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Can you imagine being powerful enough to ban everyone's favorite drink to run your competition out of business?
That Rockefeller fella was smart and rich and powerful.
Seems pretty unlikely that an all male, hard-drinking congress would ban liquor only because of the Temperance League.
But think about how money and politics are tangled up nowadays. Do you think all these bailouts would be going on if banking and cars and politicians weren't such tight bedfellows?
I found the other Henry Ford quote I was looking for:
"The small producer of alcohol never need fear competition from the big producers, such as the Whisky Trust. In the first place, the supply of raw material is unlimited. Not until someone learns how to control the sun and its light can there be a monopoly in the raw material for alcohol manufacture."
-Henry Ford, Detroit News, December 13, 1916
Guess Mr. Ford didn't see the episode of THE SIMPSONS where Mr. Burns blocks out the sun!
Seriously though, politics, war over oil, and the control of supply all take away our ability to control our own fates. We allow our power to go to somebody else.
Ethanol has the POTENTIAL to be a much better fuel than gasoline. It can also be created without pulling all this carbon out of the earth and placing it in our atmosphere.
Now I am not saying it IS being created and used the way it should right now. Right now, it's MOSTLY being created in not the best way, but I still feel it's better than gasoline in that it does burn cleaner and is essentially carbon neutral.
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