POITOU, FRANCE – “Nothing really changes.” Sitting next to us at breakfast, a companion was reading an article written by the No. 2 man in France, Édouard Philippe, in Le Monde. The headline promised to tell us how the country was going to “deblock” itself.But upon inspection, the proposals were the same old claptrap about favoring “green” energy… changing the tax code to reward one group and punish another…and spending more money on various humbug initiatives.
Subsidized green energy scams are mainly creating eyesores – other than that, they add up to nothing but cronyism writ large. After the one of the biggest solar company bankruptcies ever happened in Spain, a detailed economic study found that for every subsidized renewable energy job the government “created” (at a cost of nearly $2 million per job!) 2.2 jobs were lost elsewhere. It is a good bet that the math isn’t much different elsewhere. To add insult to injury, there is precisely zero evidence that carbon emissions are reduced by even one iota due to these efforts. It is an apodictic certainty that no economy can possibly be “rescued” by the subsidization of this nonsense. There is a widespread belief in government circles that “economic growth” can somehow be conjured up by bureaucrats. That is a costly error that increasingly endangers the future of Western civilization. [PT]
Philippe claims, for example, that France will “invest” $50 billion in job training programs, new industries, and infrastructure. The idea behind it, although not stated expressly, is that a brighter future is out there somewhere, and that France’s politicians and bureaucrats will do a better job of going to meet it than the people themselves.
“Just like the U.S.,” our American companion continued. In order to “invest” $50 billion, the feds have to get the money from somewhere. Where? They earn no money. They can only get funds by taking them away from others. Tax it. Or borrow it.
