Can government create a job? Yes! Government can create millions of jobs. They could outlaw farming equipment tomorrow which would immediately create millions of farming jobs. But would these new farming jobs be productive jobs?
Government jobs by definition aren’t productive jobs. Does a government job produce more than the cost of the labor? The only way to find this out would be to compete in the market and discover what the price of labor would be according to the law of supply and demand.
High school teaching jobs are examples of jobs that are both free market jobs (private school teachers) and government jobs (public school teachers). What do I mean by this? A private school teacher gets paid considerably less in wages, benefits, and retirement, than a public school teacher. A private school has to provide a quality service at a price that individuals value more than the money they freely exchange for that service. If they can’t, they will go out of business. A public school has no such incentive to provide quality at a lower price. They receive ever-increasing revenue through local tax levies and state and federal funding. Because of this, teachers unions procure ever-increasing wages and benefits for their teachers who provide a lower quality service. People’s next best alternative, private schools or home schooling, are considerably more expensive, which is why it is difficult to escape public schools.
Government wages are higher than market wages. The true price a teacher could command if we had a free market educational system, would be somewhere between the monopoly wage of the public schools and the wage paid by the private schools. We can’t know what it would be, all we know is the wage would be revealed through the interactions between individual demanders and suppliers of the service in the market. The true price of a teachers wage can only be discovered through the market process.
GOVERNMENT STIFLES JOB CREATION
Below are two great articles. One is about how Government regulatory costs make it difficult, if not impossible, to create real jobs in the private sector. And the other tells how we must get back to the understanding that the individuals rights as a free person trumps some vague idea of a collective good.
The first is, Our Government Destroyer of Jobs, by Charles Hugh Smith, at oftwominds.
Here are some excerpts from the article.
“Government regulation is supposed to address life safety and exploitation of workers and the public. But unbeknownst to the status quo, it’s supposed to do so with an eye on cost-benefits and diminishing returns.”
“The government’s solution to absurdly high costs of opening a small business is: borrow more money….. we make the rules, you follow them, and if you can’t afford to follow the rules, then don’t open the business.”
“This is how you get an economy of bureaucrats justifying their existence with 500-page manuals regulating private enterprise and abandoned main streets and malls. The government assumes private enterprise will jump through an endless number of hoops to operate a business, and that there is an endless supply of willing entrepreneurs who will volunteer to put themselves at risk of bankruptcy.”
“Back in reality, there is not an endless supply of people willing to jump through an insane number of hoops and risk their capital and health on starting a risky enterprise.”
“Guess what, our government: you forgot that ultimately you live off the private sector. Yes, let’s pile on another 500 pages of regulations–no problem–nothing could be easier for those in secure jobs funded by taxpayers. But if the private-sector jobs go away, who’s left to pay for state employees to shuffle thousands of pages of regulations and enforce countless “improvements”?”
FREE INDIVIDUALS vs. THE COLLECTIVE
The second is, Agenda For A Freer And More Prosperous America, by Richard Ebeling, at epictimes.com.
Here are some excerpts from the article.
“America must rediscover and reestablish its own founding principles and philosophical ideas…This means recapturing the spirit and meaning of individualism and individual rights. That every human being should be considered a free person, allowed to live his or her own life as he or she wished, guided by their own goals, purposes and ideals that will give their life meaning, value and worth, as they define it.”
“This means liberating ourselves from the false notion that the individual is owned and subservient to the collective, the tribe or the group into which they were born, and to which a political and ideological elite asserts they are to be sacrificed and obedient; that their life is not their own, but the property of the collective.”
“As long as the underlying collectivism is not challenged and overcome, real and sustainable freedom cannot be restored. America was founded on the idea of sovereign individuals, who associated with each other for mutual betterment through voluntary trade and consensual association. Government was meant to secure and protect each individual’s right to his life, liberty and honestly acquired property (meaning peaceful production and/or voluntary exchange).”
“Privileges and favors, subsidies and artificial protections for some at the expense of others must be repealed and abolished. There must be an equality of individual rights before the law, not an inequality of government-imposed “entitlements” and redistributive “rights”….”
“Freeing markets under a regime of equal individual right under an impartial rule and enforcement of the law would do far more to help those that “progressives” claim there are most concerned about in society than the entire array of interventionist and welfare statist programs have done in more than a half a century of coerced redistribution since the heady hopes of LBJ’s Great Society programs.”
VIDEO FROM LEARN LIBERTY
Below is a video from Learn Liberty, that talks about the ramifications of the new sharing economy. This sharing economy is challenging the status quo businesses that are protected by government regulations.
Related Article – Why Do People Think The Government Is The Economy? at austrianaddict.com.
Related Article – I’m From The Government And I’m Here To Help, at austrianaddict.com.
AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT 