. A massive distortion of the market.

(4)Broken & distorted energy market is failing across the board… and the companies that dominate it are to heavily invested in this failure to correct the failure. Often times renewables are already cheaper for communities & individuals. But their application is not profitable to the utility that just build a coal power plant.
Should that utility have the right to prevent independent producers of wind power access to the grid? A grid that was build with tax payer funds?

At the end it’s a question about responsibility & beliving in democracy. And democracy is not an economic system.
Should government (partly responsible for breaking the energy market) stand idle, while the consequences of this failure threaten the safty & well being of the citizens & the entire nation? Should the government of a democratic republic reject any responsibility for shaping the future of a nation?

The free market is an idealized concept that requires many preconditions in order to function. It doesn’t magically come into existance by removing laws that curtail the power of corporations & protect individual freedoms & rights.

First, I am not defending OPEC or any other type of cartel. Of course, they reduce the competitiveness of the free markets.

However, OPEC is outside the control of US policy and I am discussing our political intervention in US markets. Further, while OPEC does obviously increase the price we pay for oil, in the long run, free markets will prevail. I am old enough to remember back to the creation of this cartel following the Arab oil embargo of the 80’s. Eventually, free markets prevailed, oil dropped in price and the world was awash in cheap oil. I believe that this will happen again and it will be hastened by the very technology championed by this blog.

Secondly, it is pretty well accepted by economists that removing capital from one sector in the form of taxes and returning it to another in the form of subsidies does not create net jobs. It merely helps favored or less efficient industries at the expense of more successful ones. And, yes, moving capital from the private sector to the public is Socialism.

Finally, I am not defending subsidies to oil companies or nuclear power any more than for wind or solar. Historically, the government has been pretty awful at picking winners and losers. You can hold up Exxon and I could hold up Solyndra. Neither deserved subsidies.

In every country where the government has passed laws that enable many people to invest in clean energy by taking a little money out of many pockets, this has created a dynamic investment driven technology market. => Jobs.

You use the “socialism” as if it’s a knock-out argument, against political decisions made by the democratic institutions of your federal, state or local governments.
But you fail to recognize that the fossil/nuclear energy system and the multi-national corporations & state-owned enterprises that dominate the “market”, are dictating prices & supply like the Politburo of the Soviet Union. What do you think OPEC does when they decide that $120 / barrel is just fine for the next 5 years… do you really think that the US could offset the price effect of 80% of the world oil producers lowering / increasing their supply?
Do you really think that a little drill baby drill & “Fuck the Enviroment” from your puny federal government could challange this?

I am more inclinded to put my trust in the hands of millions of fellow citizens becoming energy producers, which would democratize the energy market and create the basic requirements of a free market system… choose your poisen, but democracy & individual independence were never the road to socialism / facism.
But I guess you would rather put your trust in the patriotism of Exxon Mobile & the King of Saudi Arabia.

Obama believes that if you sap the money from one piece of the economy and distribute it to another you create jobs. Not so. They merely take money out of one pocket and put it into another. (Better known as Socialism) The government has no business picking the winners and the losers. And YOU should stick to what you do best. Showcasing new technology that will reduce our use of carbon based fuels.