Did you predict the internet?
So-called “green jobs” are a fraud, according to the Telegraph, and the current administration, which is infatuated with this odd fantasy, has been taking steps to keep this basic fact unclear:
Green jobs are a waste of space, a waste of money, a lie, a chimera. You know that. I know that. We’re familiar with the report by Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain which shows that for every “green job” that is created another 2.2 jobs are LOST in the real economy…
After two studies refuted President Barack Obama’s assertions regarding the success of Spain’s and Denmark’s wind energy programs, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request reveals the Department of Energy turned to George Soros and to wind industry lobbyists to attack the studies.
Via the FOIA request, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has learned that the Department of Energy — specifically the office headed by Al Gore’s company’s former CEO, Cathy Zoi — turned to George Soros’ Center for American Progress and other wind industry lobbyists to help push Obama’s wind energy proposals.
The FOIA request was not entirely complied with, and CEI just filed an appeal over documents still being withheld. In addition to withholding many internal communications, the administration is withholding communications with these lobbyists and other related communications, claiming they constitute “inter-agency memoranda.” This implies that, according to the DoE, wind industry lobbyists and Soros’s Center for American Progress are — for legal purposes — extensions of the government.
There is no shame in not being able to predict trends in technology, products, markets and innovations. for example, Bill Gates largely missed the internet: “while Gates is an innovator, he is hardly an inventor. For the most part, what he did was improve on already existing products such as DOS which he bought during his early years for a few thousand dollars. Bill Gates has been judged by recent history as the ‘world’s computer genius and innovator of the PC who missed the Internet train’.” If Bill Gates could miss the internet, what credence should be put in the industrial predictions of politicians, many of whom know not one whit about the private sector.
As Michael Crichton said in 2003: “Let’s think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?” Predicting “green jobs” because you prefer a world with “green jobs” is a fool’s errand.
By the way, nothing could be more foolish than increasing bureaucratic centralization and decision-making in the incredible industry of medicine, where innovation is amazing at present. Nothing lowers cost or increases the range of choices like the decentralized, entrepreneurial phenomenon that is innovation. HT: Polipundit
March 9th, 2010 at 11:34 am
As for medical innovation and the horrors of “bureaucratic centralization”, perhaps it might help to remember that private companies just don’t do basic research. They do productization research, and only for well-known medical conditions that have a lot of commercial value to solve. The government funds nearly everything else, whether it’s done by government scientists or by academic scientists whose work is funded overwhelmingly by government grants.
It’s just simple math: if you have a condition that has a relatively small number of patients, there’s just no market incentive to sink a great deal of time and money into researching it. This is why you’ll usually find that 100% — not a majority, the entirety — of the research into a cure is done either via taxpayer-funded grants to academic researchers or, more frequently, it’s entirely found on the NIH campus.
Organ transplantation? Just about 100% is funded by NIH. Low prevalence cancers, or cancers with low survival rates? Just about 100% of all three phases is funded by NIH. You start to understand how this works.
March 9th, 2010 at 3:24 pm
Thank you, Steve, for a valuable comment. Whether I agree or disagree with it, it adds to the discussion.
Of course, my positive perception of your comment is probably colored by the fact that I agree that government funding of basic research is of great utility. I’m willing to be argued out of that opinion, but it is my opinion.
Where the private markets excel is in applying the fruits of that research, and finding ways to deliver them to ever-broader segments of the marketplace, cheaper, faster, and better. Our system right now stands in the way of doing so because the insurance companies decide what is and isn’t allowed to be marketed as “health care”. Look at what has happened to the cost of Lasik, which is not considered “health care”.
But keep in mind that the insurance companies only exist in their current form because they have a government-given mandate to determine what is “health care” for the purposes of the employer health care insurance tax deduction. If we really have a problem with the insurance companies, then the simplest thing to do is eliminate the tax deduction. No tax deduction, no insurance companies. And eventually, you’d be getting your annual whole-body MRI scan full checkup at Wal-Mart, better, cheaper, and faster.
March 10th, 2010 at 4:20 am
I have to disagree. The purpose of insurance is to share risk. I think the model ought to be a true shared catastrophic risk coverage, and routine care subject to market forces. In other words, doctors would compete for patients, pricing would be known to consumers. You could get, and pay for, the gold plated treatment, or minimal care, or whatever you choose.
March 10th, 2010 at 8:09 am
The purpose of “insurance” generically is to share risk. The purpose of “health care insurance”, as currently conceived in the U.S., is to administer the Federal tax deduction for “health care insurance”.