Adam Smith would smirk. The latest iteration of old-fashioned mercantilism now links, in a ludicrously appropriate way, the fecal matter of Kansas cows with the green activism of California legislators. In a “we-shoulda-seen-it-comin’” development, California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard plan is incentivizing Kansas dairies to sell—no bullshit-–cow methane to California industrialists. Talk about a (ahem) windfall…
The idea, though technically feasible, is not what you might hope–i.e., a rational market use of an otherwise wasted by-product. No, this scheme is instead the result of purely artificial market tinkering by fatally conceited bureaucrats prosecuting a self-declared crusade on carbon emissions. And, not surprisingly, some businesses are complicit, crudely exemplifying Smith’s warnings about the eagerness of business to collude with government rule-makers:
To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the [business] dealers…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and…
