President Obama keeps talking about the jobs his administration is “creating” but there are more people unemployed now than before he took office. How can there be more unemployment after so many jobs have been “created”?
Let’s go back to square one. What does it take to create a job? It takes wealth to pay someone who is hired, not to mention additional wealth to buy the material that person will use.
But government creates no wealth. Ignoring that plain and simple fact enables politicians to claim to be able to do all sorts of miraculous things that they cannot do in fact. Without creating wealth, how can they create jobs? By taking wealth from others, whether by taxation, selling bonds or imposing mandates.
However it is done, transferring wealth is not creating wealth. When government uses transferred wealth to hire people, it is essentially transferring jobs from the private sector, not adding to the net number of jobs in the economy.
If that was all that was involved, it would be a simple verbal fraud, with no gain of jobs and no net loss. In reality, many other things that politicians do reduce the number of jobs.
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Sowell nails it with “What does it take to create a job? It takes wealth…”
But wealth is a dirty four letter word. Until we change that notion we aren’t going to fix our 10% unemployment problem nor keep improving our pollution standards because only wealthy nations are able to work toward improving the environment. Even the eco advocates know that, which is why Climategate is about a wealth transfer.
But “transferring wealth is not creating wealth”. In fact much of the transferred wealth ends up in the hands of government rent seekers already behind the castle walls who use the money to buy off the public with self serving patronage.
The solution to all this is long term and involves the early teaching of basic economics, which isn’t what our socialists have in mind when they talk about early childhood learning. They are simply rent seeking for their brothers and sisters.
They forgot one …
Governments (BC) pay a 17% wage premium to “attract the best people (…Gordo-the-Great)”. High-skill workers naturally gravitate toward these brain-dead bureaucratic check-list government jobs. Leaving the lesser-skilled for the actual tax-paying open-competitive industries.