There is a huge flaw in this analogy: the use of "won't stand a chance", trying to imply that the aim of the ban is to keep CFL manufacturers in business. It isn't. The purpose is to stop people from wasting energy with inefficient bulbs. As long as any number of people are wasting electricity with incandescent bulbs it is worth banning them, even if the CFL manufacturers could survive without them.
You're right, my analogy was not perfect, but then it was aiming more for wittiness than accuracy since "light bulbs" wasn't a gigantic topic of debate. Anyhow, to give a more serious reply, I think you miss the point that "wasting electricity" is, in fact, already factored into the equation by the fact that consumers already pay for the electricity that they allegedly waste, and that the amount of energy wasted by inefficient lightbulbs is utterly dwarfed by, say, people leaving computers running, people running vacuum cleaners often, and so on. Even if you think that replacing incandescents with other bulbs will increase energy efficiency (and ignoring any negative environmental effects eg. the problems of disposing of mercury in CFLs), the fact that the bans are largely on
sales and manufacturing of such bulbs means that many people have basically bought entire inventories off the shelves so that they can continue to use them for whatever reason far into the future, negating the effectiveness of such a ban.
I think you would find that CFL manufacturers don't mind the government basically mandating the purchase of their bulbs in the future, though, and may even lobby in favour of it.
Furthermore, the switch from one product to another takes time - it's not like everyone stopped using horses and switched to cars as soon as cars were invented (it's kindof a poor analogy anyway because cars and horses do not have exactly the same use, but let's focus purely on horses as a means of transportation down public roads). Even if most people would end up switching away from incandescent bulbs eventually, we are facing an environmental crisis now. It is therefore worthwhile for the government to accelerate the change so that less damage is done to the environment.
See above. Anyhow, assuming we are facing an "Environmental crisis" (and that might just be a tad leaning towards hyperbole) at this very instant, there are many measures in facing it that would be quite a bit more immediately successful in dealing with such a problem.
To fix the analogy you need to add "horses are much worse for the environment than cars" as an additional factor. You could then state "Even though car manufacturers are doing fine and in the long run will probably win out we should ban horses because the changeover will take time, and during that changeover time we will be needlessly damaging our environment."
This argument could be interchanged to argue in favour of a ban of about any product with slightly improved energy efficiency. Actually, it would fit even better for arguing in favour of confiscating old household appliances (refrigerators and washing machines especially), since the energy inefficiency is orders of magnitude higher compared to with light bulbs.
Once again, there is no ban on incandescent lightbulbs. There is a program of incrementally increasing energy efficiency standards that may or may not result in incandescents becoming sub-standard or prohibitively expensive.
In Canada, there is, in fact, a ban on incandescent lightbulbs that went into effect about a week ago (on higher wattages, granted, though the standards get more stringent over time). Stop being so USA-centric.