The Government Can't Create Jobs
As the November elections approach, politicians are doing what politicians do best: making promises. President Obama's anti-business image, justified or not, will not score points with voters this year as unemployment continues to court 10% on the government's math and 20% in the real world. With these figures virtually unchanged since he took office, the president has been unable to sell the idea that his economic policies have created any jobs. So, he is doing the best he can with the hand that he has dealt himself and trumpeting the millions of jobs his policies have "created or saved." In addition, he has rolled out yet another boondoggle from the Keynsian toolbox in the form of a $50 billion infrastructure package designed to stimulate the economy and finally create some actual jobs.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are gearing up for what should amount to shooting fish in a barrel in the coming mid-term elections, getting incredible traction on criticizing Obama policies which largely mirror those of George W. Bush, for which he and the Republicans were tossed out of office just two years ago. They correctly point out that Obama's policies haven't created a single job. Americans must put them back into office or face economic Armageddon. Polls show that Americans are largely buying what the Republicans are selling, having apparently forgotten the "jobless recovery" of the early part of the last decade, which occurred while the Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.
The truth is that neither the Republicans' "supply-side economics" nor the Democrats "demand-side economics" have ever really created any jobs. Certainly, the housing boom successfully put some people to work in the homebuilding industry for a few years. However, when that bubble popped there was nowhere for those people to go. The Democrats' success seems to have been limited to the 600,000 or so people that took jobs with the census bureau. Unfortunately, the demand for people counting won't sustain a census-driven recovery. Obama's latest act of political desperation isn't getting much traction with anyone -- even liberal talking heads are finding it hard to get behind another supposed "infrastructure" program, especially one that pales in comparison (in terms of dollars) to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was long on investment and short on recovery.
So, if neither supply-side nor demand-side economics work, if neither the Republicans nor the Democrats have a program that will actually create jobs that will outlast the average car loan, where else can we look for an answer?
Perhaps we should reconsider exactly what it is that we are asking the government to do. People of all political persuasions talk about "creating jobs" as if there were no question that the government should be trying to create them, the only question being what program will create the most jobs, the highest paying jobs, or the longest lasting jobs. This is just another in an endless series of false dichotomies that accompany every election year, when voters are served up a "debate" that is framed to include two undesirable alternatives, with no acknowledgment that there may be a third. On job creation, that third alternative is this: the government can't create jobs, regardless of whether conservatives or liberals are at the controls, and moreoever, it shouldn't try to create jobs.
Read more:
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1112
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