Jay Matthews - reconsider your "Wood Welfare" please - Granite Grok

Jay Matthews – reconsider your “Wood Welfare” please

Free MarketsI just read Steve’s post North Country “Wood Welfare” and went to the NHPR article he links to and pulled this additional quote from “beleagured” logger Jay Matthews

“I’m concerned with my electrical bill like anybody, but … I think we’d probably be better off paying a little more money in our rate and then still have the logging community working, [rather than] to put ’em all out of business,” Matthews says.

Note the assumed all inclusive “…we” part – only if you are a logger.  WHY should the rest of us pay more for your lifestyle/business model via enforced corporate welfare?  I’m out of work (but working on a plan) so why should you demand that *I* and others like me have to pay more for you to keep your company going?  Fairness?  I don’t think so. As a software engineer, I’m certainly not getting the gelt from some similar type of legislation – and yes, the Free Market has affected my family adversely.  It’s that “creative destruction” thingy.  And if the landowners “depend” on that low-grade biomass to be trimmed out to grow more valuable timber, well, that’s THEIR problem, not one to be made mine financially due to artificially high electrical costs foisted upon us as Eversource is legislatively mandated to pay ABOVE market rate prices from the biomass generation plants you serve.

Instead of kvetching and complaining about decreased loads to a biomass generating plant that costs ME money, look at it as an opportunity to fix the landowners’ problem differently that still makes them AND you a profit?

As Steve pointed out, he calls himself a “staunch Republican” and rightly points out “If that’s all it takes to flip him Matthews isn’t a staunch Republican”.  If he’s such a “staunch” Republican, why isn’t he adhering to this from the NH GOP platform instead of acting like a whiny Progressive?

We believe in free people, free markets and free enterprise

By definition, government stay OUT of a free market – I’m willing to bet that if Government turned around and placed some really onerous regulations on you (on top of the ones you have now), you’d be singing a different tune.  How about this – when you talk to your “legislators”, yammer about the legislation and bureaucratic regulations to get you OUT of the cost of them and the marketplace limitation they’ve placed on you instead of enforcing higher costs on us for your benefit?

Remember, Free Marketplace never guarantees a profit – only a government “captured” can do that.  Risk and reward based on decisions and effort / execution.  Jay, a hard lesson learned – when you based your “market”, business, and livelihood on government, you forgot that what politics can give you, politics can also take it away just as quickly.

You chose poorly.

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