Politics determine winners, losers

In the summer of 2013, state Sen. Rob Hogg conducted a book promotion in Cedar Rapids for his book on global warming. I attended the first meeting at the Blue Strawberry in downtown Cedar Rapids during which Hogg claimed that the reason Solyndra went bankrupt after a nearly $500 million stimulus loan from the Obama administration was because there was too much competition in the solar panel industry.

When did the Obama administration come to that realization? It is hard to imagine a venture capital firm remaining in business very long if they invested money with such little foresight. And it's not as though the money was going into research to make better solar panels. Solar panels have been around for a long time, so Solyndra was not on the cutting edge of technology.

This episode, and many others like it, to say nothing of the overall results of the economic stimulus in general, only reinforces the notion that the stimulus package was used primarily as a way to reward large campaign finance bundlers like George Kaiser. What we're witnessing with a government planned economy is a return to 17th Century mercantilism where the government and politics, rather than individual merit, determines winners and losers.

Fred Hubler

Cedar Rapids