Unemployment Is Not a Problem! It's a Symptom.

Unemployment itself is not a problem but is an ominous symptom of a serious illness. We have been sick for a long time and have masked the symptoms with bubbles in technology and housing and with government spending and soaring government employment, but we are sick. The disease is productivity degeneration. For a healthy economy, production is the goal, and meaningful employment of the citizens is both a required means and a benefit. It is only production that creates wealth, and both unemployment and employment that is not involved in production of goods and services that people want to pay for are burdens on the productivity of the nation.

Of course employment is not the only means required, and meaningful employment cannot be achieved in the absence of two other essentials. It is necessary to have capital available at a reasonable price. And, it is necessary to have creative people with ideas and willingness to take personal risks to exploit those ideas.

1. Fred Smith personally came up with the idea of Federal Express and started and built a company that now employs about a quarter million people.
2. Sam Walton came up with the idea of low price discount stores in smaller communities and built a company that now employs more than two million people.
3. Michael Dell started a computer company in his college dorm room that now employs 85,000.
4. Steve Jobs built Apple Computer, and it now employs 22,000.
5. George Eastman founded a company 130 years ago that still employs 26,000 and has spun off companies that employ additional thousands.

And today there are tens of thousands of creative individuals who want to start companies but find the risks and taxes too high, capital availability too low, government regulations too oppressive, and future directions of government too uncertain. 

 

So, here’s an idea. Government can quit consuming so much of our available capital and cut taxes dramatically on businesses and back off on the oppressive regulations that hamper businesses and things will get better fast.

 

Or, if our elected representatives don’t want to take such simple approaches to increasing production and demand for employees, here are some options they might find more attractive: 

1. Do a census once a quarter. That would employ a heck of a lot more people that just doing one every ten years.
2. Outlaw people pumping their own gas and paying at the pump. Just think of the jobs, and waiting lines, that would create. NJ already outlaws self pumping.
3. Quit this talk of dropping Saturday delivery of mail and start twice a day deliveries. That would create lots of jobs in the US Postal Service.
4. Establish a program to audit all tax returns every year. That would require the IRS to employ a million or so.
5. Make sure all federal employees at all levels are unionized and reduce their work weeks to thirty hours, at the same pay of course. That would allow hiring hundreds of thousands of new federal employees to handle the “work” left undone by the shorter weeks.
6. Re-institute the draft and have two years of mandatory military service to be completed before reaching the age of 25 for all young men and women. That would make a huge dent in unemployment.
7. Let’s go to four senators per state rather than two and double the number of representatives also. Think of the additional staff persons and interns that would have to be hired and the square feet of office space that would have to be built!
8. Let’s go ahead and build high speed trains alongside all interstate highways. That would put millions to work and enable us to abandon automobiles entirely in the next twenty five years or so if only people were willing to give up their cars. Of course we don’t want them to actually do that because that would cost jobs in the automotive industry. Redundant transportation systems can’t be all bad.
9. Put a federal Health and Human Services employee in each doctor’s office and a dozen or so in each hospital to assist with and assure appropriate implementation of the new health insurance reform legislation.
10. Create a national ID and issue one to everybody, but don’t require people to carry them. Thousands of government employees would be required to create and issue the cards, but it would be too intrusive to require people to actually carry them.
11. Raise the minimum wage to twice the poverty level. We do not want anybody working and remaining in poverty.
12. Start a “public option” oil company. That will employ thousands and assure that if there is ever another deepwater oil well blowout, the government will have the expertise to quickly plug the hole and will not have to depend on private businesses to do so.

Well, I’m sure our representatives are too smart to take up any of these twelve silly suggestions, but I’m afraid they are not smart enough, courageous enough, and unselfish enough, to do the right things to stimulate production and demand for employees. So, we will just have to struggle along, trying to conserve what meager resources we have.

 

America the Wealthy, R.I.P.