As if politicians need an excuse for more subsidies...

Politicians really enjoy talking about "energy independence." When they get on the subject, almost inevitably they have to mention corn ethanol, a fuel alternative to oil which has recently been made artificially cheap to consumers and profitable to farmers due to huge federal subsidies. The politicians never mention the subsidies, but they do ramble on and on about the dangers of relying on oil-producing countries to power our cars and heat our homes. Sometimes they even have the audacity to complain about oil's fluctuating prices, implying that energy "security" would make all of our worries about the gas-price see-saw go away.

These politicians are liars.

Any candidate for any public office can promise the world to his or her constituents. Unlike regular people, public officials have the ability to make lots and lots of citizens cough up the money to fund their promises, which makes things much easier to promise in the first place. In the case of energy independence, politicians are promising two things: no more reliance on foreign oil, and higher taxes to make a product Americans ordinarily would have no interest in purchasing seem cheap (ethanol). The product doesn't actually get any cheaper, it just looks that way at the gas station. Someone (meaning all of us) is still paying full price, whether we roll to work via Hummer, Prius, or bicycle.

Anybody wanna guess what we call the system of government that picks and chooses which products it wants to see produced in an economy without the use of prices or demonstrated consumer demand? It was tried in places like the Soviet Union, China, Poland, and East Germany for a long time. ... anyone?

If you said Communism, you're our winner! Congratulations! You've just qualified for a chance to win higher taxes, the money from which which will be transferred (inefficiently) to huge farms all over the Midwest, propping up firms that would otherwise have had to leave the market years ago like every other business that couldn't find a way to provide a product people actually wanted to buy. Meanwhile, farmers hoping to sell you perfectly good (and extremely cheap) fruits, vegetables, and ethanol from places like Africa and South America will be going under, dragging one of the few industries in which they can compete on a global level down with them.

Brazil, it's worth noting, produces ethanol from sugar much more efficiently than anyone in the United States can from corn. They're able to complete the whole sugar-to-fuel process at a lower price than our own farmers' corn ethanol while using much less fuel. I've heard a few estimates of the amount of pollution created by American farms making corn ethanol. Most of them conclude that we would be better off just burning gasoline. Brazil does it better, but we don't buy any ethanol from them.

To me, the bottom line is this: if American ethanol made any sense, consumers would already be buying it, and the subsidies wouldn't be necessary in the first place.

Reason magazine says it much better than I can. Check 'em out.