Have Some Braised Unicorn Ribs

Walter Russell Mead does the definitive take down of the idea that "Green Jobs" are going to be the salvation of the joblessness and the American economy: Feeding The Masses On Unicorn Ribs

There's too many good quotes here to get them all, but I liked this section especially :

Let me put it this way. A GOP candidate might feel a need to please creationist voters and say a few nice things about intelligent design. That is politics as usual; it gins up the base and drive the opposition insane with fury and rage. No harm, really, and no foul.

But if that same politician then proposed to base federal health policy on a hunt for the historical Garden of Eden so that we could replace Medicare by feeding old people on fruit from the Tree of Life, he would have gone from quackery-as-usual to raving incompetence. True, the Tree of Life approach polls well in GOP focus groups: no cuts to Medicare benefits, massive tax savings, no death panels, Biblical values on display. Its only flaw is that there won’t be any magic free fruit that lets us live forever, and sooner or later people will notice that and be unhappy.

Green jobs are the Democratic equivalent of Tree of Life Medicare; they scratch every itch of every important segment of the base and if they actually existed they would be an excellent policy choice. But since they are no more available to solve our jobs problem than the Tree of Life stands ready to make health care affordable, a green jobs policy boils down to a promise to feed the masses on tasty unicorn ribs from the Great Invisible Unicorn Herd that only the greens can see.

Green jobs feeds the liberal fantasy that government can create jobs using tax money to promote policies that the liberals (as a group) want, but no one in particular feels a strong need for.  Hence, no market, and tax money spent to no particular effect.  It's mostly just welfare for liberal do-gooders.