Solyndra goes belly up

Many Silicon Valley commuters are familiar with Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer with the enormous, modern, brand spanking new building on the side of Highway 880 as you drive north from San Jose. Construction of the building was completed only recently. The paint on the walls is probably not yet dry.

Well, it turns out that Solyndra is going bankrupt.

Solyndra is one of the crown jewels of President Obama’s “renewable energy” strategy. He gave them a cool half billion dollars and came to Fremont, lowly little Fremont, last year to visit the factory and wax eloquent about its magnificent future. Now the new Solyndra building is just a monument to spectacular failure, yet another reason for commuters stuck in traffic to be depressed in this awful economy.

The government’s investment in Solyndra is typical of how badly the government botches things when it tries to create government sponsored business entities to further its social policies (whether it's creating Solyndra to further its green energy goals or creating Fannie Mae to further its low-income housing policies). Government officials always start with good intentions. But, they have absolutely no understanding of how a business should run. They have no market discipline. They don’t need to care about the money they are throwing away, because it’s not theirs, but has been expropriated from the taxpayer. And they are taken advantage of by savvy operators who are only to happy to suck at the teat of a thoroughly wasteful and corrupt government and devour the enormous amounts of money that the government shovels their way.

Anyone with a little common sense could have guessed as he drove by that Solyndra was a bad investment: land in Fremont is too expensive, the wages you have to pay Fremont workers are too high (Why do you think all hi-tech manufacturing and assembly jobs have fled Silicon Valley and moved overseas?), it makes no sense to build an enormous, brand new facility when the company could have gotten by with much less grandiose digs, and all these extra costs result in the prices of Solyndra’s products being too high for the average buyer. Only a bunch of fanatic bureaucrats blinded by "green religion" would fail to anticipate all this.

The simple fact is that when you have 9% unemployment (actually, much higher in California), when you are attacking the banks every day, when you are strangling American businesses with new regulations, when you are running trillion dollar deficits, it is very difficult for the average American consumer to have enough confidence to invest the thousands of dollars required to install new solar panels on his house. Any new business would find it difficult to operate in such an environment.

The best thing Obama could do to boost a renewable energy industry would be to stop waging war on American businesses, quit coddling the unions, and start cutting government regulation and spending on useless Keynesian stimulus. Actions like these would allow the private sector to start to grow again. And, it is entrepreneurs in the private sector, after all, guys like Steve Jobs of Apple, or Bill Gates of Microsoft, or Larry Ellison of Oracle, or Diaz Nesamoney and Gaurav Dhillon of Informatica, or Vivek Ranadive of Tibco, who produce new jobs, not a bunch of bureaucrats in Washington who are so stupid that they can't make it in the business world and therefore take refuge in academia and the Washington bureaucracy and are called “experts” or “members of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors.”

Obama is an economic disaster. Of course, I have no idea why anyone expected anything different from someone whose main experience before he became POTUS was as a community organizer/agitator. And now, he's managing to give the renewable energy industry a bad name, too.