Government to sell blue sky under cap and trade

States started regulating the sale of securities under what were called Blue Sky Laws to stop con men from selling the blue sky above them. Now the Federal government wants in on the scam in a market manipulation scam that looks to be the biggest con in the history of the world.

The Washington Post reports:

It sounds like alchemy, an act of bureaucratic magic. Under the climate-change bill just approved by a House committee, the U.S. government would literally make a commodity -- as tradable as a Pontiac or a pork belly -- out of thin air.

The bill would require polluters to obtain "allowances" -- permits allowing them to emit a given amount of a greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide or methane. Today, these gases are invisible, free and floating all around us. This bill would put a price on them.

That would accomplish an economist's version of a triple back flip. It would divide a problem of the global commons into pieces and make those who use gas or electricity pay for their share of the emissions that result.

But a closer look through the bill's 940-plus pages shows that selling chunks of air still might not be its most radical idea. The proposal would also create official carbon "offsets" -- in some cases, a government-certified hypothetical calculation of an amount of gases that would have been emitted but were not. Those, too, could be bought by polluters.

...

It has to be the biggest market manipulation scheme since communism which proved to most of the world that a command economy does not work. Waxman Markey will reprove it using an even more complex command model.