Whether we’re talking about renewables or "open spaces," the logic of the bureaucrat leads to socialism. This great passage from Mark Hendrickson writing on ethanol could be applied to most anything the government does:
"One of the elementary insights of economics is that human choices have both costs and benefits. If you buy that expensive car that makes your pulse race, then there are other purchases that you will have to do without. Even the super-rich, though they can afford anything money can buy, don’t have time to enjoy every possible indulgence, and so they have to prioritize their choices, paying for the enjoyment of some things by forgoing others. Benefits always have costs.
Expanding this analysis to the realm of politics, Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist, demonstrated with airtight logic that government intervention designed to benefit certain members of society inevitably imposes costs on others. Those who are inconvenienced by intervention—especially because they have seen that government is willing and able to alter the free market that would exist in the absence of government intervention—will seek intervention that offsets the undesirable side-effects of the prior intervention. However, any new interventions will themselves generate new side-effects, new costs, on other citizens, and so the political process lurches clumsily but powerfully in the direction of ever-greater government control that, taken to its logical conclusion, leads us further down the path of socialism."
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