When the Rent Comes Due

Is the Solyndra fiasco a “scandal?” Well, a half-billion is chump change compared to the expected $14 billion hit taxpayers will get from the auto bailout – or gosh-knows-what for “saving” Wall Street. Even here in Montana just a few years ago, Sen. Max Baucus gifted the tax-exempt Nature Conservancy and Trust for Public Land a $250 million transferable tax earmark.

Nonetheless, Solyndra matters because it epitomizes a political phenomenon that is killing our country: Rent-seeking.

Never heard of it? Rent-seeking is the academic term for, as Wikipedia puts it, trying to “derive economic rent by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur.” Academics specifically focus on “rent seeking” in terms of “efforts to capture special monopoly privileges such as government regulation of free-enterprise competition.”

Now, how many times have you heard some spokescreature spout the phrase “level the playing field” regarding yet another government subsidy (excuse me, “incentive”), which miraculously would “let the market work” – after the government manipulates the rules for that market? Yep, they’re rent-seeking a monopoly at YOUR expense.

Much has been written about how Solyndra jacked up its lobbying budget after Obama and the Democratic Congress took office in January 2009. Overall, Solyndra spent just under $2 million on lobbyists from around November 2007 until June 2011, of which about $1 million went to just two lobbyists … nice work if you can get it.

The lobbying was a great return on “investment,” too – a half-billion in taxpayer cash, loaned at a puny 4.1 percent.

But nobody seems to be onto the real irony – that Solyndra wouldn’t be a scandal if Solyndra had gotten the real “rent” it bet your money on: A government monopoly that would enable Solyndra to pay off the loan, and score zillions more.

Solyndra kept on lobbying because the No. 2 item on the big-ideas agenda (after Obamacare) for the all-Democratic executive branch and legislature was, you bet, the Waxman/Markey carbon-cap legislation.

In July, 2009, the House passed Waxman-Markey by seven votes. The bill then carried a “20 percent by 2020” (catchy, huh?) renewable energy standard (RES) requirement. In essence, the RES would give “green power” purveyors a monopoly on exploiting a new “green” energy “market.”

The timing therefore looked good for inking the loan in September 2009. Even better, the United Nations Copenhagen climate change summit was going to slap binding carbon-emissions limits on the world – or so everyone thought. But in December 2009, despite personal urging from President Obama, no binding agreement happened.

Uh-oh.

In 2010, several Senate bills requiring an RES passed committee, but never made it to the floor before the blowout November election and the bitter end of the 111th Congress – which was also the end of any short-term likelihood the “market” would allow Solyndra to pay its bills, much less cash a jackpot.

Oh, if only Copenhagen had been a “success,” if only America had a carbon-limits law! Then Solyndra shareholders could line their pockets as they empty yours – a screaming “success.” Your energy bill, and Solyndra’s bottom line, would be heading for the moon. Scandalous, isn’t it?

Well, there’s more. As Eric Rosenbaum of The Street put it, “[Solyndra] is the way the game is played in Washington, by everyone, in every sector, and on both sides of the partisan rancor.”

Solyndra is not an isolated case, rather business as usual. Political rent-seeking is a pervasive, bipartisan cancer upon America, of which Solyndra is just one tiny tumor. That, folks, is the real scandal.

I STAND CORRECTED: Last column I wrote that a so-called “community council” referendum for the Whitefish planning “doughnut” flopped because proponents failed to collect enough signatures. Not quite.

Our county commission could still vote to allow a referendum, even an illegal one. Proponents asked and were rejected. Why? Frankly, I’ll bet the “community council” backers never have, or ever will, cast a vote for any of the current commissioners.