Losing respect for Rand Paul

[Pat Mustard]

I don't think that solar energy is less efficient than coal.  I know that profitable solar manufacturing can be...and that the largest manufacturers, even when they beat coal, are not what you or I would consider sustainable or environmentally sound by a wide stretch.  

I think that you're expressing an academic naivety.  The market reality is that these dirty producers dominate, and will be your competition.  You will never be able to compete with them in a "free market"..because all other things being equal, the exploitative model is more cost effective to a producer...that's why we do it in the first place.  You will (and we already do) rely on regulation to even make the attempt, and lose.

I think Shadow is laburing under the economists' delusion that because they model markets as perfect systems (ie every actor in a market is a perfectly rational actor with perfect knowledge) that markets are so in real life. He is labouring under the delusion that the ideal is the typical.

And I'd also like to point out that the thinking behind that and other delusions, creating models to support your ideology and then assuming those models are reality, is the reason why the only worthwhile new idea in economics since Keynes*9 was thought up by two psychologists with little training in economic academia.

*There have been good economists since Keynes but they were all universally either followers of Keynes or his collaborator Galbraith.