Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away(William Hughes Mearns, Antigonish; wiki)
Matt Ridley at The Rational Optimist makes an important point in his latest blogpost:
Lobbied by big companies, politicians do bonkers things like rewarding innovations that increase the cost of fulfilling a need — such as putting up the price of electricity to subsidise wind farms and claiming it “creates jobs”. Any hairdresser, unable to make a new hire because of his electricity bill, could tell them that it does the opposite. (src)
The jobs which are created in the windfarm and solar power industries are obvious. They are made in
marginal constituencies depressed areas in large numbers, and of course one has to be glad for people who find a job.
But the jobs which are not created in other workplaces because of increased electricity bills are not obvious. They aren't created in ones and twos, rather than in large numbers. They aren't created across the whole country, rather than being concentrated in
depressed areas marginal constituencies. The people who don't get the jobs which aren't created never even realise they didn't get them. They don't go on marches complaining that they didn't get a job which wasn't created. There isn't a trade union for people without a trade; there isn't a confederation for British industries-which-could-have-existed-but-don't.
Sticking up for the market means sticking up for the idea that the ones and twos matter. That's the difference between pro-market and pro-business. Last month, Simon Goldie at Liberal Vision argued that the Liberal Democrats should push hard on sticking up for the little people, and rightly too (
src). They don't get much smaller or more local than the job which didn't happen because the government pushed up taxes, or forced electricity prices to rise sharply, or monkeyed about with interest rates.
There is, or can be, a rhetorical force to the argument that good things are not happening because government is interfering. Who will stick up for the business which never opened, or the job which was never advertised?
2 comments:
Fair point. I often wonder about the rhetoric of "creating jobs". Apparently a huge expansion of Monks Cross retail park will "create" 1000 new jobs, for example. Hmm...
But it would be interesting to know what the jobs/kWh ratio is for different means of producing electricity. Obviously the best way to create jobs in energy production (if that's all you care about) would be to pay people to sit on exercise bikes as a way of generating electricity. And the worst would be to spend all the money buying oil from some rich guy with a big oil well on the other side of the world.
In other words, I'm not sure an artificial increase in price of electricity necessarily leads to a net decrease in jobs. Probably it will, but it might not.
But, perhaps more significantly, I'm not sure the Markets are aware of the environmental effect of continuing to use fossil fuels, and that's not easy to quantify (and foolish to neglect). There are quite a few ones and twos in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ethiopia, etc., who don't have jobs now because of increased flooding or drought. And maybe the ones and twos in our country will have many more jobs a few decades down the line if we pay the cost of moving towards renewable energy now?
Renewable energies will find their place and level of use when the time is right. Now is not the time.
The cost is so high that you have in the UK a large part of the population living in what you term 'fuel poverty'.
The effects of green (or falsely created) jobs on real jobs,i.e. those that are sustainable because they create wealth is now clearly documented both in the UK and Spain.
Our objective is not to create jobs (despite the fact that that is the end result we desire). We need to stimulate real economic activity, where jobs are created because they are economically viable. Any other solution is an expensive short-term gain and a terrible long-term cross to bear. Finally, in the Labour party people are talking of becoming business-friendly. I hope they mean SME and not the giants where they go to slurp when they lose power.
Taking money out of the economy and peeing it up against a wall as politicians are wont to do, costs jobs where they can be created in SME. Excessive regulations cost jobs;
minimum wage costs jobs (Greece has a higher minimum wage than Spain and we have 40% youth unemployment and we all know how Greece is doing). It's a choice. How can you pay somebody less that €750/month (Greece)? It's disgusting! Yeah, but if the guy can't read and write properly, has no skills and a bad attitude?;
Higher energy costs cost jobs and more so when your direct international competitors have cheaper energy.
Any social plans depend on the economy for taxes. Screw the economy and you get what you deserve.
This is not a rant. I am not a shoot the strikers, baby-eating, selfish shmuck.
You want taxes? You need people to be working in real jobs which do not cost money. A job wehich has cost £250,000 in subsidies is not a job.
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