Investments in “green energy” create jobs, just like any other form of investment in physical assets. We’re told, however, that the transition to renewable energy sources will create a veritable jobs bonanza! Apparently, this is believed to be a great selling point for everyone to get behind. Sure, promoting job creation is always popular with politicians, and it is very popular with private actors seeking to win public funding of one kind or another.
The heavy emphasis on jobs creation brings to mind an old Milton Friedman story about a visit to China during which dignitaries brought him to a construction site, no doubt thinking he’d be impressed with their progressive investments in infrastructure. At the site, Friedman noticed workers digging a large trench or arroyo with shovels. When he asked why bulldozers or backhoes weren’t used, he was told that the jobs were too valuable. His response was something like, “Then have them use spoons!” The lesson, of course, is that merely creating jobs is not a prescription for building wealth and prosperity. But there is more at stake here than the low productivity of construction workers who lack the best tools.
There are some bad rationales for heavy investment in renewable energy sources, and I’ve addressed those at length previously. The appeal to job creation, however, is awful on simple economic grounds. It emphasizes a thing that is easily counted while ignoring massive costs that are generally untallied.
In the U.S. we have a huge base of productive capital that meets our energy needs, the bulk of which is built to utilize fossil fuels. That plant constitutes wealth to society, and not just to those with an ownership interest. Dispatchable power is available to the public at a rate below that at which they value the power. That ability to deliver consumer surplus on demand is a major aspect qualifying power capacity as societal wealth. The push for renewables, if wholly successful, would make the existing base of generating capacity redundant. There is no doubt that the ultimate goal of renewable energy advocates is to destroy existing capacity reliant on fossil fuels. They simply have not come to grips with the reality that it meets energy needs far more efficiently than intermittent renewables like wind and solar power. In spirit, the effort bears a strong similarity to destroying bulldozers to replace them with shovels, or spoons!
Recently, Michael Munger discussed the mistaken notion that renewable investments are justified based on job creation. He noted that with a coincident dismantling of the existing base of power generation, it amounts to exactly what Frederic Bastiat called thebroken window fallacy, which insists that breaking windows is a great way to keep glaziers fully employed. There are many examples and variations on this idea, including so-called “planned obsolescence”.
Bastiat poked fun at an elite French government official who had marveled at the economic gains reaped in England with the rebuilding of London following the “Great Fire” of 1666. Bastiat engaged in some satire by suggesting that France could greatly benefit from burning Paris to the ground. But his point was serious: we often hear that reconstruction provides a silver lining for workers following hurricanes or other disasters. Fair enough: rebuild we must. The Keynesians among us would say it works out well for workers who are otherwise unemployed. Disasters destroy wealth, however, and often lives, not to mention opportunities for incremental wealth creation that are lost forever. The reconstruction jobs are not “good news”!
Unfortunately, people get carried away with broken windows arguments, using them to justify their own pet projects. The addition of new competing products and technologies is unquestionably healthy, but not when one side enlists the state as a partner in destroying viable incumbents and existing public or private wealth. For that matter, the state and its allies seem intent on destroying invested physical capital even before it’s services can come on line… if it’s viewed as the “wrong” kind of capital.
The costs of a transition to renewables is massive. The “big ask” for green energy involves not just taxpayer support for the build and usage, with all the inefficiencies endemic to taxation and market interventions. So-called green energy also entails huge environmental costs, and it calls for the wholesale destruction of an embedded industry. That means decommissioning invested assets having many years of useful life. And that goes for physical plant all the way from the wellhead to final use, including the destruction of stoves, cars, and other machines too numerous to mention. Those machines, by the way, still account for roughly 80% of our power use.
I leave you with part of Munger’s closing:
“Once you are duped into believing destruction is productive, almost everything that a rational public policy would label as a cost becomes, by some judo move of seraphic intuition, a benefit. … The problem is that jobs are not wealth. Wealth is access to the goods, products, and services that make our lives better. It is true that ‘studies show’ that wiping out all our productive wealth based on fossil fuels … would create jobs. Those ‘studies’ are among the best arguments against doing anything of the sort.”
Statistics and measurement might not be critical to the exercise of the authoritarian impulse, but they have served to enable the technocratic tyranny idealized by contemporary statists. Certain influential thinkers have claimed our ability to compile statistics helps give rise to the bureaucratized state. I ran across a great post that led with that topic: “The Brutalization of Compassion” by David McGrogan. The mere ability to compile relevant statistics on a population and its well being (income, jobs, wages, inequality, mortality, suicide, etc… ) can motivate action by authorities to “improve” matters. The purpose might be to get ahead of rival states, or the action might be rationalized as compassion. But watch out! McGrogan quotes a bit of cautionary wisdom from Lionel Trilling:
“‘When once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest,’ he put it, something within us causes us to then ‘go on and make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.’”
Ultimately, to pursue their vision, interventionists must impose controls on behaviors. In practice, that means any variance or attempted variance must be penalized. Here’s McGrogan’s description of the steps in this process:
“The conceptualisation of the population as a field of action, and the measurement of statistical phenomenon within it – the taking of an ‘enlightened interest’ in it – gives rise to both ‘pity,’ or compassion, and the application of ‘wisdom’ to resolve its problems. What is left, of course, is coercion, and we do not need to look far to identify it in the many means by which the modern state subjects the population to a kind of Tocquevillian ‘soft despotism,’ constantly manipulating, cajoling and maneuvering it this way and that for its own good, whether through compulsory state education or ‘sin taxes’ or anything in between.”
Follow the Scientism
I can’t neglect to mention another important condition: the hubris among apparatchiks who imagine the state can improve upon private institutions to achieve social betterment. They will always fail in attempts to replace the action of the private markets and the price mechanism to process information relating to scarcities and preferences. Absent that facility, human planners cannot guide flows of resources to their most valued uses. In fact, they nearly always botch it!
Government provision of public goods is one concession worth making, but the state capacity needed to fulfill this legitimate function is subject to severe mission creep: we frequently see efforts to characterize goods and service as “public” despite benefits that are almost wholly private (e.g. education). Likewise, we often hear exaggerated claims of “harms” requiring state intervention (e.g. carbon emissions). These situations often hinge purely on politics. Even when legitimate external benefits or costs can be identified, there is a pretension that they can be accurately measured and corrected via subsidies or taxes. This is far-fetched. At best, it’s possible to vouch for the directional appropriateness of some interventions, but the magnitude of corrective measures is variable and essentially unknowable. Too often we see government failure via over-subsidization of politically favored activities and over-penalization of politically disfavored activities.
One of the most egregious errors of intervention is the over-application of the precautionary principle: if risks are associated with an activity, then it must be curtailed. This often relies on measurements of highly uncertain causes and effects, and it involves aggregation subject to its own biases.
Just as questionable is the ability of “experts” to model natural or behavioral processes such that outcomes can be “predicted” over horizons extending many decades forward. That interventionists tend to ignore the uncertainties of these predictions is the most blatant and damaging conceit of all, not least because the public and the media usually have limited knowledge with which to assess the phenomenon in question.
Public Health Tyranny
The Covid pandemic presented a compelling excuse for precautionists in government and even private institutions to impose radical controls under a set of claims they called “the science”. These claims were often false and really antithetical to the principles of scientific inquiry, which calls for continually questioning hypotheses, even when they represent “consensus”. Yet a series of questionable scientific claims were used to justify abridgment of basic freedoms for the general population, most of whom faced little risk from the virus. This included lockdowns of schools and churches, business closures, cancellation of public events (except of course for protests and riots by Leftists), deferred medical care, vaccine mandates, and mask mandates. The damage these measures inflicted was fierce, and in the end we know that it was almost entirely unnecessary. Still, the public health establishment seems all too willing to ignore the facts in its readiness to repeat the whole range of mistakes at the slightest uptick in what’s now an endemic infection.
Standard Issue Cronyism
In the wake of the pandemic, we’ve witnessed a surge in calls for government to enhance the security of our nation’s supply chains. Too large a share of the critical goods required by domestic industries are produced overseas, which has made supply disruptions, and the threat of future disruptions, especially acute. Right on cue, advocates of industrial policy and planning have arranged for the federal government to provide $85 billion to domestic producers of semiconductors under the so-called CHIPS Act. But semiconductor producers are in no need of government incentives to “re-shore” production:
“… there has been even more chipmaking investment dedicated to the U.S. market, even as federal subsidies have languished. Construction is now underway at four major U.S. facilities and will continue with or without subsidies—something even Intel reluctantly acknowledged when it delayed the groundbreaking ceremony on its much‐ballyhooed Ohio facility to protest congressional inaction. This is because, as numerous experts have explained over the last year, there are real economic and geopolitical reasons to invest in additional U.S. semiconductor production—no federal subsidies needed.”
Moreover, the global shortage of computer chips appears to be ending. The subsidies will unnecessarily enrich industrialists and their shareholders, provide a source of graft to bureaucrats and various middle men, and likely over-allocate resources to domestic production of chips. Industrial planning of this kind has a long history of failure, and this time won’t be different.
Climate Fascists
We also see repeated over-application of the precautionary principle and rising dominance of industrial policy in climate and energy policy. Enormous sacrifices are imposed on consumers for the sake of minuscule changes in global carbon emissions and the “expected” long-term path of future “global” temperatures. The interventions taken in pursuit of these objectives are draconian, limiting choices and raising the cost of virtually everything produced and consumed. They distort the direction of physical investment, disfavoring reliable sources of base load capacity needed for growth, and also disfavoring the safest and most reliable zero-carbon alternative: nuclear power. The renewable energy sources foolishly pushed by the state and the ESG establishment are environmentally costly in their own right, and they don’t work when natural conditions are unfavorable. As one wag says about the climate provisions of the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act, “Gonna be a lot more Solyndras coming”.
And talk about sloppy! Our “trusted representatives” in Congress could hardly be bothered to pretend they’d done their homework. They neglected to provide any quantitative carbon and temperature impacts of the legislation. This must be a case of true honesty, because they really have no idea!
Delusions of Central Planning
One great weakness (among many) of arguments for state industrial planning is the assumption that government agents are somehow more competent, efficient, and “pure of heart” than agents in the private sector. Nothing could be more laughable. On this point, some of the most incisive commentary I’ve seen is provided by the masterful Don Boudreaux, first quoting Georgetown philosopher Jason Brennan before adding his own entertaining thoughts:
The typical way the left argues for the state is to describe what economists in the 1850s thought markets would be like under monopoly or monopsony, and then compare that to a state run by angels. Both halves of the argument are bad, and yet philosophy treats this as if it were rigorous and sophisticated.
“Far too many policy proposals are nothing more than prayers to the state-god. ‘We entreat you, Oh Powerful and Sacred One, to relieve our people of this or that misery, blemish, and market imperfection! We beseech you to bestow upon us – your faithful servants – cosmic justice, safety from new pathogens, unkind thoughts, and microaggressions, and protection from each and every burden of reality that we can imagine being cured by an omniscient, benevolent, and omnipotent deity! If we obey – and sacrifice to you without complaint our treasure and our freedoms – you will provide!’
I do not exaggerate. Pick at random any proposed government intervention offered by the likes of Progressives or national conservatives, and you’ll discover that the workability of this proposed intervention, when evaluated honestly, rests on nothing more solid than the above absurd faith that the state is – or, when in the right hands, will be – a secular god.”
On the idealization of government’s ability to “plan the economy” rationally, here is more from Boudreaux, first quoting the great Deirdre McCloskey:
Deep in left-wing thought about the economy, and in a good deal of right-wing thought, too, is the premise, as Isaiah Berlin once put it with a sneer, that government can accomplish whatever it rationally proposes to do. As has been often observed about leftists even as sweet as John Rawls, the left has no theory of the behavior of the government. It assumes that the government is a perfect expression of the will of The People.
“And nothing is more unscientific – indeed, more mystical – than is this still-commonplace practice of most Progressives, and also of very many conservatives, to analyze the economy and society, and to offer policy recommendations, using such a juvenile ‘understanding’ of the state. Yet such an ‘understanding’ of the state permeates the work even of some Nobel laureates in economics – laureates such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz. This ‘understanding’ of the state is inseparable also from the work of pundits too many to count…
That these professors and pundits think of themselves as scientific – and are widely regarded as being especially intelligent, thoughtful, and scientific – testifies to the strength of the cult of democratically rubber-stamped coercion.”
Conclusion
Humans have proven to be incredible documentarians. The advent of measurement techniques and increasingly sophisticated methods of accounting for various phenomena has enabled better ways of understanding our world and our well being. Unfortunately, a by-product was the birth of scientism, the belief that men in authority are capable not only of measuring, but of fine-tuning, the present and future details of society and social interaction. Those pretensions are terribly mistaken. However, the actions of Congress and the Biden Administration prove that it’s adherents will never be persuaded, despite repeated demonstrations of the futility of central planning. Their words of compassion are no comfort — they must coerce the ones they “love”.
I have a certain ambivalence toward Donald Trump, and I could go on and on about why it’s so “complicated” for me. One thing for which I’ve credited the Trump Administration is its effort to “deconstruct the administrative state”, as Steve Bannon so aptly put it shortly after the 2016 election. Of course, the progress thus far hasn’t always lived up to my hopes, but the effort to deregulate continues. And after all, the regulatory state is deeply entrenched and difficult to uproot.
Then my eyes glazed over as Trump floated an idea so bad, an intervention so awful, that I can hardly gather it in! It has to do with TikTok, the Chinese video sharing service that has gained popularity worldwide. Crazy as this might sound, it’s not so much Trump’s threat to shut down TikTok’s U.S. operations. Like most libertarians, I’d find that appalling in and of itself, except for the legitimate data security issues at stake. The company’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are a national security concern and an ethical blot on the company, given the CCP’s brutal treatment of Muslim Uighurs, its roughshod treatment of Hong Kong, and its threats to Taiwan. In any case, at least Trump said he’s amenable to a sale of the company’s U.S. operations to a domestic firm. Several large tech firms have expressed strong interest, including Microsoft. So, while any government imposed shutdown or forced sale makes me squirm, it’s not my main issue here.
What really stunned me was to hear Trump say the U.S. Treasury must get a cut of the deal! This is “Hall-of-Fame” statism. Where in the hell does the U.S. government get a legitimate financial claim to the value of any private business that changes hands? Well, Trump seems to think the federal government is adding value as the heavy:
“But if you buy [TicTok], the United States, which is making it possible to buy, because without us they can’t do anything, should be compensated.”
Yes, the buyer would be the beneficiary of a shakedown, and the demand is another poke in the eye to the Chinese. Of course, it might well threaten the transaction, and I’m not even sure it’s in Trump’s interest politically. But that’s not even the worst of it: as Warren Meyer explains, it would be hard to think of a better way to weaponize financial regulation than having the Treasury at the bargaining table in private negotiations for corporate control:
“Already there are too many regulatory hurdles to doing about anything, and Trump wants agencies to use regulatory approvals to hold up corporations for payments. And you can be sure this is a precedent the Democrats will be only too happy to latch onto — want a pipeline built, where’s our vig? Who wants [this to be] the first Trump decision AOC comes out in support of? The Republican Party sure has come a long way in my lifetime.”
The Left would certainly love to exercise this kind of coercion as a revenue source, as a cudgel of industrial policy to wield against disfavored firms and industries, and as a way to favor cronies. It’s a ready extension of Barack Obama’s deranged “You-didn’t-build-that” theme.
Is this one of trade advisor Peter Navarro‘s brainstorms? I was relieved to see Trump economic advisor Larry Kudlow cast some doubt on whether the government would follow through on Trump’s idea:
“‘I don’t know if that’s a key stipulation. …. A lot of options here,’ Kudlow told ‘Varney & Co.’ on Tuesday. ‘Not sure it’s a specific concept that will be followed through.’“
I think Trump would really like to kill TikTok. Maybe his grudge is driven in part by the presumptive role that TikTok played in his under-attended Tulsa rally. But there are domestic competitors to TikTok, so consumers will have alternatives. The most popular of those seems to be another Chinese app called Likee. In any case, downloads of other video sharing apps have spiked over the past few weeks. If Trump’s real aim is simply to shut down TikTok in the U.S., I’d almost rather see him do that than start making a practice of horse trading with cronies over shares of corporate booty.
In advanced civilizations the period loosely called Alexandrian is usually associated with flexible morals, perfunctory religion, populist standards and cosmopolitan tastes, feminism, exotic cults, and the rapid turnover of high and low fads---in short, a falling away (which is all that decadence means) from the strictness of traditional rules, embodied in character and inforced from within. -- Jacques Barzun