Tuesday, February 28, 2017

FDR Adviser: Using corn as ethanol fuel is wasteful

I laughed out loud when I came across this one. Stuart Chase, the man who coined the term "New Deal" and was an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, bemoaned the "destruction of goods" in his book titled "The Challenge of Waste". Here is the full paragraph: (page 22-23)

DESTRUCTION OF GOODS

Even when the industrial plant is running, we find that enormous quantities of the output never reach the consumer at all by reason of defects in the distribution and market mechanism. In a period of so-called "over-production," we see night riders burning tobacco and cotton, corn used as fuel, milk dumped into rivers by the thousands of gallons, one-half of the potato crop rotting in the ground, carloads of watermelons floating down the Potomac, boat loads of bananas in the waters of New York harbor, textiles and machinery "dumped" in foreign markets at a fraction of the price the domestic consumer is forced to pay, sugar and coffee crops wantonly destroyed.

Given the state of progressivism today and the continual pace of "progress", I have little doubt that in our time, Chase would be fully on-board with the modern ethanol mandate due to all of the power it gives government. Still, to see this back then is quite humorous.

https://tinyurl.com/hww2wx4

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