“Nobody is saying that the answer is no government.”
Regardless, that wasn’t my point. I was simply disagreeing with the premise that politicians don’t create jobs. For one thing, a government job can be both necessary and a benefit to non-government businesses and jobs. For example, consider a policeman. No police is as bad as too many police.
If a politician hires more police to maintain the rule of law, that doesn’t only create new work (jobs) for those citizens who become police. It also helps control crime so that private businesses can prosper and potentially create more jobs themselves.
It’s true that government jobs are dependent on income that comes from the private economy (that was probably what Cruz was getting at), but my point is simply that governments do create jobs—real jobs that can benefit the economy and enable it to prosper. The key is finding the right balance so that government doesn’t end up harming the private economy.
I don’t know of anyone who is claiming there should be no police or government. There might be a few who think businesses should create private police forces and fire departments, but again, that wasn’t the gist of my post.
Government jobs leech resources from the private sector. A necessary evil to some degree, but definitely something to be minimized. That is, each government job above the minimum required for a functional society takes more than the equivalent resources from the growth part of our economy—as well as being funded under the power of force.
And, of course, we haven’t been below that minimum level for hundreds of years, if ever at all. Such government-created jobs therefore aren’t really relevant to our current situation.
Surely you don’t disagree but that Perry hasn’t “created” private sector jobs in Texas?