by Tom Cholewa

Created on: June 24, 2009   Last Updated: July 02, 2009

Can somebody please tell me what happened to all the talk of alternative fuels that will help free us from our dependence on foreign oil? Last year at this time, you couldn't watch television or listen to the radio for more than thirty minutes without hearing a talking point about our need for energy autonomy, then...poof!

So the guy on the left wins and all of a sudden, the ideas which he so vividly described (images of ethanol-powered cars and wind turbine farms and tens of thousands of good-paying jobs for would-be government workers), evaporate like a hockey rink in Arizona.

Granted, Mr. Obama has had a pretty full plate during his first 100 days in office, what with the GM and Wall Street bail-outs, responding (or not) to saber rattling in Iran and North Korea, the ever-popular universal health care issue, and picking out a family dog, but do you think the issue of alternative energy is lying dormant in Washington, waiting patiently while other, more pressing matters get ironed out? I don't.

In fact, if we do not keep abreast of exactly what is going on in Washington with regard to alternative energy legislation, we run the risk of thousands of small business opportunities being pushed out of a pristine marketplace by what essentially amounts to a government monopoly. The truth is, they're not talking about it because they're doing it, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed on 17 February of this year, is proof of that.

Now, I'm not saying that the government shouldn't give alternative energy the push it needs to get going in this country. The government should have done something during the original energy crisis in 1975, but that administration seemed to make a habit out of dropping the ball on every issue that affected America's economic stability, national security and global credibility.

In any case, there's really nothing grossly objectionable about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, aside from the fact that it turns a lucrative marketplace into a bureaucratic agency. If you are an entrepreneur, or even an American who believes that the principles of capitalism are what have made this country the richest in the history of the world, you shouldn't stand for this. I, for one, do not want to wake up one morning to find that the Army Corp of Engineers has planted a wind turbine in my backyard. That's just one step closer to '1984' becoming an instruction manual, rather than a warning.

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