I would like to go on record, and make a detailed public prediction about what will happen when thousands of workers take up new government-based “green jobs” all across the country.
During his campaign, Obama spoke of a plan to take hundreds of thousands of unemployed people and rapidly hire them into the federal government in order to do “green jobs” such as installing insulation, roofing, and windows in the vast tracks of rickety old houses in and around Philadelphia, for example. Makes sense. Sounds good.
But consider the impact this will have upon of professional installers of window, insulation, and roofing that region. Thousands of professionals who have invested their lives into building a skilled career in a trade will be undercut by these new government workers. Indeed, the government will undercut them using their own tax money.
The market will be flooded with “affordable” goods and services delivered by untrained inexperienced workers who will show up to “work” on houses for the Federal Government, even though they have never done such work before. And they will be supervised by government Supervisors who have never supervised such work before. But fear not, all of this is okay because the goal is that the workers have good jobs quickly, not that they do good jobs.
Philly is just one small example. There are estimates that we may have as many as 600,000 “McJobs” done by “McWorkers”, who have no stake in the business, no interest in the quality of the outcome, no reputation to protect or build, and no long-term future in the business. When one McJob is done, the Government will come up with another McJob in another profession or another region. In return, Democrats will secure the votes of ever increasing numbers of McWorkers who will depend on them for a supply of easy work with no accountability and no future. We will adopt the “Big Dig” as a National model for our new economy. Unglued ceiling bolts, crushed motorists, and invisible cost over-runs--like the Big Dig-- will be the rule, not the exception. Each time a citizen is injured by the shabby work, a lawsuit will follow, seeking millions of dollars—taxpayer dollars.
After a few years of McWork on the houses of Philadelphia, we will see:
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Tens of thousands of houses with new roofing which will leak badly.
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Millions of windows that weren’t fitted true/square will break when people apply force.
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Miles of new insulation will become wet if there are any flaws in the vapor barrier layers—which, there will be many, of course.
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The wet insulation will cause mold to grow rampantly—like New Orleans after Katrina.
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Energy consumption in these houses will increase, not decrease, because people will need more electric pumps, fans, and heaters than before.
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Professional roofers, siders, and window installers, who would ordinarily be able to fix these problems, will have been driven out of business because they couldn’t compete with the semi-free unskilled McWorkers provided by the government in the previous years.
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A few individuals will become astoundingly wealthy. They will be the manufactures of poor-quality building materials. Using targeted political contributions to Democrats that head up the “Senate Select Subcommittee for McWork”, these tycoons will lock up all the contracts for supplying all of the materials for the McProjects.
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When the greedy tycoons are exposed and put on trial, Democrats will blame Capitalism, not Socialism. The Tycoons will be sent to jail. The Democrats will be re-elected. Journalists in the media will have no tough questions.
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Although Journalists will aggressively ignore each new failure, it will accumulate until there is inescapable clarity. Democrats will be forced to step up and say that they “had good intentions”, and that the program needs to be “mended, not ended”. They will say that this enormous waste of people, time, materials, and money is “an important growing pain on the path to becoming more compassionate and ‘green’, and people who argue otherwise don’t care about you or the planet we share”. In fact, “Republicans don’t even care if old people die”.
Democrats will take credit for helping the poor, and ignore the many new poor they create—such as professional roofers and window installers. As Rod Blagojavich did yesterday, other Democrats will insist that they are true to a noble purpose and above criticism. The majority of journalists will not blink or smirk.
When 55% of voters stop believing 60% of politicians, and they tune out 90% of the news media… the misery will end soon after. 51% of voters is the theoretical number, but I include a 4% cushion here to cover a few million McVoters from Minnesota, New Jersey, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
That is my prediction. But I wish I could prevent it all by trying out a small test-swatch before we paint the whole economy with McJobs. Let the first test swatch be Harvard University.
Picture 10,000 people who “need good jobs” being taken off the streets by the Federal Government and converted into new McProfessors at Harvard University. After a few weeks of intensive training in how to be a Professor we would dress them in tweed jackets and drop them at the campus with instructions to go into classrooms and teach stuff, write stuff, and say stuff. Who cares about the details? These people need good jobs, right? At the end of each week, we will pay the McProfessors with tax money we take from the ordinary Professors. We will pay ourselves from whatever is left—which is most of it. Lastly, we will go on television and claim credit for the change and hope we have delivered.
After Harvard, then Stanford, and Time Magazine, and MSNBC and the New York Times. We would dump a few thousand McProfessionals on each one of them for a year. After they get a good taste of McCompetition, perhaps they would stop trying to force it upon the rest of the country.