Vermont Tiger is, as usual, scolding politicians (well, Democrats and Progressives, at any rate) for deviating from laissez-faire absolutism. There’ve been a few times in the past where the “evidence” to support their arguments has made me raise an eyebrow, though… and this time its particularly the case. From VT Tiger:

There’s a great deal of data on this available, if our elected leadership chooses to look at it.  Spain, for instance, has long been touted as an example of a robust “green” economy, yet the data shows that, at least in Spain, the green economy costs more jobs than it creates.  In this study, it’s estimated that for every 4 jobs created, 9 will be lost.  This new Green Math simply doesn’t add up.

This is a study getting a lot of internet coverage across right wing websites and publications – and has been pushed repeatedly on Fox News. This is where it caught the eye of Media Matters, however:

(Study author) Calzada is reportedly a founding member of the Prague Network, which, according to Radio Prague, is “an international grouping of institutions aimed at countering panic connected with global warming,” or that Calzada is reportedly a fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, an organization that has reportedly received funding from ExxonMobil.

Now, birds of a feather, right? I’m not necessarily going to throw out somebody’s work because they get money from sources with an agenda – but it certainly does raise eyebrows. And Calzada cannot be reasonably considered a truly neutral party, given his close association with the Prague Network and the far right Ludwig Von Mises Institute. Also, VT Tiger (as well as Fox News) makes no mention of critics of the study – critics such as (gasp) the Wall Street Journal (!?) (after the flip):

But the study doesn’t actually identify those jobs allegedly destroyed by renewable-energy spending. What the study actually says is that government spending on renewable energy is less than half as efficient at job creation as private-sector spending. Specifically, each green job required on average 571,000 euros, compared with 259,000 euros in “average capital per worker” in the rest of the economy.

So how does that translate into outright job destruction? It’s simply a question of opportunity cost, the paper says: “The money spent by the government cannot, once committed to “green jobs”, be consumed or invested by private parties and therefore the jobs that would depend on such consumption and investment will disappear or not be created.”

On paper, that makes sense. But Spain’s support for renewable energy came out of existing tax revenues — there were no special levies on corporate activity designed to underwrite clean energy.

The money the government has spent on clean energy may have edged out other government spending, but it’s hard to see how it could have edged out private-sector spending, especially when the Socialist government there has reduced corporate income-tax rates, most recently this past January.

And just where did that study come from? Professor Gabriel Calzada is the founder and president of the Fundacion Juan de Mariana, a libertarian think tank founded in 2005. He’s also a fellow of the Center for New Europe, a Brussels-based libertarian think thank than in recent years apparently accepted funding from Exxon Mobil.

One doesn’t even have to engage with Tiger’s (and Calzada’s) underlying premise that any job that comes through government investment is inherently bad to realize that this one study is nothing anybody should be hanging their hat on.