Let me please play the devil's advocate here...
healthcare reform will create ___ jobs.
This is a good thing.
That part sounds good. How many jobs will it destroy?
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It is irrational spending not incited by market demand or proper investment. If I go around and confiscate money from everyone in my neighborhood and then higher some gardeners then I will have also created jobs, but now the desires of those peoples who I stole the money from won't be satisfied and jobs won't be created from real demand by people who are being sociable and working. I'd just direct you to Bastiat's article of the broken window.... As far as I can tell that should have obliterated keynsian economics 100 years before it was developed
limitgov: Let me please play the devil's advocate here... healthcare reform will create ___ jobs. This is a good thing.
http://jim.com/econ/chap04p1.html
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It's easy to refute an argument if you first misrepresent it. William Keizer
I figured out why kenyesianism didn't work. Its because when they created a bunch of jobs by making people dig holes, they didn't create enough stimulus. You could double the amount of jobs created if you also paid people to fill the holes back up. If they did this maybe we wouldn't be in a depression right now.
My healtcare program costs my company about $7000. Why don't you create a job by getting with 9 friends and each chipping in that 7K to create one 42K job plus benefits. Or better yet save the environment by just paying the person the money to do nothing. If that is a good deal to you then why don't you do it. If not then it probably isn't a good deal to the rest of us either.
The answer to the devil's advocate seem to be Bastiat's broken window fallacy.
In the begining there was nothing, and it exploded.
Terry Pratchett (on the big bang theory)
limitgov: healthcare reform will create ___ jobs. This is a good thing.
What kind of sick bastard would want to create work to do? What we need are consumers' goods and services.
Jobs are not desirable in and of themselves. They are only desirable by virtue of their ability to lead to consumers' goods and services. A government-sponsored job may be good for the lucky individual who receives it, but for society as a whole, it is almost always a relative detriment, because the labor involved is almost always less productive than the factors of production which the free market would have directed the new job's wages to. And for society as a whole it is an absolute detriment to the extent that the activity of the job diminishes the capital structure. In the first case, growth is limited. In the latter case, wealth is destroyed. In neither case is wealth created. And in both cases, wealth is redistributed.