That was the plan.

The free market by itself doesn't provide enough opportunity for graft and corruption. 

//The stimulus energy investments were “a bit of a disaster,” says Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School. “A lot of the problem was in the ways they were implemented. They violated all the rules of how these things should be done.” Not only did the government make large bets on a few companies, in effect picking winners, but it did so without clear rules and criteria for the choices. And, says Lerner, “the selection of the battery and solar companies was extremely opaque. A lot of it seemingly came down to if you had a former assistant secretary of energy doing the lobbying for you.”//

Remember when we had the technology to make machines that didn't take all night to wash dishes?

Life in a free society.

//When bureaucrats make decisions “on behalf of” consumers, consumers don’t get what they want.

Exhibit A: A federal rule to cut energy use of microwave ovens when they are off (this is not a joke). To reduce energy use by two watts per oven (also not a joke) the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Office pushed manufacturers to adopt a technology that caused the ovens to fail 50 percent of the time in the Department of Energy’s own tests.

Exhibit B: Dishwashers with interminable cycle times. To save eight cents of hot water, federal mandates led to wash cycles taking much longer to complete. Two- and three-hour cycles, virtually unheard of 20 years ago, are commonplace today.//