Remember this —
Solar-cell manufacturer Solyndra became a household name when it collapsed, taking $627 million in American taxpayer dollars with it. It’s the poster company for the government picking winners and losers—or really, just losers—in the energy market. But there are 12 more “green energy” losers that have declared bankruptcy despite attempts to prop them up with taxpayer money—and the list is growing.
There’s a reason why these companies could not rely solely on private financing and needed help from the government. They couldn’t make it on their own; they couldn’t even make it with extra taxpayer help.
These green government “investments” take from one (by taxing or borrowing) and give to another, but they merely move money around. They do not create jobs. They send labor and resources to areas of the economy where they are wasted.
They do not create jobs. They send labor and resources to areas of the economy where they are wasted.
You’d think this would be easier to understand.
I had a conversation over the weekend where I mockingly floated the idea of a Federal Bureau of Hole-Digging and its sister Federal Hole-Filling Agency. My counterpart replied “at least people would have jobs.” After a pint and a half of instruction, I’m still not sure he understood that creating a million hole digging/filling jobs would destroy a million jobs that actually had some value and would raise the standard of living.
From what I’ve read of lefties who think they can manipulate markets while decrying people that manipulate markets, the idea was to cobble together a supply and hope a demand showed up. Or, possibly, to forcibly assemble a demand.
There’s a great deal of magical thinking involved, there. If you build it, they will come. And, hopefully pay more than the going rate so’s you don’t go bankrupt from having built it.
The big disconnect is always the revenue source. Magical thinkers think that money is magically created by the benevolent State, and that there are no negative effects from the “creation” of this money. Never mind that it comes from people who would rather be pursuing useful ends, or that it comes from the yet-unborn, or that it comes from shrinking the value of all the other dollars in our pockets.
No, our benevolent overlords can simply wave a magic wand and create a million jobs that pay $30/hour for leaning on a shovel all day. Who could possibly object?
“Who could possibly object?”
Shovel sharpeners, who wouldn’t have any useful work to do. On account of all the leaning.
Oh, wait! They could sharpen the shovels without having to have dullness first!
Or there could be a union work rule that the junior member of each crew has to drag all the shovels across a concrete surface for an hour each day. Otherwise, the shovel sharpeners might not even bother to sharpen the sharp shovels, and we can’t waste taxpayer money like that.
When Obama said “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen,” he was being completely truthful, he just had companies like Solyndra in mind.