[astine]

It's not a matter of free markets, it a matter of corruption. Solyndra's business model as a company was provably unsound years before it emerged as scandal but it still received funding from the government because people believed in the idea of a solar company. The thing is that Solyndra ended up not actually contributing much to solar as a business or technology because their source of income was based on politics and not on making solar power workable. Seeing as Solyndra's founders were politically connected, it looks a lot like the real driving motivator here was political back-rubbing and not actual improvement to alternate energy technology.

If you want the government to fund scientific advancement so that alternate energies can become reality, that's one thing, but the government shouldn't be funding provably unsound companies just because they happen to be in a popular field. It's comparable to investing in Pets Dot Com because the Internet is the new thing.

At best government funding of industry won't actually improve the industry and will just be a colossal waste of money. At worse, it will be yet another avenue for politically connected connected millionaires to get free public money put into their private ventures.

[mrj]

Heh, well, the private sector is immensely corrupt, too. Witness the news from Wall Street on just about any given day. It's not fair to point to one thing the government screwed up and say that government is wholly corrupt. It is imperfect but we're supposed to be working towards a "more perfect union," not that we had achieved it already.

The great thing about government is we can involve media, we can send FOIA, and we can scare politicians into doing the right thing if necessary. If government corruption was as bad as you seem to think, Solyndra would still be getting paid and none of us would know about it.

[astine]

No, no. It's one thing if crooked business men steal from and lie to one another, it's another entirely if Congress, which is supposed to prevent that (on at least some level) has an active interest in those lying and cheating business deals.

The problem isn't that the government is currently actively corrupt (it isn't for the most part,) it's that the more it get's involved in the economy as member rather than a governing body, the more motive individual government members and workers have to be corrupt. We have an active free press and law enforcement agency which catches corruption but that's not a good reason to create conflicts of interest where there shouldn't be.

[mrj]

Hm, well I see your point. Direct investment in companies is risky for everybody, governments and individuals.

But what else is there? How is government supposed to create the right conditions for a market solution? The solution was supposed to be carbon credits by making using polluting materials gradually more costly over time and thereby creating the conditions for clean(er) energy to be viable in the market. But that was rejected outright as a "tax."

Government as a member in the market is bad, we can agree there. But outside of direct investment, it gets politically difficult to change anything.