Regarding the notion that the impending EPA regulations will create jobs:

A recent Institute for Energy Research blog posting deftly debunks the laughably simplistic notion proposed in a recent Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) report. In an amazing twist of logic, the PERI report actually argues that impending EPA greenhouse gas regulations will not only not harm industry and the economy, they will actually benefit the economy by creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

This new PERI study resurrects the same “green jobs” fallacies in its previous reports, which we debunk here. Our argument is quite simple: The government doesn’t make the country richer by imposing new constraints on economic activity. On the contrary, new regulations hurt the economy because it is now costlier to produce the same amount of output, in this case, electricity.

The IER posting does not discuss it, but this same line of thinking was shown to be fallacious over 160 years ago. In his timeless essay, “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen,” noted French economist Frederic Bastiat described the fallacy of “The Broken Window.” It’s very much worth the 15 minutes it will take to read through Bastiat’s straightforward and simple deconstruction of the notion that society profits through an act of destruction or misdirection of productive effort.

Jason Hayes is Communications Director of the American Coal Council. He writes the Coalblog at www.coalblog.org