STOP AND GO

Sunlight, water, raw materials and people: these are the
resources for businesses.  They are all we need, but of
course, we must add STOP signs for none of us can do
whatever we please.  Deciding on the STOP signs is a big
problem.  What shall we allow and not allow.  There must
be STOP signs for pollution, but to what degree?  Will we
have STOP signs for CO2?  It isn’t yet clear.  We can
look forward to controversies over the energy diet of our
economy, but I believe we can manage this if we stick to
STOP signs and don’t confuse ourselves with GO signs.
A GO sign is a subsidy, an incentive or a tax credit, an
interference by government of a different sort than the
STOP sign.

      Citizens and businesses don’t need GO signs for they
naturally go everywhere there are no STOP signs.  GO
signs are deception.  Recently, Senator Bingaman
mentioned the dilemma of being handed a GO sign to
use.  He can’t pick winners, is uncomfortable choosing
which interest to favor.    Well he might be.  GO signs are
not what they first appear.  If stop signs seem harsh or
rude, consider the truths behind the GO signs government
uses, ostensibly to guide us.  

      The big GO signs prominently waved before the
public for oil shale, hydrogen, photovoltaics, wind energy,
fusion and other projects are connected to a much greater
sum of tiny private stop signs dispersed far and wide.  
Tax really reads stop.  Citizens and businesses must stop,
or limit, what they would otherwise do in order that
government may do what it wants.

      The billions that seem to inevitably find their way to
the biggest defense contractors and the largest government
labs such as Sandia or Los Alamos are taken dollar by
dollar from the rest of us.  Might we not have made good
use – no, better use - of the money than having politicians
decide for us?  If it is humiliating to think of the choices
taken from us, it gets worse when you add in the handling
charges.  To send another ten million dollars to General
Electric or British Petroleum or another hundred million
to Sandia or Los Alamos, much more than that has to be
collected.  However large the glorious public GO signs
the press sings about, the sum of the tiny private STOP
signs inflicted on us is far greater.

      Aside from the waste in the large handling charges,
(a second city of lobbyists squatting at our Capital) I
think most enjoy placing their own bets.  We don’t like
paying taxes but we do enjoy betting on what we believe
in.
      How have we gotten ourselves in this mess?  Fooling
ourselves that we have a system that enables us,
encourages us, frees us, and uplifts us when, if we look,
we see it is no such thing?  I see this with solar energy.  
People are confused by the go signs. GO signs for
everything.
Go Ethanol
Go wind generators
Go photovoltaics
Go nuclear
Go oil
Go subsidies
Go DOE

      Behind the huge GO signs whose projects require
immense funds assembled in large businesses are the
even greater sums of tiny STOP signs causing neglect of
more efficient traditional ways, neglect of nature and
small uncomplicated enterprises.

      The deception behind the GO sign, the inability to
see that the nourishment for the GO projects has been
taken bit by bit from the rest of us, is aided by our
inflated paper money which makes this a fraud.  Like a
railroad station where you don’t know if it’s you or the
neighboring train that is really moving, wealth passes from
one group to another as we stand, giddy and confused.

      It is no help that our children are forgetting to walk
or bike (under solar power) to school.  Shopping centers
skip windows and skylights for electric lights.  Passive
heating and cooling, once popular in New Mexico, are
forgotten. Clotheslines are outlawed in many
communities.  Solar water heaters are rarely used. We are
being directed by huge GO signs toward denatured solar
energy, toward solar electricity, away from nature, and
some may have noticed toward tyranny, not freedom.

Steve Baer
May 2007