You are confusing transferring and creating jobs.

A job is only created when you have a profit, our government can not profit.

So our government can not create a job, becuase they must take someone elses profit.

However the government can increase the profit:
By letting us keep more of our proffit,
Or by investing in large scale things that decrease costs, or increase productivity, and thus increasing the public sectors profit.
If the government builds an airport. The building portion will just transfer the jobs out of another sector. However this allows an airline to staff and employ people who need the service.
The jobs are still created in the private sector.

A side note
Bagnell Dam and Lake of the Ozarks is owned and operated by Ameren UE. Do not say it can not be done through private investing, sometimes permits etc, make it almost impossible.

G Alston: I think you’re confusing correlation with causation.

Unfortunately, these facts and the accompanying logic mean nothing to liberals who value above all government acting as puppeteer to its citizens.

Tragic for all of us. Let’s do what we can to persuade Congressional Republicans to start standing up for Conservative principles which WORK!
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/we-demand-true-conservative-leadership.html

So, rather than prove any of your points, you’ll just assert them to be true? Certainly there’s a cross-over point at which taxes become detrimental to the economy whereas prior to reaching that point they were not, but to presume that point lies exactly where “american progressivism” would like it to lie is improbable at best. Given what we intuitively know about human nature and willingness to work for others not directly related to us by kinship, that rate is much more likely to be at the low end of the scale than the high end. There is, of course, a countervailing evolutionary mechanism that forces people such as yourself to proclaim that rate is at the high end. It’s called, in layman’s terms, “moral grandstanding”.

A what was that ill-informed dig at economists who recognize that the New Deal was not the salvation it’s made out to be? Unless you’ve got a whole set of data that no one else has had a chance to analyze, it’s very likely that the scenario is the exact opposite to what you’ve, again, simply asserted rather than proved.

Who teaches liberals how to debate these days? Whoever it is, they are not doing their job very well.

It is self-evident that in order for government takings to destroy the private sector’s resources we would have to be talking about full scale command economics ala the soviet union and not the moderate tax policy of modern neoliberal democrats. Not even european social-democrats or american progressivism represent any significant threat to the ability of the private sector from functioning. These policies might have been detrimental to pre-industrial revolution europe (Smith and Bastiat) but modern economics is a far different landscape.

Fact: In order for nuclear power to provide energy we need a place to deposit the waste generated.

Fact: Harry Reid (i.e., the government) prevented the opening of the Yucca Mountain repository. Therefore…

Fact: The government has prevented jobs from being created for lack of affordable energy. For example, the U.S. auto industry would be in great shape if it was producing hydrogen fueled, fuel-cell powered cars and trucks but it can’t because there is no electricity to make the necessary hydrogen fuel. Now, then, how many jobs is that? The UAW says millions.

Correction: In my previous post, I meant to say that we would be free from dependence on *foreign* oil. My apologies. I agree, it’s too valuable to burn, but if we had electricity to heat up oil shale to free its petroleum, the U.S. would have at least a TRILLION barrels of domestic oil. That enough for plastic manufacturing, do you think? More jobs lost.

Now you’re the one arguing a special case. I’ve already laid out why government involvement in “novel big goal” projects spurs economic development, and it’s not the fact the government is throwing a lot of money at it. I can’t fathom why you’re trying to shoe-horn energy into this, though, because it doesn’t fit.

Unless you can prove that the money that went to Hoover Dam and the TVA would not have resulted in more jobs in the private sector *and* would not have resulted in more economically efficient production of energy, you can’t claim these as successes.

Hoover Dam, especially, is about to show the problem with picking a certain technology to do a certain job by fiat and building it on a massive scale. Because Hoover Dam stood for so long as the edifice that provided Las Vegas with both water and electricity, it caused the people of that area not to look for other solutions and instead just keep building. Now, Las Vegas is facing shortages of both water and electricity because of the distorting influence of Hoover Dam on economic decisions the last 70 years.

Government implementing energy projects, such as Hoover Dam, the TVA, or your thorium reactors is rather similar to JFK announcing that by the end of the decade the US will land a man on the moon *in an airplane*. Instead of creating the demand and letting the intelligence of many individuals solve the problem, he would have been picking a solution by dictate in advance. It would have been a waste, and would have had many unintended consequences.

Agreed. Thing is, I don’t think IBM or Boeing can swing this by themselves. Government would have to be involved. Bush’s VSE is exactly the thing that was needed. I agree with it. And it also underscores my point: government involvement with this stuff will create jobs.

I never said the government can’t create jobs, or can’t be involved in creating jobs. Such a blanket claim is simply false. The question is how does government create jobs in an economically useful way. Like I’ve said several times now, when the government picks technological winners and losers by fiat, it is economically destructive. That includes energy. When government sets it sights on a goal and calls upon the economy to solve it, the mechanisms of the economy work and jobs are created long-term.

Paradoxically, when government *tries* to create jobs, it destroys them.

I would be willing to bet that the same outcomes we all desire could be achieved by the government announcing that it had goals X,Y,Z in certain areas and the person/team that achieved those goals would have the right to profit from them for a set number of years without taxation.

From what I hear you saying, you’re making the case that there are “public goods” that only the government can provide directly, but I would argue that while there are “public goods”, the government can probably best provide them indirectly through incentives like tax moratoria.

In the examples and eras you cite, capital markets were definitely not as well-developed as they are now, primarily due to lack of communications infrastructure. With today’s capital markets, I think the government would do better to provide those indirect incentives and let the market allocate capital to the actual projects meant to achieve the goals.