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Comment by chris_va | Hacker News Reader

That's the beauty of capitalism. You can just let it run its course and not worry about it. If something is less efficient, it will not be able to compete in the market for very long.

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Yes, but in the U.S. case we don't have theoretical free markets like that. There's too complex a network of government subsidies, unequal taxes, and corporate lobbying putting many things on the market that would not survive normally. I'm not saying this is inherently bad, just that we shouldn't think we can just let things run its course and the less efficient things will be weeded out.

I would argue that if human beings and their well-being is important, a theoretical fee market system would not be ideal. Thats fine if you are willing to suffer as a result and the system is more important than you (or others) but because that will generally not be true we have to kludge it together and make the market as free as we generally can with exceptions to not ruin too many lives. Once you kludge it here and there you can start introducing kludges just for your own gain.

My basic idea was that when seeing this headline people don't go "more people? great!" but instead go "more people? how can we fix that?"

That is a good entrepreneurial instinct. If you or a competitor comes in and can create the same value with fewer people, then that drives consumer prices down, which is one of the end goals.

Having said that, there is nothing wrong with employing more people, as long as they are creating marginal economic value. Hiring 10 people to make $10M is better than 5 people to make $9M for a company.

Many energy sources require subsidies though.

Wind and solar are competitive with coal and natural gas without subsidies.

Regardless, there are subsidies for wind power, which may even be the cause for the "wind boom":

https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/12/21/subsidies-drive-us...

Good! Fossil fuels have a 100 year head start.

Since there are also subsidies for fossil fuels, renewable subsidies are necessary just to bring the market back in line.

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