"A Good Investment"

This weekend past, we recognized the anniversary of the birth of Thomas Edison. Hollywood made a couple of movies about Tom: “Young Edison” with Mickey Rooney, and “Thomas Edison” with Spencer Tracy. Edison was called the genius from Menlo Park, and he certainly was. Every time you watch a movie or turn on a light when entering a room, you can thank Tom Edison. At times, Edison didn’t have two nickels to rub together, yet he continued with his work, the work from which the entire world has benefited. Mass electric power was from the Edison Company, not a public company at the time, but a private enterprise from an inventive genius. Edison didn’t seek any public funding while he was doing his experiments; at times he had very little money, and some of his fellow scientists that worked with him went without pay in order to help fulfill Edison’s dreams. None of those men knew whether Edison would succeed or fail, yet they continued on the quest. To the credit of Edison and his associates, we found a method of affordable power for America and the rest of the world, and they never asked for a government grant or loan! I’m sure over the course of past years billions upon billions of dollars have been made by different power companies around the world. Risk of investment and invention are the keys to the free enterprise system; sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. If the public wants what you make, then you will succeed; if they don’t, you won’t!

SOLYNDRA is a great example of a bad idea! Five hundred and twenty-eight million dollars of “government money” (your tax money) was given to a “bad risk” investment. In 2006, this company asked the George Bush administration for funding for this very same project. After some investigation, the advisors to the President said SOLYNDRA would be bankrupt by September of 2011, and an investment into this company would be money thrown away. Wow, talk about prophetic vision! Almost to the day, SOLYNDRA threw its hands into the air in bankruptcy. The owners of the company still got paid, and it was quite a bundle too. The only people to get stuck were American taxpayers; we took all the risk, even though we weren’t in on the decision to invest in this debacle.

It didn’t take SOLYNDRA too long to give up, after all, it wasn’t their “dream”, it was the “dream of Barack Obama”. They were actually risking very little and they already reaped a massive reward in your tax dollars. Not one executive went without a paycheck to keep things going; they just closed the doors. Hourly workers and American taxpayers were the ones left with stunned surprise.

In the free market, a business failure is an acceptable risk if you believe in what you are doing; but you must be the one taking the risk, not an innocent public. Since Mr. Obama has been endorsing and funding companies like SOLYNDRA, the attrition rate has been well above an acceptable level. This policy by Barack Obama has been an abysmal failure because those companies didn’t offer anything that the free market wanted, and they had no “skin in the game” themselves.

America thrives on the ideas of men like Thomas Edison, who are willing to take their own risks, and make their own sacrifices, and then reap their own rewards. This is capitalism, this is the free market and this is why we have had success in America.