Green jobs or green junk?

The lovely folks at the Cato Institute put out a blog today discussing government manipulation in the green jobs market.   You can check it out here:

 Green Industrial Policy: Taxes, Subsidies, and Privelege

Green jobs policy is formed as follows.  First you use subsidies to distort incentives and increase investment in wind and solar power.  This creates green jobs that the market can’t support without those subsidies.  Other countries then do the same, but their manufacturers are better than yours.  So to protect the new green jobs you created, you impose tariffs to prevent green competition from harming the green investments you artificially incentivized.

In what world does this policy make sense?   This is simply another example of government interference retarding growth in exactly the industry it professes to want to expand. 

I think a more accurate summation of our green energy policy would be as follows:  We vow to create a new job market, driving corporate growth through subsidies and tax breaks, but only for those companies that we choose to shepherd.

One can easily imagine the conditions of getting on the inside of the green energy clique.

One washes the other, dontcha know?