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David Freddoso, over at NRO, writes:

I've been linked by some conservative bloggers on this topic, and I've gotten a lot of emails that blame liberals for ethanol. I have to say, that's not exactly right. The Left is partly to blame just because they labor under the illusion that state planning can bring about better economic results. If ethanol is bad, then they might say we're just not subsidizing the right thing.

But today, liberal environmentalists are not the ones pushing ethanol. It's Agribusiness, all the way. Most reputable liberals believe ethanol to be a big joke -- an enormous corporate welfare subsidy with no real benefits and many downsides.

On many issues, Conservatives have more in common with ideological liberals than we do with the business interests that come to Washington looking for a handout. Our goal should be to persuade the Left -- to use clear failures we agree on, like ethanol -- to demonstrate that Big Business will always come to Washington for handouts until Washington stops giving them altogether. Each new handout is the next ethanol, the next sugar -- and once you've started giving a handout, it never ends.

I'm so tired of this. "The left" is not what it once was. This isn't 1975, for god's sake. When will these people wake up?

I can only speak for myself, but as a member of the left I have no interest in using "state planning" to "bring about better economic results," nor do I know anyone on the left that does. Those ideas died many, many decades ago. Not that the people on the right bothered to notice.

Do I believe that government has a role to play in setting energy and environmental policies? Yes, of course. But that makes me no different than Milton Friedman, a man no one would ever describe as anywhere near the left. Both modern liberals and more traditional conservatives agree on this: the question is not if government will get involved, but how.

Markets cannot do everything on their own. Some problem are failures of collective action beyond the reach of the magic of markets to solve. This is why governments exist: to provide us with the institutions and structures necessary to solve problems that we could never solve on our own.

Here is but one hypothetical example. Imagine that tomorrow all of the world's car manufacturers simultaneously announced that they had created a low cost, zero emission, hydrogen powered vehicle. Imagine too that they announced these vehicles were ready to put into immediate production, and that by the end of the decade tens of millions of cars would be ready to be sold.

Sounds great, right? A simple, easy, and quite significant step that would simultaneously reduce our dependence on oil and drastically reduce our carbon footprint. It would be something close to a miracle, right? Yes, but....

All of our infrastructure is based around gasoline. There are hundreds of thousands of gas stations in the United States, and not one of them sells hydrogen. Without gas stations, no one will buy the cars. But unless someone will buy the cars, there is no reason for them to be produced. Chicken, meet egg; egg, meet chicken.

This would be a classic collective action problem. Over time - decades perhaps - it is possible that the market might solve this on its own. But we don't have decades to wait. We need the cars now.

The only solution in this instance would be for government to get directly involved in converting the nation's infrastructure from carbon to hydrogen. There quite literally is no other solution. Would it be inefficient? Yes. Would there be waste, fraud, and abuse? Of course. Might it be immense? Yes. Might there be sensible things we could do to minimize it? Yes. Businesses are inefficient, too, and they are often full of waste, fraud, and abuse. The world is not perfect, but we live our lives nonetheless. We muddle through. It is often the best and only thing we can do.

Government isn't always the solution, but it isn't always the problem, either. It is just like everything else we humans create: imperfect. We over here on the left already know that. We aren't the problem. It is conservatives that are the problem.

They are the ones who create offices of faith based initiatives. They are the ones who ignore and suppress science when its findings are inconvenient. They are the ones who launch wars and depose regimes in the belief that entire societies can be transformed through the actions of the state. They are the ones "laboring under illusions," not us.

Were conservatives to come to their senses, then perhaps we might be able to work with them. But so long as they are convinced that we on the left are either secret socialists and/or terrorists sympathizers, I have no interest in even trying to find common ground. They and their misguided ideas are a danger to our nation, and so long as that is true, we must continue to fight to marginalize them. Reconciliation can and must come eventually, but not yet. Not even nearly yet...

[H/T: Andrew Sullivan]

UPDATE: As if on cue...

Joseph Wassmann thought he had a secure position producing videos for the U.S. Military Academy, but not long ago he found his job on the line because of a Bush administration plan to inject more efficiency into the federal bureaucracy.

Wassmann, 40, was among a group of information management employees at West Point who had to prove that they could do their jobs better and more cheaply than a private contractor. If they could not, they were told, the work would be outsourced. It was all part of President Bush's government-wide plan to reduce costs by inviting contractors to bid on about 425,000 federal jobs that could be considered "commercial" in nature.

The West Point competition dragged on for more than two years. In the end, Wassmann and most of his co-workers won, but only by agreeing to downsize from 119 employees to 88. And the mood has never been worse, he said.

"Tensions are at an all-time high," he said. "We have to cut ourselves to the bone to win these bids. . . . And morale is just destroyed afterward."

The public-private face-off at West Point illustrates just what Bush envisioned when he proposed the "competitive sourcing" initiative in 2001 as part of his management agenda. It turned on a simple idea: Force federal employees to compete for their jobs against private contractors and costs will decrease, even if the work ultimately stays in-house.

But as Bush's presidency winds down, the program's critics say it has had disappointing results and shaken morale among the federal government's 1.8 million civil servants.

Private contractors have grown increasingly reluctant to participate in the competitions, which federal employees have won 83 percent of the time.

The program fell short of the president's goals in scope and in cost savings. Between 2003 and 2006, agencies completed competitions for fewer than 50,000 jobs, a fraction of what Bush envisioned.

Moreover, the Government Accountability Office found that the administration has overstated the savings from some competitions by undercounting the costs of running them. Collectively, they cost $225 million, or about $4,800 per job, according to White House figures.

"The competitive sourcing initiative did little to improve management, produced a ton of worthless paper, demoralized thousands of workers and cost a bundle, all to prove that federal employees are pretty good after all," said Paul C. Light, a professor of government at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Their ideology told them that markets were magical, and magic is good! Magic must be spread everywhere and always! Never mind the decades worth of data and theory that have been developed by political scientists and policy analysts. Fact, who needs them? If we just believe in the magic of markets, all of those theories and analyses will just disappear!

Or not.