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"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton

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Can the U.S. learn from Europe’s green mistakes?

Posted by Louie Glinzak
on Monday, March 14, 2011

Kenneth P. Green, of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), recently examined green energy in Europe in an essay titled, “The Myth of Green Energy Jobs: The European Experience.” Green thoroughly analyzes the green industry in Europe while seeking to discover the reasons behind its current downward spiral. As readers discover, this is largely due to the green industry being unsustainable while heavily relying on government intervention and subsidies.

Green uses the failing green industry in Europe to forewarn the United States that its policies, if continued, will bring the same unfruitful results. If the green industry is going to succeed it should not be a government supported industry, as Green states:

…governments do not “create” jobs; the willingness of entrepreneurs to invest their capital, paired with consumer demand for goods and services, does that.

All the government can do is subsidize some industries while jacking up costs for others. In the green case, it is destroying jobs in the conventional energy sector—and most likely other industrial sectors—through taxes and subsidies to new green companies that will use taxpayer dollars to undercut the competition.