After reading the following I’m glad that Kerry is not President (although I’m not exactly thrilled with Bush either…definitely a difficult choice between two unpalatable candidates–at least for me).

But Kerry said the federal government must do its part to help businesses overcome obstacles to competing in the global economy – such as rising healthcare and energy costs, and lagging investments in education and research and development.

Kerry laid out what he called a ”three-pronged competitiveness challenge” facing the nation’s economy – energy, education and incentives for business growth.

Kerry called for focusing on new technologies and alternative fuels to reduce the nation’s oil dependence and create new jobs. His proposal includes tax incentives for automakers to produce more fuel-efficient cars and for consumers to buy them, and developing energy alternatives such as bio-fuels and wind energy.

”You just heard the president give a speech in the State of the Union message and he talked about how America is addicted to oil,” Kerry said. ”Mr. President, the nation is not addicted to oil, your administration is addicted to oil.”

On education and business competitiveness, Kerry called for using the same money that goes for tax cuts to instead be used to improve schooling and for new investments in research and development.–source

Here is my problem with the bulk of these kinds of proposals. They make sense without the government subsidy. What does your typical investor want in a company? A competitive company that is looking for new ways to grow and stay profitable? If the answer to this is yes, then why do we need a government ”three-pronged competitiveness challenge”? We don’t. Granted some businesses will fail to find new ways to grow and remain profitable, but that is just the way the market is. We don’t want to continually prop up failures.

Consider the energy-efficiency nonsense that Kerry is pushing. Suppose I have a company and we’ve just come up with a slick new battery system for hybrid cars that really does allow for 75 mpg of gasoline. Is this going to be a good thing or not? My guess is it will be a good thing. Granted I may not be able to set up a huge factory that cranks out millions of hybrid cars, but I could sell the system to the highest bidder. How much would GM, Ford, Toyota or Honda be willing to pay for such a system? With such a system they could get a jump on their competition in the hybrid market, and with gasoline prices still quite high given prices of the last 10 to 15 years this could be a very lucrative move for whichever company buys the new battery system. Hence there is plenty of incentive to do research on hybrids and their battery systems.

The only possible justification for the government to get involved in such research is if the external benefit of such a battery system is large and the country as a whole would benefit if such technology was not protected with patents and other restrictions. That is, if the hybrids cut pollution then the benefit of this might be sufficient to justify government involvement. However, this is not the justification that Kerry is relying on. Kerry is instead focusing on reducing dependency on foreign oil and creating new jobs. As I’ve argued in this post, using the government to try and “pull ourselves up by the bootstraps” is likely to have precisely the opposite results.

Kerry called for focusing on new technologies and alternative fuels to reduce the nation’s oil dependence and create new jobs. His proposal includes tax incentives for automakers to produce more fuel-efficient cars and for consumers to buy them, and developing energy alternatives such as bio-fuels and wind energy.

Let me translate this propaganda. What Kerry is saying is that he’d rather take the money that we are spending on oil and put it into the hands of American corporations. Funny how Bush is considered to be the Kelptocrat in Chief when Kerry has been making these kinds of statements since he first announced his candidacy for President.

Now to head of charges of being a Bush lickspittle or partisanship, I think many of Bush’s policies are equally dumb. Bush has come out in favor of subsidizing hybrid cars as well. See my posts here and here that are critical of Bush. This kind of nonsense seems to cut across party lines.