Another Stupid Friedman Idea

I know I should stop reading Thomas Friedman's column in the NY Times, but I am incorrigible and, besides, his column is often a convenient example of the muddled thinking which leads to stupid policies. That said, see The Green-Collar Solution in today's paper.

The basic premise (from activist Van Jones) is to use boatloads of taxpayer money to train and hire disadvantaged youth in "weatherizing millions of buildings, putting up solar panels, constructing wind farms". In other words, spend a lot of dough on "do nothing" jobs.

We don't need all that "green" stuff. We should design and build more efficient products, but mostly we need to design and build thermonuclear reactors. We should spend taxpayer dollars on R&D for fusion power, not on training youth to do construction work. Besides, a large part of the construction industry labor comes from illegal aliens, which implies that disadvantaged youth don't want to do that kind of work anyway.

(The best advice today for helping "disadvantaged youth" can be found in "Come on, people : on the path from victims to victors" by Bill Cosby and Alvin F. Poussaint.)

Recall that Friedman was one of the biggest cheerleaders for Bush's War on Iraq. We have already spent about $400-$600 billion on Iraq, and will probably spend double that in Iraq before we come to our senses. What a waste. Our military should have had plans to crush Al Qaida after their first series of attacks on us in the 1990's, and we should have had a president on 9/11 who was prepared to execute such plans. Instead, we invade Iraq!

The same mindset was at play in the 1960's and 70's when we invaded Vietnam. Had we instead invested the money in R&D, we would already have had decades of cheap energy, saved a trillion dollars from going to Arab countries for buying oil and funding terrorism, and there would never have been a "Gulf War" in 1991, nor a 9/11 attack on the US, nor an invasion and occupation of Iraq in the 2000's.

But at least we were able to feed the egos of our "war presidents".

Thanks, Tom. I feel better now.