Pretendustrial Terrorism: Green Jobs Critic Receives Parcel From "Green" Company: Dismantled, But Otherwise Operational, Bomb

What?

A company did this?

Spain’s Dr. Gabriel Calzada — the author of a damning study concluding that Spain’s “green jobs” energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure — was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy company Thermotechnic.

Says Calzada:

Before opening it, I called [Thermotechnic] to know what was inside … they answered, it was their answer to my energy pieces.

Dr. Calzada contacted a terrorism expert to handle the package. The expert first performed a scan of the package, then opened it in front of a journalist, Dr. Calzada, and a private security expert.

The terrorism consultant said he had seen this before:

This time you receive unconnected pieces. Next time it can explode in your hands.

Dr. Calzada added:

[The terrorism expert] told me that this was a warning.

His study found what you'd expect it to find, but with rigorous methodology: that "green jobs" cost far more money than comes back out of them through economic effects, and that, therefore, are a money sink, and a not-insignificant one, as each taxpayer in Spain is measurably poorer due to massive subsidies of such mockupations in pretendustries.

The whole stupid idea that "Green Jobs" will produce other, real jobs is insane from the outset. Whenever someone pitches this, they'll claim, sure, we're throwing money into this nonprofitable pretendustry requiring lots of subsidies (funsidies?), but hey, employment will go up.

In a trivial sense this is correct: If we replace a coal-burning electricity plant, employing 200, with a giant hamster-wheel affair in which 2000 people jog all day to produce energy, sure, I guess we've increased employment at that particular situs 1000%.

But that is anti-wealth -- it ignores the secondary effects of people having to pay 1000% more salaries for their energy than they used to. And the entire history of wealth in the entire history of man is the story of fewer men and fewer man hours to produce the same number of goods.

If our economy becomes twice as efficient, producing exactly twice as many goods as it once did, for the same investment of manpower, then we have become exactly twice as wealthy. We now have twice as many goods at the prices we used to pay for half as many.

It is ridiculous to keep asserting, contrary to basic common sense, that if we reverse the wealth-producing effect of increasing efficiency, and make ourselves less efficient -- with basic goods now requiring two, three, or five times as much as they once did -- that we will become wealthier.

We won't. We'll become poorer. Of course we will.

How could it be otherwise? In what society, ever, did basic goods (food, shelter, energy) become more labor-intensive and more expensive and yet that society became wealthier?

By this logic we should abandon technologically-advanced farming methods and go back to hunter-gather societies. After all, if you increase the number of people required to feed the nation to hunter-gatherer levels-- like, say, to 98% of the total population-- you've really increased the hell out of employment in that sector, haven't you?

That's basic common sense, and basic economics. Caldaza's deadly study, however, wasn't about common sense or abstract economics -- it was about cold hard numbers, how Spaniards fared before the Pretendustrial Revolution as compared to how they fare now as the Pretendustrial Revolution reaches crisis point.

And so they sent him a bomb.

As Mel Brooks said, "How are we going to protect our phoney-baloney jobs?" Well, with bombs, I guess.

Cf. The Broken Windows Fallacy. Some nitwit once proposed that a person who throws a rock through a shopkeeper's window is actually increasing societal wealth. Because, see, that shopkeeper will now have to employ the glazier a second time to get a new window, and that glazier will have more money, and that money will then be spent on other goods, etc.

In other words, the vandal, far from being penalized, should be rewarded by the government for doing his part to keep the government running.

Later some other economics studied this curious claim and found it to be, in economic terms, strictly retarded. Obviously so. As it failed to take into account that the shopkeeper now had to charge his customers higher prices to cover the cost of the broken window, and thus they each had their own wealth diminished (and if he had to keep on replacing the window, that shopkeeper would find his wealth greatly diminished, as he'd go bankrupt).

The Green Jobs Fallacy is almost exactly like the Broken Windows Fallacy, in that both posit that somehow, if everything costs a lot more due to waste (and destruction), somehow we all wind up richer.

Call it the Broken Solar Panel Fallacy, then.

In World War II, the Germans had to synthesize a lot of fuels (at a much higher expense than petroleum) because the Allies substantially cut off their petroleum supplies.

Did the Germans become richer during the war due to having so many manhours diverted to synthesizing fuel out of canola oil (or whatever)?

Did Adolf Hitler ever say, "Wow, thank God the Allies are cutting off our oil shipments. This canola-to-fuel industry is really keeping our economy humming nicely!"

No, he did not.

And no, they were poorer.

Because thousands of people who otherwise might have been fashioning goods for sale were instead diverted to chemical plants to make an expensive synth fuel.

More Media-Friendly Headline: Crazed Tea Party Radicals Send Bomb to Environmental Scientist.

Dismantled, But Otherwise Operational, Bomb&bodytext=What? A company did this? Spain’s Dr. Gabriel Calzada — the author of a damning study concluding that Spain’s “green jobs” energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure — was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 04:11 PM

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