It was bad enough when the corn biofuel debacle drove up gas and food prices, but now the biofuel debacle is messing with my beer, as chronicled in this article on Reason.

Actually, I already knew this -- the my local brewery, Weyerbacher, had already explained how ethanol was driving up their costs by increasing demand for corn, leading to a shortage of less profitable hops.

Of course, it's the subsidies that make corn ethanol profitable for agriculture, which you'd expect libertarians to get worked up about. Plus, it's increasing the cost of beer, which all freedom loving patriots enjoy. Still, it's not just them. Rolling Stone wrote about the problems with ethanol in "The Ethanol Scam: One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles", the New York Times' Paul Krugman went after it in "The Sum of All Ears" and Time Magazine dedicated a cover story about corn-for-gas in its cover story "The Clean Energy Scam".

It's a working proof of the law of unintended consequences. It seems like a great idea, and I've spoken to people who honestly believe that we can grow our way out of foreign oil dependence. And maybe we can ... we'll just have to stop eating (or end up paying so much for food that we just wish we could stop). Plus, we have the added headache of either not helping with global warming, or actively making it worse.

Unfortunately, this is an election cycle, and it's unlikely anyone will go against ethanol now ... but if momentum keeps building against it, maybe there's a chance that things will start swinging the other way during the mid-term elections.