Ed Emery Echoes SMI’s Concerns
In a Joplin Independent op-ed, Missouri Rep. Ed Emery has a familiar concern with the state’s ethanol mandate. He has noticed a 10-percent decrease in his car’s fuel efficiency since gas stations began switching to a 90/10 gasoline/ethanol blend in anticipation of the E-10 mandate going into effect.
The Show-Me Institute recently took this decrease in efficiency into account in a study on the impact of the ethanol mandate. The key conclusion of both Emery’s piece and the study is that consumers are getting the shaft both because of the subsidy and the loss of fuel efficiency. We should expect no less when government actors intervene in the marketplace.
Emery sums up the empirical evidence nicely:
Historically, government mandates do not represent good compromise; they violate market forces, pick winners and losers, and frustrate technological progress-all bad for the consumer.
