The Fallacy Of Obama’s Green Jobs

In a recent speech Obama said he’d invest “$150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy” that will “lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can’t ever be outsourced.” Now setting aside whether or not the government should be investing in private markets like the energy industry at all (not to mention the irony in calling the expenditure of 150 billion taxpayer dollars “affordable”), can the government really create jobs that help the economy?
John Stossel says no, pointing out that such nonsense was dispelled as the “broken window fallacy” by French economist Frederic Bastiat:

Politicians always promise that their programs will create jobs. It’s used to justify building palatial sports stadiums for wealthy team owners. Alaska Rep. Don Young claimed the infamous “bridge to nowhere” would create jobs (http://tinyurl.com/6jq623). The fallacy is the same in every case: Even if the program creates jobs building bridges or windmills, it necessarily prevents other jobs from being created. This is because government spending merely diverts money from private projects to government projects.
Governments create no wealth. They only move it around while taking a cut for their trouble. So any jobs created over here come at the expense of jobs that would have been created over there. Overlooking this fact is known as the broken-window fallacy (http://tinyurl.com/ydasa2). The French economist Frederic Bastiat pointed out that a broken shop window will create work for a glassmaker, but that work comes only at the expense of the cook or tailor the shopkeeper would have patronized if he didn’t have to replace the window.

Thank about it this way: Barack Obama takes $150 billion out of our pockets (politicians like to pretend like the money they spend doesn’t really come from us but it does) and spend it on “green” energy initiatives. But what would have happened to that money if you and I had just held on to it? We would have spent it in the economy and created jobs in other areas. And those jobs would be one heck of a lot more sustainable than the jobs Obama would create because those jobs would be created by economic activity freely engaged in by the public.
Not economic activity that some politician like Obama had to use the force of government to transact.
And who is to say that these jobs Obama would “create,” if they were in fact jobs that would be added to our economy which they’re really not, are sustainable? Who is to say that they’d last? I’m no expert on the energy industry, but I have my doubts about the business plan of an industry that requires a $150 billion investment from the government to grow.