The libs keep telling us about all the jobs Obama's energy policies are going to create. It's going to take a lot of people to run all those power lines and put up wind turbines and solar panels.
If you're someone who needs a job -- or a wind turbine -- I suppose that's a benefit. But if you just want to buy groceries and put food on your table, you should understand that those jobs are a cost.
The economy's a big supermarket where we're all stocking the shelves and filling our baskets at the same time, and putting a million people to work stocking shelves with wind turbines isn't going to fill any baskets with groceries. What's more, when a million wind turbine workers go to fill up their own baskets, they're not going to be shopping in the windmill aisle. When they take their groceries, they'll be getting a share of yours. You'll see this when the rising price of groceries forces you to buy less -- that's the market's way of cutting the wind turbine folks in on your slice of the pie. This is what happens anytime you take a million people out of grocery production and put them to work for government -- less pie, but more mouths.
Sure, some of these wind turbine people will just transfer over from the petroleum business, and some petroleum workers will be freed up to produce groceries instead. But in the end you'll still come out behind for one simple fact: fossil fuels are the cheapest thing to put in your shopping basket. To put alternative energy sources in your shopping cart, you're going to have to pay more, and that means buying fewer real groceries.
Putting people to work is supposed to mean we all live better. When people go to work and we're less well off as a group, it's a sure clue that the government is somehow involved. And the difference -- between how much better things should get and how much worse they do get -- well, that's a cost.
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