As I write this, President Obama is presiding over what he’s calling a “jobs summit.” This is just a colorful way of describing a bunch of federal and state politicians, economists, business people and labor leaders getting together at the White House to jaw about putting people back to work. Now, at the risk of sounding extremely disrespectful, this jobs summit is truly laughable. Not that the nation’s 10.2% unemployment rate is any laughing matter, far from it. In fact, the sad state of employment in this country is something that makes my blood boil. But what makes me even more furious is that the federal government has decided to take the lead in job creation, as if the government were the ultimate arbiter on jobs.
John Stossel expressed it best in his Fox Business News article: “What arrogance! The political class thinks that economies revolve around them, that Washington makes things happen, that politicians are the most important players.” You see, the hubris here is that the government can come up with some new magic policy prescriptions and/or new government programs that will rescue the nation from the ravages of unemployment. They act as if creating jobs were somehow as mysterious as physicists’ quest for a theory of everything. But really, isn’t the formula for job creation pretty well-known by now?
Let’s make a bold assumption to this lingering question—When government sets simple rules that everyone understands and then gets out of the way, free people create jobs. Perhaps an even simpler way of saying this is that where you have capitalism, you have job creation. End of story—period.
Tags: arrogance, economists, Federal Government, free market, job creation, jobs summit, ravages of unemployment
