What is the "Key" to Job Creation?

"Creating jobs is the key to making long-term deficit reduction achievable and providing the relief working people need. An investment in transit and other infrastructure will create jobs and keep our communities safe and thriving. And we need to lay the foundation for long-term economic growth by investing in clean energy, education and job training."

As tiresome as it is, the repulsive and destructive arguments presented in this article must be countered as often as they are made. In this article by two top AFL-CIO officials, entitled Rep. Ryan's tax plan moves us backward
, labor's leaders propose to perpetuate a trend that is moving us back to pre-American days of Imperial Government.

I've left the following comments:

zemack May 02, 2011 at 8:13PM

What is the source of real jobs?

Jobs are created by the person(s) whose intellectual energy and ambitions exceed his physical capacity to realize them. He then needs to hire one (or more) persons to help him transform his ideas - his intellectual labor - into useful products and services. The more productive his intellectual labor is, the more people are willing to buy (i.e., trade for) his product, meaning the more people he must hire. The only thing that stands in his way is coercive interference – i.e., government regulations, taxes, etc. What is required for the job creators to flourish? A government that protects his rights to think and act upon his own judgement, and his right to his earnings, every bit as strongly as it protects those described as “working families”. The job creator – i.e., the businessman – simply requires laissez-faire, or freedom – along with his employees, customers, and everyone else.

What the alleged representatives of the workers advocate is something entirely different, however. It can be summed up with this analogy: If I were to embark on a string of convenience store stick-ups, then use the loot to put an addition onto my or anyone’s house – to “invest” in the homebuilding industry – I will have been said to have “created” construction jobs. As ridiculous as this sounds, once you cut through the socialist/Orwellian double-speak above, that is exactly what is advocated on a national scale in this article.

In the name of creating jobs, we are presented with a worn-out old scheme to punish free production and trade, transfer still more wealth and power to a bureaucratic/political governmental elite, empower politically-connected special interests, force more and more people into dependence on and therefor slavery to the state – and to make actual, original productive job creation ever more difficult. Socialist governments can’t create jobs, or wealth. Socialist governments forcibly transfer wealth, and that’s it.

I will not defend or criticize the Republican plan. Their track record of reigning in galloping statism is horrific, to put it mildly. What I will say is this: Socialism in all of its manifestations (including Keynesian welfare statism) has proven economically unworkable, and immoral because it violates every individual’s right to manage and live his own life. What’s needed is something the GOP is currently too cowardly to advocate: Phase out and end government’s involvement in such areas as retirement (Social Security), healthcare (ObamaCare, Medicare), charity (Medicaid, SCHIP, etc). The government has mismanaged those horrendously, bringing America to the verge of banana republic status. Return power in those areas literally to the people – the people who earn the money before it is confiscated. Replace the graduated income tax with a flat, low-rate tax, fair and simple. End the insanity of trying to spend the economy into prosperity. What can’t work in your personal life, can’t work on any scale.

These are for starters. The fundamental issue is statism (the individual’s life belongs to the state) vs. freedom. By using the government-created economic crisis to rationalize expanded government, Mr. Trumka and Mr. Wowkanech are following a hundred-year-old pattern. Labor’s leaders choose statism, not “working families”. They do job seekers great harm by attacking job generators, denigrated as “Wall Street and the rich”, and the economic freedom a dynamic economy requires.