When Nanny State Political Economics Win

Those of you in the States may have noticed a recent ad campaign by the huge Danish wind system manufacturer, Vestas, on the television lately. Why is it that a Danish wind manufacturer is running these ads and not one from the innovative United States?

Frankly, it's to a great extent because the owners of wind turbines in Denmark got together decades ago and formed an organization that forced the government to make the manufacturers make turbines that actually did what they claimed to do. So when those same turbines came over and competed against US wind turbine manufacturers which had no such burdensome anti-capitalist nanny-state regulation, they ended up kicking our rears.

How bad did they kick our rears? There is really only one natively designed and developed industrial sized wind turbine manufacturer in the United States. That would be Clipper out of Carpenteria, CA. The G.E. turbine has it's roots not in the original G.E. research done in the 1970s but on German technology bought by Enron and then sold, at a bargain price, to G.E. during its liquidation.

This all reminds me a bit of the Nebraska Tractor Testing Lab at the University of Nebraska. In the old days, tractor manufacturers would make unsubstantiated claims and the farmers would pay the price. So the Nebraska legislature decided not to let them do that to farmers anymore (not every farmer has an dynamometer laying around to do it themselves) and required that each tractor be tested before it could be sold in the state.

Somehow John Deere survived that odious process.

When Nanny State Political Economics Win

Those of you in the States may have noticed a recent ad campaign by the huge Danish wind system manufacturer, Vestas, on the television lately. Why is it that a Danish wind manufacturer is running these ads and not one from the innovative United States?

Frankly, it's to a great extent because the owners of wind turbines in Denmark got together decades ago and formed an organization that forced the government to make the manufacturers make turbines that actually did what they claimed to do. So when those same turbines came over and competed against US wind turbine manufacturers which had no such burdensome anti-capitalist nanny-state regulation, they ended up kicking our rears.

How bad did they kick our rears? There is really only one natively designed and developed industrial sized wind turbine manufacturer in the United States. That would be Clipper out of Carpenteria, CA. The G.E. turbine has it's roots not in the original G.E. research done in the 1970s but on German technology bought by Enron and then sold, at a bargain price, to G.E. during its liquidation.

This all reminds me a bit of the Nebraska Tractor Testing Lab at the University of Nebraska. In the old days, tractor manufacturers would make unsubstantiated claims and the farmers would pay the price. So the Nebraska legislature decided not to let them do that to farmers anymore (not every farmer has an dynamometer laying around to do it themselves) and required that each tractor be tested before it could be sold in the state.

Somehow John Deere survived that odious process.