By John Ransom
Saturday, October 04, 2014
While many will be giddy because the BLS reported that
job creation came in at 248,000, well above analysts expectations-- and because
unemployment ticked down to 5.9 percent-- make no mistake: this is still a bad
job market.
That’s because another 315,000 people left the labor
force last month. When adding in the numbers of people who entered the civilian
population (217,000) job creation is hardly keeping up with population growth.
The job gains, in fact, are not much better than in
previous years. When one accounts for part-time work, discouraged workers and
those who have dropped out of the labor force entirely, unemployment is closer
to 23 percent, with no great sign of retreat from that number.
Six years into the so-called "recovery", the economy should be humming by now.
Instead any vibrations are merely echoes created by the
government drumbeat that the economy is just fine.
True, there is plenty of money-- money created by the
government via government-sponsored enterprises. And if the government is
somehow unhappy with who has money today and who does not—as they seem to be--
they only have themselves to blame.
Some of us have said all along that the best way to get
people who need money --actual cash in hand-- is via a paycheck. You can only do
that when you encourage job growth. The best way to encourage job growth is to
make it easier to hire people, not harder.
But you know our silly government, always doing it the
weird way.
Instead they've created tons of cash, along with tons of
regulation in hope of creating an economy as they want it to be, not an economy
as it is.
These regulations say precisely how homeowners, home
builders, doctors, patients, insurance companies, automakers, factories,
students, public utilities, private investors, public companies, universities,
airlines, cable companies, software companies, cellphone makers and even
bakeries and dairy farmers can spend their own money.
That’s why despite record amounts of money supply, we
have the slowest velocity of money ever on record. If monetary velocity were
recorded like global temperatures are pretended to be, we’d be in a deep, deep
Ice Age.
So along the way this government has created a class of
people, like me, who’d like to tell some politicians what precisely THEY could
do with their government.
Consequently, today we have both a capital strike AND a
labor strike in response to a government that seems to care little for either.
But if results are the true measure of intent, then one has to say that
government just barely cares more for capital than they do labor.
After all, banks, as Willie Sutton said, are “where the
money is.”
Today’s bank robbers are a bit subtler than Sutton. They
only wave guns around when they have to. Instead they use the power of the
grand jury, the power to prosecute both criminally and civilly any deviation
from the approved list of activities that you can do with the money that the
government created.
Unemployment benefits, disability benefits and welfare
benefits are all on the list of approved financial activities one can
participate in with the government’s money.
Creating jobs is too, kind of.
But job creation comes with so many caveats,
prerequisites and conditions that, screw it, it’s just easier to stay at home
and watch TV.
After all, someone can just hire a kiosk to do our jobs
while we all collect our benefits. And if the benefit is not enough, the
government can create more money and increase our benefits.
So, yes: The job market is so much better now that
315,000 people have given up looking for work.
Celebrate it; embrace it.
Marx thought the drudgery of work would eventually
alienate labor.
But Obama’s figured out a way to avoid labor entirely.
The alienation he throws in for free.
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