Job Creation ex nihilo
11-17-09
Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the winter of our discontent made
glorious summer by global warming.
Government and economists are "disappointed" in the rate of job growth.
Now there's what I call a puzzling phenomenon. Even though neither
government nor business has done anything at all to stimulate job
growth, the unemployment problem has not improved. Despite their best
efforts to will job growth into being through the power of pure
belief, unemployment is up and no new jobs have been created. How can
this be?
How can wishful thinking not have put millions of people back to work?
More importantly, how can reimbursing the financial industry for the
trillions they lost through the backfiring of their own wishful
thinking not create jobs? These are some effective wishful thinkers
we've given trillions to. They brought growth in every industry
including their own to a standstill by the sheer power of imagination.
If they can't create jobs by doing nothing but daydreaming about it a
few hours a day between receiving bonuses, who can?
To be fair, business is no fan of low unemployment. Low unemployment
means workers can be choosier, at least in theory, about where they
work, thus forcing employers to compete for them with better working
conditions and benefits and higher wages. So any practical initiatives
for creating jobs with the specific purpose of lowering unemployment
will have to come from the government.
This leads to another question: how can the Commerce and Labor
Departments be disappointed in the backwards rate of job growth?
Nothing has been done to create jobs, so what's to be disappointed
about? If the Obama administration had done one one-hundredth as much
to create jobs as they did to not close Gitmo, I could see them being
disappointed. But since they have done absolutely nothing to stimulate
job growth, it's unclear how poor or zero or even negative job growth
can be a disappointment.
And yet I love that they're disappointed. It's almost adorably
childish, the fact that they're disappointed
Back in the Reagan era we all understood how giving the government to
the industries it was supposed to regulate would benefit working
people, and we grasped how firing lots of employees to raise a
company's stock price was good for everyone, just as we knew that
helping the rich get richer would magically end poverty. But those
were the good old days of quaint superstition and blind faith.
Once the really really rich had almost all of our money and then I
guess burned it or tied it to the backs of sea turtles or however they
made it disappear, the spell was broken. No amount of money given to
the same wrong people would make things right anymore. The magician's
pants had fallen down, and the doves he'd been concealing in them
dropped out dead onto the floor. Giving him more doves was not going
make us believe in magic again. It would just kill more doves.
We see that now, but our government can't seem to figure it out. Obama
and his fifty-two assistants are firm believers in spontaneous
generation, it appears. Just as we returned to medieval treatment of
prisoners during the Bush administration, the Obama administration has
returned to the medieval belief that if you sit on a cheese long
enough, cattle will hatch out of it.
Bush, of course, never intended to create enough jobs to make any
difference, just enough to get by in the polls. But, boy, if Obama
could whip up a few dozen million jobs, not only would it make him a
hero again, he would actually be keeping his promise to his
constituency—the people who voted for abandoning so-called
"centrist" trickle-down, supply-side, corporate-favoring voodoo
economics, in favor of an economy more attached to the needs and
productive use of the abilities and imaginations of the actual people
making up the majority of society.
At this logical point, any discussion of economic policy boils down to
the question, "what is an economy for?" At its most basic level, an
economy springs up around a community's needs. People need food, so
farmers grow it or hunters and gatherers hunt and gather it. People
need shelter, so designers design it and builders build it. People
need first aid, so healers heal. People need to learn skills and
folklore, so teachers teach. Things the community can't provide for
itself must be traded for, so traders trade. And beyond that, creative
people make art, train animals, innovate and invent. Even the simplest
real community quickly develops economically beyond the basic needs of
the people it comprises. But it never abandons the task of providing
those needs. Those needs are the basis of the so-called primitive
economy, and any economy that provided innovation and glory without
taking care of the bases first would be considered a failure by its
own people.
However, sometimes even its own people are too dazzled by a society's
glory to realize how that glory has devoured their society from the
bottom up. Take what we can piece together of the original society on
Easter Island. They made great innovations in religion there. So
powerful were their invisible overlords that the entire economy came
to be devoted to appeasing them. The Easter Island economic priorities
allowed the feet, legs, torso and arms of society to wither away,
leaving only giant heads. Who can argue that those giant stone heads
aren't awe-inspiring, as awe-inspiring in their own way as any sky
scraper, billionaire's yacht or Roland Emerich movie?
But had you and I been there, with our post-modern common-sense
attitude, when the Easter Islanders were squandering their resources
on the awe-inspiring, even as their children were starving, we would
probably have considered their priorities poorly ordered… unless we
were Ronald Reagan or Milton Friedman or some other economic genius
who could see beyond the mere misery of human starvation to the
greater economic truth.
See, our economy is sophisticated. We focus on greater economic truths
first. In this way we are spiritually superior to primitive societies.
Mere gross concerns such as food, shelter, education and healthcare
are secondary to the greater subtle economic truth that resources must
be controlled by those already ordained and established as resource
controllers.
This is why Obama can't create jobs: he's too spiritual. He appeases
the big stone heads, even though his goal may be to feed the starving
children. He can't help it. It's very difficult to think beyond one's
epistemology. I love that word, epistemology. Look it up and make sure
I'm using it correctly, won't you? I have a bad history with such
theoretical terms. Whatever it may mean, giving to the big stone heads
is considered a natural and inevitable way to behave. Giving to the
poor is considered artificial and strange. Feeding the big stone heads
is not considered meddling with the forbidden gears of the cosmos,
while providing health care to poor people is. Ultimately, the world
is understood to be constructed so that all resources are destined to
gravitate to the big stone heads, and no other understanding is
possible.
And yet here are millions of us, out here in the real society, saying,
"Giving everything to the big stone heads is killing us, man."
You want to create jobs? Look first at what needs doing. Then use the
resources at your disposal to pay people to do those jobs, and to get
buying power to the people who need those jobs done for them. Teaching
and healing and growing food and providing shelter. Even trading and
innovating. And I mean people, not giant agribusinesses or insurance
companies or teacher-enslavement corporations or mighty absentee real
estate moguls. Not importers of toxic Chinese slave toys. Not thieves
who commandeer inventors' ingenuity.
There are plenty of jobs that need doing and plenty of people to do
them. You want to match the people with the jobs. You need to
facilitate something real and material in the actual proximity of the
unemployed person. The giant stone heads won't magically do that for
you.
The jobs needing doing are on the ignored ground floor of society—the giant stone heads don't have any connection to that world's actual
material requirements. They'll make a cream-filled cupcake. They'll
make an action figure. But they don't provide real food or real
figures or real action. They trade in trinkets and talismans and spun
sugar. They're the owners of the company that owns the company that
sells the mortgage debt owed by the owners of the crappy carnival
where the games are rigged and the prizes unwinnable.
They exist at the top of many layers of ownership. I don't have
anything against ownership per se. I have something against layers and
layers of unnecessary ownership that produces nothing, siphons off
everything, and is answerable to no one.
When you exist at the bottom of several strata of ownership, as most
of us do, you are buried alive and the priests are dancing on your
grave. It may be a beautiful and awe-inspiring and even highly
significant dance, but its richness is lost on those of us trying to
breathe underground. Defrock the priests and give their frocks to the
poor and naked.
If Obama really wants to avoid disappointment next time the job
figures come in, here's what he should do: something. Something real.
Something real in the region where the real unemployed people are. In
their midst. Jobs aren't going to create themselves. Banks aren't
going to create jobs by themselves. And certainly not where jobs are
most needed. As far as their usefulness to a real society, the banks
are broken. The magic is used up. The carnival's all broken down, the
magician's doves are dead, the rides won't move and everyone knows the
corn dogs are full of E. coli. The bearded lady cut her throat
shaving.
Nothing comes from nothing. As long as you're imagining, imagine
something new and useful to do. And then do it.
This has been the Moment of Truth: good day!
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