About This Blog

This blog accompanies the website New Electric Politics (http://ceolas.net/).


Why is this blog called Freedom Light Bulb?

The obvious assumption is that this is about individual freedom versus society good.
Wrong.
This is about individual freedom and what is good for society.
On overall energy use as well as on environmental factors, energy standard based bans on simple light bulbs make no sense, as will be shown - while at the same time obviously limiting choice.


But this also goes beyond light bulbs.
It is about the relationship between individual and society, and further to that, the relationship between citizen, industry, government and environment.

It is also about regulations on any product in society:
about seeing the advantages that different products have for different uses,
rather than to look for disadvantages as reasons for their destruction,
including any government mandated "improvement" that unnecessarily affects their advantages, by bureacratic committees setting arbitrary cut-off points for the allowed existence of otherwise safe products - since citizens are otherwise too stupid to buy what committee members and their political promoters think is "right".

Progress is welcomed - not feared.
Progress brings more choice and more advantages, a progress helped - not hindered - by allowing competition against that which already exists.
This gives the best products at the lowest price: including the best energy saving products, since energy saving is a positive marketable advantage.

The Big Picture is about the need to save energy in the first place, and if so, about alternative energy sources, about electricity generation, grid upgrades, smart grid technology.
It is not about "enlightened politicians" engaging with delighted patent profiting corporations to force feed consumers with new unproven shoddy expensive "Green Technology" they would not otherwise buy, so that the idiot citizens can all save money "in the long run".
In the long run they are all dead, and have questionably made savings on what they did not want in the first place. If they had "sufficiently" wanted what is offered instead, the bans would not have been "necessary".


The light bulb ban is a good illustration:

A product ban justified neither on safety grounds or to save energy.
A symbolic feel good gesture to save the planet, that also happens to deliver big profits to lobbying manufacturers by destroying a bright and popular but also cheap and patent expired "generic" product, in the name of government defined progress.

Government control over citizens - or federal control over states - can be questioned at the best of times. And it can clearly be questioned here.

All products have advantages - all have their reason for existence.
Even if light bulbs - or buildings, cars, washing machines, refrigerators, TV sets, computers and much else - "needed" government policies for product and resource saving progress, then government supported consumer information or government taxation would still be better, not just to keep choice, but ironically also to save energy, for reasons described and referenced.


The website light bulb section more thoroughly lays out why the light bulb regulations are a bad idea, whether to save energy, emissions, or money, or for any of the other reasons held to justify the regulations.
This is done mainly with North American, European and Australian references and links, though the principles of course apply everywhere.

Given the research behind the website, I am getting news updates and other information that may better be suited to a blog, so will see how it goes.

A summary of my position on light bulb regulations can be seen here

For a more comprehensive rundown of reasons why light bulb regulations are wrong,
and how consumers hardly save money regardless of energy savings,
see the page "How Regulations are Wrongly Justified"