Of Greek Columns and Green Jobs

by Christopher C. Horner

The ultimate in Obama’s Big Government schemes that still await us is the “global warming” agenda, a necessary component of which is the “green jobs” boondoggle. “Green jobs” is certain to be a central part of the Senate’s stab at cramming down “cap-and-trade”, commencing with introduction of the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman legislation now moved back to a week from tomorrow (to divorce itself from the originally intended association with the loopiness of Earth Day).

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Deconstructing the Big Lie of “Green Jobs” is the focus of a key chapter in my new book just out today, “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.” Go grab it.

Legislating “green jobs” programs means incurring massive debt to pay for make-work as part of a campaign mandating enormous inefficiencies on the economy. It therefore also ultimately means concomitant taxes. It kills real jobs in a trade off for far fewer temporary jobs, largely make-work and at enormous per-job subsidies. This creates a “bubble” that must be constantly pumped full of taxpayer cash simply to maintain it, also ensuring a bust to go with any putative boom.

Read the below excerpt from Power Grab expanding a bit on this appealing sounding (“jobs”!) sales pitch for statutorily mandating enormous inefficiencies on the economy — heck, read the whole book — and you will have a substantially better idea why Barack Obama surrounded himself with Greek columns at his DNC coronation in Denver. That’s the sort of debt we’re talking about. The fella’s prescient, I’ll give him that much. Now, from Power Grab Chapter 5, “Green Jobs and Scam: The Wholesale Fraud of ‘Green Jobs’”:

Consider the Center for American Progress’s (CAP) Andrew Light, whom I will use as our green guinea pig for these purposes, having by chance viewed him repeating his movement’s vacuous catch-phrases to Fox News late in Obama’s first year in office while I was pulling material together for this book. There he stammered, either naively or disingenuously, “you, sort of, if we’re gonna move the world towards a fundamentally new suite of mechanisms for creating energy, that’s, you need people to do that and that, that’s how you make, you’re gonna create jobs.”

Is it possible that the greens actually think that that is the sum total of these mandates’ impacts?

Of course not. These people are ideologues, not complete idiots (even if they seem to think you are). If mandating things is beneficial to employment and the economy, why stop at adding these new great ideas? Let’s mandate many, many more things in the name of global warming. If we wanted to “move” the world onto (feel free to say force, or otherwise use the full weight of government to coerce), say, a vegan diet and stop all of that destructive bovine flatulence, why, that would create jobs making tofu and selling it in vegan food stores, too. Same is true for rickshaws instead of automobiles, both of which are logical extensions of the “green jobs” case. We’d be the richest country in the world, if only we could get beyond old ways of thinking and our resistance to success. There are no downsides at all to this free lunch, and all it will produce is jobs, jobs, jobs.

Readers over the age of thirty may recall that this sort of ministration of the economy by our superiors has been tried in East Germany, and worked so well they had to build a wall to keep all the millionaires in.

Further, this philosophy is absurd on its face given that it tells us that Hurricane Katrina, the Chicago Fire, and other horribles global warming is supposed to bring more of, are actually good for the economy. …

Then there’s the free-lunch fallacy on which “green jobs” depends and which our policy sages ignore. After in effect mandating the destruction of windows in order to replace them, everyone is left with a full window pane if lighter in the wallet, liberated from the confiscated wealth they would have put to productive uses. But, that wealth was transferred to the Burgemeister’s glazier brother in law, in whose faltering alternative-window business the town’s former vice president heavily invested before running around warning townspeople about the horrors of old windows causing hellfire to be rained down on the village. Which, under this theory of economics, would actually be beneficial.

“Green jobs” legislation would be the ultimate cash for clunkers program, except that cash for clunkers applied to automobiles simply moved September’s likely vehicle purchases up to August without actually creating new demand. Green jobs programs do create new demand, if via mandates, for that which otherwise is not demanded (hence the mandate). Therefore, this involves moving forward purchases not of what would be purchased later, but what was unlikely to ever be purchased. Imagine not incentivizing car purchases, but mandating them—for the Amish.

So, there’s a feel for Power Grab. Upset Team Obama and rush out and grab one at your local retailer today, or get it online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Borders.


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Posted Apr 19th 2010 at 6:50 am in Economics, Environment, News | 46 Comments