The Environmentalist’s Favorite Energy Source

Next time your environmentalist friend tells you we need to stop using fossil fuels to save the planet, ask him or her - What is your favorite energy source?

How would a true environmentalist answer that question? It is puzzling, because environmentalists have actively campaigned against almost every energy source out there. They complain that nuclear power is too dangerous and has a waste disposal problem, that wind power has whirling blades that kill birds, that sun power uses acres of unsightly mirrors in the desert, and that geothermal energy sites are mostly in ecologically protected areas. Hydro power is in such disfavor they even want to demolish existing dams!

Environmentalists do tend to favor ethanol and hydrogen, but neither of these are viable energy sources. Ethanol from corn is not energy positive and will never survive without endless government subsidies. Hydrogen is not an energy source but is merely an inefficient way to store energy from other sources.

No, environmentalists have no favored and viable alternative to fossil fuels. Their intent is apparently to starve the world economy of its needed energy by government action. That is a formula for poverty and possible de-population. As for me, I love petroleum, people, and prosperity.

Stop Trying to Create Jobs!

I know this heading sounds crazy. After all, everyone wants more jobs. All of the presidential hopefuls have their own jobs plan, and President Obama even created a new “Jobs Czar” position in his cabinet and appointed General Electric's CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, to the post.

But is job creation really a proper government policy goal? To answer this question, we need to ask what we want the economy to do for us. How about this: The economy should create as much wealth as possible with as little human effort as necessary.

Really, isn’t this just good common sense? Why would you want to expend any more human effort than necessary to create the products and services that people want and need? Obviously, labor-saving devices and increased worker productivity are good things, yet you might think they are bad things if you are too focused on jobs.

Too bad so many people in government make exactly that mistake. They are so motivated to protect existing jobs that they do so at the expense of job creation and wealth creation. It causes them to pursue such wrong-headed policies as import barriers, export subsidies, government make-work projects, a large standing army, a complex tax code, and burdensome regulations that divert valuable resources.

This is not to say that government is helpless to cure unemployment. It can do so by ending government policies which make it less profitable to hire workers; policies like minimum wage laws, the payroll tax, and laws making it difficult to dismiss workers or easy to be sued by workers. Also, a lower corporate tax rate would help.

Lately we have had some severe job-killing new policies, specifically, the threat of Obama-Care, restrictions on domestic energy production, impending EPA greenhouse gas regulations, the re-regulation of business accounting guidelines (Sarbanes-Oxley), and the reform of financial practices (Dodd-Frank). Maybe that’s why companies have become reluctant to hire (well duh).

According to the insight of von Mises, a free economy naturally produces low unemployment because human capital is the scarcest of all resources. That’s why excessive unemployment is always a government failure, never a market failure. Remember that next time someone complains that the economy isn’t producing enough jobs.