Ah, what I could do with infinite income. Travel all the time. Go fishing… a lot… like every day. Give all my money to charities of my choice, which of course means infinite charities since there’d be infinite money. But I couldn’t give all the money away anyway, because it’d be infinite! What to do?
A quick math/physics lesson.
When a non-zero real number is divided by zero, the result is what mathematicians call “infinity.” Physicists call the packing of mass or energy into zero space a “singularity” — such as occurs at the center of a black hole, where for all intents and purposes there is an infinite gravitational field because of so much mass piled into so little volume. We can expand the principle to economics.
If I give a company $1 million to create jobs but no jobs get created, then mathematically speaking what I’ve got is infinite salary per job created ($1 million divided by zero).
I want one of those jobs.
The Heartland Institute reports on nearly $2 billion from the stimulus package spent on wind power job creation:
Despite promises that stimulus money directed to the wind power industry would create plentiful “green” jobs for unemployed Americans, the American Wind Energy Association reports no increase in overall U.S. wind industry jobs and an actual decline in manufacturing jobs [emphasis added] in the industry.
Forget infinity. Jobs created are not just zero, but lower than zero — as in negative — when dollars pour from government coffers (that’s from us, the taxpayers) into winder power coffers. What this means is that we must divide $2,000,000,000 by a negative number. Alrighty then. The result is not infinity, but instead a reversal in the flow of dollars in the employer-employee relationship. It’s a new theorem. Let’s call it:
Obama’s Green Axiom
Green subsidies destroy jobs and require the people who lost the jobs to pay, let’s say, five years of ”back” salary to the government in appreciation for job destruction.
Sounds about right — as far as capturing the logic of green weenies.
What’s actually going on here? Well, E. Calvin Beisner, a spokesman for a faith-based environmental group says:
Wind power is about three to four times more costly than nuclear, coal, oil, and natural gas, and it’s intermittent and unreliable. That’s why government mandates and subsidies are necessary to get people to produce it.
Oh-oh, fact and logic — the enemies of “progressive thought” in general and “green” energy specifically. Beisner continues:
Any time you see government mandating or subsidizing something, you immediately know it’s not economically efficient. If it were, it’d be profitable, and if it were profitable, private investors would be supporting it in their quest for profits.
Blast that darned logic. Blast economics too. Think that maybe free-market capitalism is the answer? John Locke Foundation regulatory analyst Daren Bakst thinks so.
The right thing for the federal government to do is to stop subsidizing wind power and other renewable energy sources that will never be reliable forms of electricity generation. If we really want to create jobs, we should focus on doing everything we can to promote low-cost, reliable energy, such as removing barriers to building coal-fired power plants.
But starry-eyed idealists known as “progressives” (a.k.a. green weenies when they wax enviro-religiously) would never stoop so low as to accept reality. No, the green way is to use the power of government to force impossible wisdom on a populace that sees right through the wisdom — prosperity be damned. This is our current and and will be our future reality if we do not purge Washington of the progressive menace in 2010 and 2012.
