John Hinderaker at Powerline exposes the hypocrisy of hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer, who is willing to spend millions opposing fossil fuel projects like the Keystone XL pipeline. Why? Because Steyer stands to make many more millions in profits from “green energy.”
Most environmentalists are just misguided idiots. It takes a greedy capitalist to turn that idiocy into a profit opportunity.
Level of surprise: zero.
There are wealthy who indulge in things soley for their own benefit.
I strongly disagree. It takes government regulation and cronyism to turn idiocy into profit opportunity.
[…] TOM: Having the right political friends and promoting the “correct” causes can really pay off… […]
*ahem* Al Gore
Crony capitalism at its finest.
I find crony capitalism to be as nonsensical as dehydrated water. You can’t have effective cronyism with capitalism; it takes government control of the market to make it work.
The analogy you try fails miserably. Crony capitalism describes exactly what you posit. The lobby Congress and the bureaucracy to get the law and regulation that benefits them and suppresses their competition.
A very good example of a crony capitalist.
As I tell my kids, “Everyone has an agenda. Including me.”
“Capitalism” does not mean “100% Free Markets”
That’s why we have the term “Free-Market Capitalism.”
Between 2001 and 2008, Powerline was my first read, every day.
They seem to be doing some good work still. Sort of like how George Will occasionally pens an excellent column.
But they went out of their way to alienate many Tea Party types, and did so with a will. So I’ll just say I’m glad that they, like George Will, aren’t a total loss.
It is NOT his “green energy” subsidized ventures that makes him a hypocrite. It’s the fact that he and his fund have made a boatload of money investing in foreign coal companies and funding their mergers, and as far as anyone knows, continue to do so.
So Steyer’s personal War on Domestic Coal is just causing problems for his competition, making his overseas coal investments more valuable. So does the Obama Administration’s refusal to issue permits for exporting coal (and other fossil fuels, including natural gas).
This guy is walking the line between hypocrisy and outright corruption.
Maybe we need a special term for 100% cronies.
Crony-ist?
Ahh, that explains the call to Mark Levin the other day about a Power Plant in Connecticut that was shipping in coal from Indonesia