The time is right

In the early 1870s, Thomas Alva Edison declared "the time was right" to introduce the stock ticker and the printing telegraph.

It was. Americans, grasping the benefits of his inventions and finding them affordable in relation to those benefits, willingly purchased Mr. Edison's inventions; he and the capitalists who invested in the enterprise grew rich.

As the 1870s rolled on, Mr. Edison declared "the time was right" to offer Americans the telephone, the phonograph and the incandescent electric light bulb. By 1888, he had decided "the time was right" to offer Americans the motion picture camera and projector.

He was usually right. Whole industries grew up around his inventions.

Last week, 120 years later, Nissan President and Chief Executive Officer Carlos Ghosn declared, "The time is right for electric cars," as top executives with more than a dozen companies, including the Nissan Motor Co., Fedex Corp., electric utility PG&E Corp. and battery developers A123 Systems Inc. announced the formation of an "Electrification Coalition" to lay the groundwork for millions of electric cars to reach U.S. highways.

Mr. Ghosn said the auto industry was working quickly to develop zero-emission cars in response to concerns about oil security, tighter emissions requirements in the United States and elsewhere and a public thirst for alternative vehicles not tied to petroleum.

"There's no pie-in-the-sky here," intoned Frederick W. Smith, FedEx's chairman, president and CEO. "It's simply a matter of organization, a matter of will and a matter of execution."

And that matter of getting Congress to hand them a couple trillion dollars seized from taxpayers, of course.

Participants "acknowledged that the proposals would be expensive and would require a major commitment from Congress," The Associated Press reports. "The group's blueprint would cost more than $120 billion over eight years and promote tax credits for the installation of advanced batteries, loan guarantees for the retooling of plants, and tax credits for public charging stations and home charging equipment."

Wow.

Here's a better idea: Let these companies gather investment capital on the private market by convincing would-be investors this scheme will eventually pay off. The investors then put in their money and take the risk -- and if the whole thing works they make healthy profits.

If it doesn't, they take the loss -- not indebted taxpayers.