If All We Get Is a Circus, Can’t We at Least Have Trained Seals

The Interior Department is directing more than $300 million in federal “economic stimulus” money to the Bureau of Land Management to update its facilities, roads and trails and jump-start renewable energy projects across the country, said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, honking and clapping like a trained seal here on Saturday, May 2. The largest chunk of the funding – roughly $143 million – will go toward new construction, deferred maintenance and energy efficiency upgrades on existing facilities. In Nevada, that will include $1.2 million to install solar panels at 16 remote fire stations, $6.8 million on abandoned mine cleanup, and $8 million to clear up a backlog in permit applications for people who want to install wind and solar projects – but not projects that could deliver substantial amounts of cheap power quickly by using coal or other proven technologies, mind you – on public lands. One line item in Mr. Salazar’s festival of fiscal frivolity calls for spending $800,000 in federal tax moneys to repair trails in the Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area, near Henderson. Gosh, only a few months ago the concern was how to keep people from finding out where the old Indian pictographs in Sloan Canyon WERE, to prevent them being defaced. Now the federal government wants to pave the trail? Will they follow the example of the Japanese, who not only paved the hiking route up Mount Fuji, but also placed benches and cold-beer vending machines at convenient intervals? Pardon a little adult intervention into this zillion-dollar equivalent of a kids’ birthday party, but pony rides, paper hats, and hiring people to slap solar panels on the roofs of rural outhouses and fire stations only just barely qualify as “creating jobs.” Real jobs involve producing something that consumers – either here or abroad, among our trading partners – want and will voluntarily pay for. There’s no reason to believe one-time desert make-work schemes, building things no one would voluntarily buy, will “buoy” the economy any better now than when FDR tried the same thing with his 1930s “Civilian Conservation Corps” – keeping men dependent on the government and thus stretching the Great Depression by an extra seven years. What is any newly trained “outhouse solarizer” going to do when you run out of BLM outhouses?...LewRockwell.com