Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!
(Facts, Fictions, Fallacies)
The biggest spotlight in public policy today, especially due to the dismal economic climate, is the level of employment in the economy. Professional economists and citizens alike eagerly await the latest government statistics on “job growth” or more accurately, job losses. Despite these abundantly clear signals of economic and personal pain, establishment mouthpieces still have the effrontery to proclaim “the recession has passed.”
This claim is all the more ironic, as the siren song of political economy to always increase the amount of jobs in a nation, regardless of climate. Jobs are politically popular – from pork-barrel spending projects that enrich a single district[1], to massive public works programs, the jobs fetish of politicians and mainstream economists knows no bounds. The epitome of this viewpoint was the quip by the king of make-work programs, British economist John Maynard Keynes, who advocated the government in tough times to “pay people to dig holes and fill them back up again.”[2] Bear in mind, lest we forget, “we’re all Keynesians again.”[3] The Keynesian viewpoint manifests itself in the Obama-Geithner-Bernanke triumvirate over economic policy. These views are currently being encapsulated in President Obama’s propaganda campaign for a second new round of fiscal stimulus, known as the “jobs bill” to succeed the dubious $787,000,000,000 stimulus package in 2008.
While there might be a strong empirical correlation between the total number of jobs and total economic output (or their respective growth rates), it does not necessarily imply causation. Sycophantic Keynesians and their devout adherents in Washington make an offering at the jobs-altar with the sacrifice of causal economic laws. It is not the jobs that are the underlying engine of growth in an economy, but the savings and wealth that they produce.
While there are many fallacies in putting “jobs” on a pedestal, this article will deal with two of the most important: First, that jobs are intrinsically more valuable than the income they provide, and that thus everyone must have one; and second, that the free market naturally tends towards less than “full employment” in the long-run (the brunt of the Keynesian onslaught).
Before addressing the specific theoretical problems in the Keynesian system, every citizen in America, knowledgeable or not, should ask themselves one question: “Why should we ever trust the same people who promised us unprecedented prosperity and made an absolute mess of things to provide the solution to the problems they created?”
