Thomas Sowell on Snow Jobs
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By
Monty Pelerin, posted December 8th, 2009 http://www.economicnoise.com/2009/12/08/thomas-sowell-on-snow-jobs/
Jobs or Snow Jobs?
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
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.
Politicians who mandate various benefits that employers must provide
for workers gain politically by seeming to give people something for
nothing. But making workers more expensive means that fewer are likely
to be hired.
During an economic recovery, employers can respond to an increased
demand for their companies’ products by hiring more workers– creating
more jobs– or they can work their existing employees overtime. Since
workers have to be paid time-and-a-half for overtime, it might seem as
if it would always be cheaper to hire more workers. But that was before
politicians began mandating more benefits per worker.
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