Revenooers

The Fed.Gov requires you to fill your tank with 10% Ethanol. It turns out that this is a pretty bad idea from a public policy perspective:

First, the primary job of the Environmental Protection Agency is, dare it be said, to protect our environment. Yet using ethanol actually creates more smog than using regular gas, and the EPA's own attorneys had to admit that fact in front of the justices presiding over the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 1995 (API v. EPA).

Second, truly independent studies on ethanol, such as those written by Tad Patzek of Berkeley and David Pimentel of Cornell, show that ethanol is a net energy loser. Other studies suggest there is a small net energy gain from it.

Third, all fuels laced with ethanol reduce the vehicle's fuel efficiency, and the E85 blend drops gas mileage between 30% and 40%, depending on whether you use the EPA's fuel mileage standards (fueleconomy.gov) or those of the Dept. of Energy.

Fourth, forget what biofuels have done to the price of foodstuffs worldwide over the past three years; the science seems to suggest that using ethanol increases global warming emissions over the use of straight gasoline.

Oh, and click through to the read the bit about how your engine is going to croak after Congress raises the percentage of Ethanol in Gasoline to 15%.

So, it's bad for the environment, it's bad for transportation, it makes people hungry because it raises the cost of food, and it will destroy your engine. So why is Congress so bullish - drunk, you might even say - on Ethanol?

Revenooers. No, not BAT men, but Congressmen. The agricultural industry would be the moonshiners, and plenty of palms are being greased in the form of campaign contributions. In the dry terms that Economists and Historians like to use, this is classic rent seeking, where an interested party buys off someone in the government to force the use of the interested party's product.

Rent seeking generally implies the extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity, such as by gaining control of land and other pre-existing natural resources, or by imposing burdensome regulations or other government decisions that may affect consumers or businesses. While there may be few people in modern industrialized countries who do not gain something, directly or indirectly, through some form or another of rent seeking, rent seeking in the aggregate imposes substantial losses on society.

With the new administration making it clear that their philosophy is one of a much more naked use of governmental power in the interest of favored parties, this is an expression we'll see a lot more of, no doubt.

All the sophisticated, Ivy League types who think that this is a (ahem) high octane idea, have forgotten just how long this has been thought A Bad Idea:

In their petition, the candlemakers cite several economic 'advantages' that might be had from blocking out the Sun, by increasing consumption of products: tallow, leading to the increased production of meat, wool, hides, etc; vegetable oil, leading to the increased production of poppies, olives, and rapeseed; resinous trees, leading to more bees, hence crop pollination; whale oil, leading to a larger merchant navy that would boost France's prestige and standing.

Hey, dudes, Whale Oil is out - someone needs to update this to something later than 1845.

Oh well, they're probably smarter (and nicer) than I am, anyway. And with a ton of Ivy League college debt, they probably need the rents more than I do. Or something.