Posted on 08/04/2018 11:16:36 AM PDT by Kaslin
ate income and racial inequality, and forestall recessions. The policy’s champions sell it as a win-win: No one who wants to work would be unemployed and the economy at large would benefit, too. According to their flawed logic, if a healthy economy generates jobs, then perhaps we can beget a healthy economy by “creating” jobs in the first place.
However, these policymakers have matters precisely backwards, failing to understand that if it were so easy to guarantee jobs in this way, it would be no less possible to simply legislate gross domestic product growth. It is ludicrous to believe the government can create prosperity and economic development through the thaumaturgical power of statute. The forces of supply and demand stubbornly persist despite the will of crusading legislators. Further, mandating jobs for all would come with unintended consequences that run counter to the stated goals of any job-guarantee program.
Employers’ resources are finite, and their personnel decisions reflect this fundamental fact. If business owners are not hiring of their own accord—that is, without being coerced by the law or otherwise induced by taxpayer dollars—then they have determined that the costs of adding workers outweigh the benefits. In other words, they can’t afford more staff. This is not a decision for politicians, who lack the information and incentives necessary for sound stewardship of others’ businesses. If the economy could sustain these new jobs without taking a loss, they would already exist, rooted firmly in actual consumer demand.
Competition and markets work because they allow multiple points of decision-making power. In the words of Adam Smith, the “invisible hand” guides the intersection between actors with their own interests—millions of connected nodes that generate feedback as to how time and resources ought to be allocated.
Although the marginal benefits of job-guarantee programs are questionable, at best, the costs are quite conspicuous and significant. Even conservative cost estimates put such a job-guarantee schemeon par with some of the government’s most expensive programs, Medicare and defense spending, both of which are plagued by waste and inefficiency. However, sometimes the negative consequences take time to express themselves, which makes policies such as a job-guarantee program so beguiling for legislators trying to win political points with well-meaning but naive do-gooders.
Competition and markets work because they allow multiple points of decision-making power. In the words of Adam Smith, the “invisible hand” guides the intersection between actors with their own interests—millions of connected nodes that generate feedback as to how time and resources ought to be allocated.
Although the marginal benefits of job-guarantee programs are questionable, at best, the costs are quite conspicuous and significant. Even conservative cost estimates put such a job-guarantee schemeon par with some of the government’s most expensive programs, Medicare and defense spending, both of which are plagued by waste and inefficiency. However, sometimes the negative consequences take time to express themselves, which makes policies such as a job-guarantee program so beguiling for legislators trying to win political points with well-meaning but naive do-gooders.
There are simple psychological reasons that politicians and policy wonks who regard themselves as pragmatic, and thus focused on practical solutions rather than ideology, dramatically underestimate costs and overestimate benefits. We tend to be biased in favor of what we can see right away, the immediate result. As the causal chain becomes more protracted, it becomes more difficult to accurately allocate costs among particular public policies. Eager to take credit for any perceived benefit of a policy, politicians never have to be confronted with the more distant costs. Until jobs fall like manna from heaven, any government “guarantee” of employment will have to mean arbitrarily removing resources from some people and projects to invest them in others.
It is, moreover, ironic that the state would be charged with the creation of jobs or the guarantee of employment, given that government is the foremost job-destroyer and preventer. A destructive combination of special-interest regulatory capture, basic economic illiteracy, and administrative hubris drives these regrettable, job- and growth-killing policies.
It’s difficult to take government seriously on this issue—and there’s no reason why we should. Government has no credibility when it comes to creating economic opportunities for working people. On the other hand, it certainly has a long and storied history of placing hurdles in the way of economic advancement, of precluding job-seekers from self-employment, and undermining innovation. Favored by this warped pay-to-play economic framework are large incumbent firms, possessed of the financial and personnel resources to parse the red tape and navigate the regulatory labyrinth. We should expect that government job guarantees will similarly favor the well-connected and government-dependent.
Rent-seeking corporations use their access to industry regulators to solicit costly rules that create artificial scarcities, driving out smaller competitors. Needless occupational licensure regimes cost the U.S. economy millions of jobs. As more and more on both sides of the aisle and the putative political divide are coming to realize, most existinglicensing rulesandother regulationsare regressive, a deadweight economic loss. Not only do they fail to serve stated consumer protection goals, in most cases they actually inhibit economic opportunity and mobility.
The astute observer will, no doubt, wonder why policymakers don’t chart another course, the more direct one, removing these artificial, coercive obstacles to commerce, innovation, growth and thus new jobs. Lawmakers seem intent on placing the government in the way of job creation wherever possible, its interventions costing the national economy as a whole trillions of dollars. In 2016, the Mercatus Center estimated that if regulations had merely been frozen at 1980 levels (themselves quite high), the economy would have been approximately 25 percent larger than it was in 2012.
Furthermore, even the notion that government acts in the public interest, that its interventions will redound to the benefit of society’s worst off, is itself a deeply pernicious myth, at odds with the historical record. In his book,Our Enemy, The State, Albert Jay Nock explains that the state’s primary purpose—and the underlying purpose of its various economic interventions—is “maintaining the stratification of society into an owning and exploiting class, and thus a propertyless dependent class.” Quite contrary to the happy notion that the state was born of a contract, instituted to provide law and order and serve the common good, Nock shows that those administering it are tantamount to “a professional criminal class,” its interests and goals being “purely anti-social.”
Proposed job-guarantee policies would address and perpetuate the wrong problem. The real issue is not how to use government to guarantee everyone a job, but how to restrain government and how to stop a decadent and corrupt organization (whose only tool is force) from arbitrarily limiting free markets and job-seekers’ prospects. A totalitarian state seeks to guarantee employment, regarding its subjects as charges, as dependents or wards. A free society resolves to limit the size and scope of government, certainly out of the way of job-creators’ and jobs-seekers’.
It is ironic that the Job Guarantee push goes big time just as we are in a period when anyone who wants to work can get a job. Of course these jobs are all demeaning in that one has to work for a boss who isn’t the benevolent Government
or has to work for an income when his sensitive temperament makes it more pleasant to lay home and watch TV.
Socialism is an effort to outlaw the reality of human difference; to deny the reality that regardless of the subject of comparison, some people are better than others; that regardless of the varied social influences, some people are also better motivated than others.
You do not solve any "problem" by refusing to consider the causation for the "problem." And see Lies Of Socialism
Government guarantees most of time deliver nothing but more misery. For many years the wealth gap between rich and poor was relatively small. Then as government grew because of 1929 depression, it made more promises and increased control. And in 1980, after 50 years of this growth the gap between rich and poor also began to grow. Today.as a result of that growth the gap is now greater than ever. The President is attempting to correct but it would take a miracle to do so. Thus the division in our nation is at an all time high. Hate, envy, jealousy and evil along with media’s help rule the day.
Karl Marx is chuckling in h*ll.
Americans, in the beginning, tried socialism. Like every other people who tried such a non-starter for providing individual incentives, individual freedom, and prosperous economy, they failed. Here is the story:
The Economic Dimension Of Liberty Protected By The Constitution
"Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The enviable condition of the people of the United States is often too much ascribed to the physical advantages of their soil & climate .... But a just estimate of the happiness of our country will never overlook what belongs to the fertile activity of a free people and the benign influence of a responsible government."
- James Madison
America's Constitution did not mention freedom of enterprise per se, but it did set up a system of laws to secure individual liberty and freedom of choice in keeping with Creator-endowed natural rights. Out of these, free enterprise flourished naturally. Even though the words "free enterprise' are not in the Constitution, the concept was uppermost in the minds of the Founders, typified by the remarks of Jefferson and Madison as quoted above.
Already, in 1787, Americans were enjoying the rewards of individual enterprise and free markets. Their dedication was to securing that freedom for posterity. The learned men drafting America's Constitution understood history - mankind's struggle against poverty and government oppression. And they had studied the ideas of the great thinkers and philosophers.
They were familiar with the near starvation of the early Jamestown settlers under a communal production and distribution system and Governor Bradford's diary account of how all benefited after agreement that each family could do as it wished with the fruits of its own labors.
Later, in 1776, Adam Smith's INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS and Say's POLITICAL ECONOMY had come at just the right time and were perfectly compatible with the Founders' own passion for individual liberty. Jefferson said these were the best books to be had for forming governments based on principles of freedom.
They saw a free market economy as the natural result of their ideal of liberty. They feared concentrations of power and the coercion that planners can use in planning other peoples lives; and they valued freedom of choice and acceptance of responsibility of the consequences of such choice as being the very essence of liberty. They envisioned a large and prosperous republic of free people, unhampered by government interference. The Founders believed the American people, possessors of deeply rooted character and values, could prosper if left free to:
Such a free market economy was, to them, the natural result of liberty, carried out in the economic dimension of life. Their philosophy tended to enlarge individual freedom - not to restrict or diminish the individual's right to make choices and to succeed or fail based on those choices. The economic role of their Constitutional government was simply to secure rights and encourage commerce. Through the Constitution, they granted their government some very limited powers to:
- acquire and own property
- have access to free markets
- produce what they wanted
- work for whom and at what they wanted
- travel and live where they would choose
- acquire goods and services which they desired
Adam Smith called it "the system of natural liberty." James Madison referred to it as "the benign influence of a responsible government." Others have called it the free enterprise system. By whatever name it is called, the economic system envisioned by the Founders and encouraged by the Constitution allowed individual enterprise to flourish and triggered the greatest explosion of economic progress in all of history. Americans became the first people truly to realize the economic dimension of liberty.
- assure that the ground rules were fair (a fixed standard of weights and measures)
- encourage initiative and inventiveness (copyright and patent protection laws)
- provide a system of sound currency with an established value (gold and silver coin)
- enforce free trade (free from interfering special interests)
- protect individuals from the harmful acts of others
Footnote: Our Ageless Constitution, W. David Stedman & La Vaughn G. Lewis, Editors (Asheboro, NC, W. David Stedman Associates, 1987) Part III: ISBN 0-937047-01-5
We don't want job guarantees, we need guarantees of a good economy and freedom for biz owners and workers alike.
To my knowledge, the only power that the states have expressly delegated to the feds to guarantee anything is to guarantee each state a republican form of government, corrections welcome.
"Article IV, Section 4: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government [emphasis added], and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
Otherwise, regardless what FDR’s state sovereignty-ignoring activist justices wanted everybody to think about the scope of Congress’s Commerce Clause powers (1.8.3) when it wrongly decided Wickard v. Filburn in Congress's favor imo, please consider the following.
A previous generation of state sovereignty-respecting Supreme Court justices had clarified that the states have never expressly constitutionally delegated to the feds the specific power to regulate INTRAstate commerce. So the best that Congress can do to “guarantee” jobs is to do a great job of regulating INTERstate commerce. Corrections, insights welcome.
"Article I, Section 8, Clause 3: To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;"
"State inspection laws, health laws, and laws for regulating the internal commerce of a State, and those which respect turnpike roads, ferries, &c. are not within the power granted to Congress [emphases added]." -Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
H O W E V E R …
The problem with the current corrupt, post-17th Amendment ratification Congress is that master deal-maker Pres. Trump has been indicating, in my words, that one way that Congress has been destroying the nation is by grossly (treasonously?) mismanaging its Commerce Clause powers.
In fact, noting cultural jokes about selling the Brooklyn Bridge, corrupt Congress has arguably been selling the whole nation.
The remedy for unconstitutionally big federal government …
Patriots need to finish the job that they started when they elected Trump president.
More specifically, patriots now need to be making sure that there are plenty of Trump-supporting, state sovereignty-respecting patriot candidates on the 2018 primary ballots who will commit to keeping the federal government's big nose out of intrastate commerce.
Patriots then need to pink-slip career lawmakers by sending patriot candidate lawmakers to DC on election day.
And until the states wise up and repeal 17A, evidenced by concerns about the integrity of the outcome of Alabama's and Pennsylvania's special elections, patriot candidates need to win elections by a large enough margin to compensate for the following concerns.
Intel Chair: FBI, DOJ Obstructing Trump Probe in Hope of Dem Takeover in Congress
Keep Pelosi from becoming Speaker again.
Obama: Pelosi will be speaker again after November midterms
Keep Democrats from impeaching Trump.
Democratic Rep. Al Green says he will force House impeachment vote
Young, misguided, newly registered pro-gun control voters who are likely clueless about the fed's constitutionally limited powers.
Possible deep state ballot box fraud and associated MSM scare tactics.
Interference from people like Soros.
Hacking Democracy:
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