President Clocking Persistent 9% Unemployment Rate Kills Another 200,000 Jobs

From Hot Air -- just kidding, Truman, I know it's in the sidebar; I just wanted to see the vein in your forehead -- the Obama Job Slaughter continues.

President Obama's United States Department of Agriculture has delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio for up to six months by cancelling a mineral lease auction for Wayne National Forest (WNF). The move was taken in deference to environmentalists, on the pretext of studying the effects of hydraulic fracturing.

“Conditions have changed since the 2006 Forest Plan was developed," announced WNF Supervisor Anne Carey on Tuesday. "The technology used in the Utica & Marcellus Shale formations need to be studied to see if potential effects to the surface are significantly different than those identified in the Forest Plan." The study will take up to six months to complete.

Apart from the obvious -- another 200,000 jobs delayed, and probably delayed for longer than six months; plus the general signal to business that Obama will attempt to make every endeavor your attempt extremely costly, so don't even bother -- this reinforces my belief that liberals celebrate the abstract over the concrete.

When you think about jobs liberals like, versus jobs conservatives like, you will generally find the that the more abstract a job is -- and here I mean "abstract" to mean "removed from the physical, the concrete, and the dirty by one or more steps" -- you'll find that they tend to be soft jobs. Media advisor, writer, designer. One of the more concrete jobs they favor is the law, but that itself is far removed from actual production of goods -- law does intersect with business, but far away from the actual production of goods. Where law intersects with business it does so in a paper way -- businesses are referred to in court filings, but of course the businesses are abstracted, as the law just deals with them as legal actors. Not as real companies, with real workers and real management, producing real goods.

This is why liberals with something of a pragmatic streak go into politics. On one hand, politics does intersect with people's lives in tangible ways. On the other hand, what makes politics attractive to this psychological type is that it's a no-dirty-hands occupation. Everything is position papers and talking and media-type stuff.

As I've noted before, this all goes back to the Victorian fiction that a carpenter, who actually did a great deal of mental work, including creativity, in his job, was just a "hand worker" and therefore lower class while a drudge at the Bank of England, who merely did third-grade-level summing of accounts all day, was a "mind worker" and therefore middle class.

The liberal mindset is bewitched by this fiction -- this daft, stupid fiction -- and declares that everyone working in liberal-type fields must be of a different intellectual class than those lowly businessmen who merely manufacture goods that people wish to voluntarily buy.

And ergo, only they can make the proper decisions about whether these mentally-lower-class individuals can ply their dirty working class trades.

You don't have to be a liberal to recognize that any time you take oil or coal or shale out of the ground, it's going to have an adverse impact on the immediate environment. Not so much as the hysterical environmental lobby claims, of course, but some.

But liberals seem to live in a fantasy world in which, ideally, all of us would just be passing around pieces of paper to each other. That is, they seem to believe the world, if they got it all set up properly, would consist of only work in the soft, abstract, "clean" fields liberals prefer (clean, because they tend to be pushing paper back and forth, rather than digging and building and sweating), so, that being the ideal State of Man, there's really no problem trying to hurry that along and penalize those dirty hand-workers who want pump some oil out of the ground.

But because they are, mentally, so removed from the concrete, they are free to believe in magic. The magic in this immediate case is the magic of electricity. They seem to want a steady power supply for their MacBooks and their editing software and their Media Centers with Bose speakers, but they don't really want to think much about how that vital spark actually makes it into their homes' copper wires.

In their own minds, they've neatly cleaved the real, vital, vigorous, and dirty from their own existences, which they have endeavored to make as abstract, sedentary, and "clean" (except for those trees) as possible, so they just don't see the connection between energy production and their own energy consumption.

The electricity is magic. It will always be there, as it has always been there before, right? So, no problem killing every industry that actually tries to make some electricity.

Solar power is the perfect Magic Beans Solution for this problem with reality. It's technically not magic; it actually exists. Sort of. So it's the perfect Pretend Energy Source. Just pretend that it's an efficient source of energy, just pretend it doesn't cost far more than any other source, just pretend there's not a whole lot of environmental impact caused by the production of all those exotic chemicals required to produce the cells -- just pretend enough, and you've got your Magic Power Source, where your iPad works but not a puff of smoke rises into the air.

There's a real childish mentality here. Kids like burgers, but they will get very emotionally upset when they see a cow being butchered. I can't blame them. They're kids. And I think even I'd be shaken to see a cow pulled up by its hind legs and electrocuted, or killed by a hammer-blow to skull.

And yet, I know that my burger relies on just this process. There are no magic burgers. If I want to eat a burger -- and I do -- I have to accept that there are going to be some cows killed and butchers.

The liberal mentality has a very powerful capacity to deny reality, to escape uncomfortable facts like this through a combination of training -- they teach themselves to pretend -- and a lack of a real, hard intersection with the real, hard world.

It causes all sorts of problems. Currently we have one of them in the White House.

posted by Ace at 12:48 PM

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