In the Washington Post, Steven Mufson does a nice job describing how Solyndra is just one of many energy subsidy failures of recent decades.

I covered some of the same topics as Mufson–including the Clinch River Breeder Reactor and the Synthetic Fuels Corporation–in this study at Downsizing Government. However, I presented the politics of these two projects a bit differently than Mufson. He sort of suggests that the Reagan administration was gunning to kill the Clinch River project, and that only the Carter administration was to blame for Synthetic Fuels.

Regarding Clinch River, President Carter should be credited with trying hard to kill it, but Congress blocked him. The Reagan administration initially supported the project, but that changed as the bad news mounted over time. I noted: “The combination of bad economics, environmental problems, and cost overruns gave the upper hand to project opponents in Congress, and funding was cut off by a fairly narrow vote in the Senate.”

Regarding Synthetic Fuels, the Reagan administration was once again initially supportive, and it only later changed course due to falling oil prices and numerous scandals in the program. When it became clear that the political winds were changing, I noted that “there was a mad dash to hand out subsidies before Congress shut the project down.”

That sounds familiar doesn’t it?

Over at Downsizing the Federal Government, we focused on the following issues this past week:

• The “government efficiency” snake-oil salesmanship from politicians has become tiresome, especially when it comes from high-profile Republicans like Mitt Romney.
• An establishment commission is planning to “reform the nation’s housing policy by crafting a package of realistic and actionable policy recommendations” for the Beltway establishment’s consideration. Hold onto your wallets, taxpayers.
• Certain people saw the “Christmas Tree Tax” as an opportunity to further partisan aims rather than provoke a discussion and debate on the proper role of the federal government.
• On so-called shallow loss proposals to provide subsidies for farms in cases when farm revenues fall slightly below the record high levels of the past few years.
• Politicians who fixate on “government efficiency” probably aren’t truly interested in reducing the size and scope of government.

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Coloradans resoundingly rejected a tax hike for education spending last week. In a new op-ed, I note how wise that decision was, and explain how lowering taxes actually does improve education—while saving taxpayers millions of dollars along the way.

I’m not a fan of international bureaucracies.

I’ve criticized the United Nations for wanting global taxes. I’ve condemned the International Monetary Fund for promoting bigger government. I’ve even excoriated the largely unknown Basel Committee on Banking Supervision for misguided regulations that contributed to the financial crisis.

But the worse international bureaucracy, at least when measured on a per-dollar-spent basis, has to be the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

[caption align=right]

OECD Headquarters: Living the good life at US expense[/caption]

American taxpayers finance nearly one-fourth of the OECD’s budget, at a cost of more than $100 million per year, and in exchange we get a never-ending stream of bad policy recommendations.

This Center for Freedom and Prosperity study has all the gory details. The OECD bureaucrats (who get tax-free salaries, by the way) endorsed Obamacare, supported the failed stimulus, and are big advocates of a value-added tax for America.

What’s especially frustrating is that the OECD initially was designed to be a relatively innocuous bureaucracy that focused on statistics. Indeed, it was even viewed as a free-market counterpart to the Soviet Bloc’s Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.

My, how things change.

Perhaps the most odious example of bad OECD policy is the campaign against tax competition. Beginning during the 1990s, the OECD has attacked low-tax jurisdiction for the supposed crime of having good tax laws that attract jobs and capital from high-tax nations such as France and Greece.

So why did the OECD launch this project to prop up Europe’s welfare states? The answer can be found in an excellent new study from Professor Andrew Morriss at the University of Alabama Law School and Lotta Moberg, a Ph.D student in economics at George Mason University.

It’s a publication designed for academic journals, but it avoids jargon and gibberish, so a regular person can read and understand how the OECD has morphed from a harmless (though presumably still wasteful) bureaucracy into a force for global statism. Here are some of the key findings in the study.

[T]his transition was in part the result of entrepreneurship by a group of OECD staff, who spotted an opportunity to expand their mission, bringing with it a concomitant increase in resources and prestige. They accomplished this by providing a framework for interests within a group of high tax states to create a cartel that would channel competition in tax policy away from areas where those states had a competitive disadvantage and toward areas in which they had a competitive advantage. …These states then sought to restrict tax competition, which in turn required them to create a means of delegitimizing such competition and by preventing each other from defecting from the cartel by lowering tax rates unilaterally. …The French … realized that single-country financial controls were unworkable within a global financial system.

In other words, the bureaucrats at the OECD and governments from decrepit welfare states like France both saw a benefit in creating a tax cartel.

This “OPEC for politicians” is grossly contrary to good tax policy, international comity, and national sovereignty. But those factors didn’t matter.

Unfortunately, it’s quite likely that we will see further schemes from the OECD and other international bureaucracies. The politicians have learned that transnational cartels increase their power.

[T]he evolution of the OECD from a facilitator of economic competition to a cartel enforcer represents something new in international organization behavior. …The cartelization of tax policy is an important effort to hold off the impact of the forces unleashed by competition on a more level playing field, but it is certainly not the only one. …If the opportunity is provided, it may be better from a politician’s point of view to form a cartel on taxation as a protection. With a cartel, there are fewer constraints on domestic policy, improving the politicians’ welfare by increasing the degrees of freedom available to satisfy domestic constituents and win re-election.

This video has more information on why the OECD is contrary to the interests of American taxpayers.

Needless to say, it is outrageous that the politicians in Washington are sending more than $100 million to Paris every year to subsidize this bureaucracy. For all intents and purposes, we are being coerced into paying for a bunch of European bureaucrats so they can then advocate even bigger government in the United States.

And those bureaucrats get tax-free salaries while pushing for higher taxes for the rest of us!

Can anyone think of a more destructive item in the federal budget, at least when measured on a per-dollar-spent basis? I can’t. That’s why I’ve been fighting the OECD for years, even to the point that the bureaucrats threatened to put me in a Mexican jail for the “crime” of standing in the public lobby of a public hotel.

Here’s the story, from the Bismarck Tribune:

Angered by a federal health care law that most of them despise, North Dakota House Republicans defeated legislation Thursday to give state officials authority over a health insurance marketing agency that the law requires states to establish.

(Correction: ObamaCare does not require states to create an Exchange.)

They said endorsing state administration of the agency, which is called a health insurance exchange, would be tantamount to approving the federal health reform law itself.

“I certainly am not going to legitimize Obamacare with my vote,” said Rep. Wes Belter, R‑Fargo. “We, as a state of North Dakota, need to follow some of the other states who have said no… It is the law, but the fight should not be over.”

Supporters … said Thursday’s vote was the state’s last realistic chance for running its own exchange, since deadlines are looming and the Legislature does not meet again until January 2013…

After a debate that lasted almost two hours, representatives voted 64–30 late Thursday to reject the legislation. All but 10 of the House’s 69 Republicans voted against the bill, while 20 of its 25 Democrats supported it…

Opponents of the bill said they resented the pressure, which they said was caused by unrealistic deadlines in the federal health care law.

Rep. Keith Kempenich, R‑Bowman, compared the situation to high-pressure sales tactics in a used car lot.

“If the federal government was really sincere on trying to reform health care, they wouldn’t have put these artificial dates in,” Kempenich said. “Whenever I’ve seen things that get rushed like this, or they get where you’re pressured like this, usually, they’re full of it, and that’s what this is starting to look like.”

Kudos to the North Dakota Policy Council’s Brett Narloch.

Libertarianism.org’s first week was a terrific success. If you haven’t visited yet, I encourage you to do so. The site’s an excellent place to learn about and explore the theory and history of liberty.

This week Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org added

• A new video in our Libertarian View series. Blogger and GMU professor Don Boudreaux tells how his working-class upbringing and economics training led him to libertarianism.
• George H. Smith published a new essay in his Excursions series. Smith examines colonial reaction to the Declaration of Independence’s list of grievances as well as the political principles informing its drafting.
• Jason Kuznicki wrote a long blog post on the difference between “ideal acts morality” and “common sense ethics”—and how these two approaches play out in politics and real life.
• Miles Pope began a series of posts on Jan Narveson’s classic book, The Libertarian Idea.
• I blogged about Elizabeth Warren’s popular argument for paying higher taxes and how it relates to the intriguing subset of political philosophy dealing with political obligation.
• Finally, Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org expanded its social networking reach to Google+. So if you’re a Google+ user, be sure to circle Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. And while you’re at it, we’re also on Facebook and Twitter.

Best-selling author Glenn Greenwald debated former drug czar John Walters at Brown University last night before 300 students and faculty. Glenn authored Cato’s landmark study on the decriminalization of drugs in Portugal and he will be speaking at our drug conference next week.