An essay by Steve Baer contrasting "sunshine" — free, natural, available to everyone — with "tax shine," the distortions created by solar tax credits and subsidies.
Baer coins "tax shine" as a satirical counterpart to sunshine. His central claim: solar tax credits don't help the sun — they pervert its use. Tax shine has "caused acres of roof, even flat roofs not pointing at the sun, to be covered with photovoltaic panels with no space for skylights." It has led Iowa and Indiana fields to grow corn for ethanol "even though we read the farmer uses more than one gallon of oil for each gallon of ethanol."
The contrast runs through the whole piece:
Tax shine doesn't pass through windows or skylights. It doesn't reach solar water heaters. It reaches only PV panels and corn. Baer argues that "bright tax shine, though it brings more widespread shade than shine, distracts the public from taking care of itself. Public relations paid for by tax shine has brought us under a spell, we have forgotten the benefits of simple windows and skylights."
This essay is the purest expression of a thread that runs through Sunmen, the Dear shareholders letter, and the Corrales Comment pieces: Baer's conviction that subsidies corrupt solar work. The Sunmen manifesto says it explicitly: "Sunmen don't want subsidies, solar tax credits, green energy laws or other such influences on their work." The shareholders letter shows Baer's alternative: raise private capital, build prototypes, prove the physics.
The essay also explains why the archive focuses on passive systems — windows, skylights, unglazed collectors, water storage — rather than photovoltaics. For Baer, the simple uses of the sun are the ones tax shine has made everyone forget.