When the Tulip Mania swept through Holland, foreign observers had a rollicking good time. “Look at those crazy Dutchmen!”, Europeans howled with glee. Their mocking laughs grew louder as a handful of bulbs alleged to grow into tulips of a “special” kind were sold for as much a house or a boat.
The enjoyment was increased by the amazing oddity of the situation. Stolid, respectable Dutchmen, whose very beings were conscious, purposeful manifestations of pious, Calvinist rectitude, suddenly turned into sporting speculators with no more restraint than dogs in heat.
The Mississippi Bubble provided similar opportunities for Frenchmen to alternatively enrich and impoverish themselves. They were as heartily mocked as the bamboozled Dutch. But, being Frenchmen, their fiscal mistakes were expected, if not thought to be unavoidable, due to their very nature. The bursting of their bubble wasn’t even close to being as much fun to watch as the bizarre bankruptcies of the Burghers behind the dikes, but did provide some amusement.
The South Seas gave the English their opportunity to engage in a brief period of national hornswoggling. Like the French, their excesses were also described, correctly, as a “bubble”. It soon burst.
These frauds did provide some wealth redistribution, mostly between people within the respective countries. So, in the aggregate, the nations, themselves, were not overly damaged. The governments did not actually force people to participate in the frauds. On the other hand, they certainly made no substantive attempts to warn their citizenry that chicanery on a national scale was occurring. By their silence, sometimes accompanied by tacit encouragement, citizens were often led to participate, especially by “not missing their opportunity to get in on the ground floor”.
Today, governments encourage those in their prosperous middle-classes to, for instance, buy a politically correct Prius or Volt to “do your part to help stop global warming”. That provides those with money to waste the ennobling feelings of self-righteousness that such ridiculous purchases provide. The poor, however, have no such choices. They are ruthlessly ravaged by the modern fraudsters with the unstoppable power of the state behind them.
As poorer Europeans freeze in cold winters because they can’t afford the expensive electricity that comes from the many, many wind farms, the fun has gone out of the clean energy frauds. When food prices cause malnutrition and starvation because corn is turned into ethanol, the biofuels fraud has ceased to be amusing, much less respectable, except to those personalities so cruel, vicious, and hurtful as to enjoy making the most helpless and poorest people suffer even more.
