Politics

George Will: "Countless" Green Jobs, Literally

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The Washington Post columnist writes about that recent Spanish study that concluded green investments had led to higher, not lower, unemployment:

Still, one can be agnostic about [such] reports while being dismayed by the frequency with which such findings are ignored simply because they question policies that are so invested with righteousness that methodical economic reasoning about their costs and benefits seems unimportant. When the president speaks of "new green energy economies" creating "countless well-paying jobs," perhaps they really are countless, meaning incapable of being counted.

For fervent believers in governments' abilities to control the climate and in the urgent need for them to do so, believing is seeing: They see, through their ideological lenses, governments' green spending as always paying for itself. This is a free-lunch faith comparable to that of those few conservatives who believe that tax cuts always completely pay for themselves by stimulating compensating revenue from economic growth.

Sample the lengthy Reason archive on Obama's "green jobs" here.