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Obama’s Tech Fallacy
Stephen Mauzy / American Thinker
President Obama embraces a philosophy that is the enemy of technological progress. A simple example demonstrates his fallacy: would a perpetual motion machine be a boon or a bane to society?
Surely it would be a boon, right? Here’s a machine that, once started, would run in perpetuity without additional energy input. Just imagine the reduction in emissions from internal combustion engines alone. OPEC would become a nonentity. Electric bills would be a fraction of what they are today. Energy, in general, would be subject to Moore’s Law.
Sounds too good to be true, and it would be, even if a perpetual motion machine were possible. A perpetual motion machine would be Schumpeterian change on steroids: it would surely be creative, and it would surely be destructive — destructive to the status quo.
A perpetual motion would displace jobs in virtually all business sectors. Opponents would be many, and organized from both sides of the political isle for obvious selfish reasons: on the right, oil, coal, natural gas would be decimated, as would many agricultural machine manufacturers. On the left, phony, quixotic alternative energy — windmills and solar in particular — would be rendered even more useless. The need for labor in manufacturing and production would be greatly diminished, thus diminishing the ranks of organized labor.
