Constant Conservative

While I’m on the topic, here is excellent response to Barack Obama’s statement that he will both remain “green” in his approach to governance as well as create new jobs by so doing. Sounds rather like having one’s cake and eating it too. Let’s see how it shakes out:

Spending money on projects where costs exceed benefits simply to “create jobs” is a bad idea. Taking capital from productive uses and redeploying it to politically popular but nonproductive uses lowers productivity by paying those with “green jobs” more than their output is worth. It’s not welfare, it’s “greenfare.”

This, by the way, was the make-work model followed during the Great Depression. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.

History tells us that FDR, the “bold experimenter” did not know when to leave things alone. I suppose we could call him the “bold meddler in matters beyond his ken” but that doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? Make-work tends to make a number of people feel good about themselves for about as long as it takes them to figure out what is really going on. If Barack Obama truly wants to invigorate the United States economy, then he needs to take a, dare I say, hands off approach. He might be amazed by how many jobs are created–not by the government–but by businesses small and large which have capital with which to work.