How many millions of jobs is the Keystone XL worth?
In a New York Times interview over the weekend, President Obama sneered at 2,000 or so construction jobs created by construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Here’s what he doesn’t get — and perhaps doesn’t want to understand either.
Tar sands development is about wealth creation or creating something out of nothing or more out of less — the very engine that has provided developed nations with their unparalleled prosperity, astonishing public health and clean environments.
Alberta has reserves on the order of 170 billion barrels of oil locked in the tar sands. Left alone, the tar sands are worth nothing. But excavated and processed into crude oil, they are worth (at today’s prices) more than $100 per barrel — i.,e, $17 trillion.
That is a lot of wealth to create out of nothing — wealth that can create a lot of jobs.
The U.S. economy employs about 150 million people on a GDP of about $16 trillion.
The remarkable thing about the Keystone XL is that all that wealth can be dramatically facilitated by the temporary labor of only thousands of people. Once complete, $17 trillion worth of wealth can start its journey from Alberta through the U.S. and into the economy where other processing can create even more wealth out of it.
Obama’s sneer at the Keystone XL? Consider the source.
If you don’t identify the problem correctly, you cannot solve it. Anything you do will be solving the wrong problem in the wrong way and have far too many unintended consequences.
Hence, the real question is: what is the real problem?
You say the problem is that they ignore reality. If that were the fact, they would be right accidentally part of the time. Yet, they make the wrong decisions and solve the wrong problem in the wrong way every time. This is not by chance. It is because of their fundamental ideas they hold as true.
They think reality “as such” cannot be known so they substitute their fantasy, whim, and public polls for knowledge about reality and act accordingly. Then if reality does not obey their decisions, out come the boots, knives, guns, whips, and gulags to make it so. That this invariably fails to reach their own goals is interpreted as reality being uncooperative so they double down on what didn’t work.
They have denied the one thing that makes human life possible: an unbreached contact with reality. As a consequence, they achieve the only end that is permitted by the nature of man and his necessary relationship to reality: despair, poverty, death, and destruction;
Prosperity and wealth creation are not values for Leftists–they don’t care. Oil production is way too prosaic for these fine Leftist intellects. Leftists are not grateful at all for the high standard of living in the US–they just take it for granted as if it will never change. Leftists are such a stupid bunch!
I am simply judging Obama by his public statements, actions, and proposed/enacted policies since his first political speech in 2008. All one needs to do is listen with a well tuned philosophical critical ear and deduce the philosophical and psychological principles that guides him. I knew what he was three minutes into the first speech I listened to. He has delivered to the letter on that original assessment.
My most benevolent assessment was that he was/is a narcissistic megalomaniac. I said at the time, “America has found her Hitler.” We are currently philosophically, intellectually, culturally, and economically on a parallel path as Germany ca 1936. The productive among us are the new Jews and are his primary target. His version of Kristallnach is not far off if he is allowed to continue.
I have no idea what Obama actually does understand other than sleazy politics. But he does not understand economics or engineering. What he does not know about those topics would fill several books and he ought to read them, starting with Dr. Sowell.
Obama believes that wealth cannot be created but can only only be taken. Hence he is a true believer in wealth redistribution. After all, he believes, since those who are wealthy took their wealth, they didn’t create it. That means he thinks he gets to take it from them and do with it as HE whims. Why? Because he thinks he is more powerful than the creators of wealth.
What if the creators of the wealth stopped creating it? What then would Obama be able to take? Zero, Zip, Nada, a big fat Nothing! What then is his power worth? Once the consumable wealth is consumed, there is nothing for his stolen wealth to buy even if it is gold. All his much worshiped power of the boot, knife, gun, whip, and gulag can do is create poverty, despair, death, and destruction. Brute force cannot create wealth. It can only destroy it along with countless lives depending upon the ability to create wealth. This is the end his enacted cause will achieve. His stated intent and carefully planned goals are irrelevant. The cause will reach its own end.
The creation of wealth takes the mind of man applied to the resources of the earth to make things that are life giving, life sustaining, and life enhancing. For a mind to be able to do that, both the mind and the body holding that mind must be free to think, to act, to own what the action produces, and to trade with others of like mind. THAT is what Freedom means and it is the last thing that Obama will permit. In his way of thinking, HIS WHIM must RULE and only HE gets to decide who gets, keeps, lives, or dies.
Why is it that we creators of wealth permit Obama to do what he is doing? It is way past time for us to say NO in such a way it cannot be evaded. It is time to hand Obama a huge reality check marked due and immediately payable.
He who is free will never submit. He who submits was never free. Stay free!
Obama is an idiot, pure and simple.