Yesterday’s Asbury Park Press reports that the respective leaders of the state Assembly and state Senate, Sheila Oliver and Stephen Sweeney (Todd) are going to shift their focus from changing their policies that are bankrupting suburban towns and policies that are producing overpriced, ineffective schools and instead are going to concentrate on “creating jobs”. Anytime time you hear a politician say that he or she will work to create jobs you know that that person is either an economic ignoramus or a dishonest political hack or, most often, both. Our vainglorious legislative leaders, Oliver and Sweeney (Todd) probably fit the latter most category.
Imagine there are two neighboring towns, Sylvania and Freedonia. Let’s say that Sylvania was run by a criminal gang that specialized in extorting home builders and that Freedonia had no such problem. In Sylvania builders had to pay this gang a vig on all transactions or any houses they built would be burned down. In Freedonia they did not. The Sylvanian gang got so greedy that the cost of building there became prohibitive. Of course in Freedonia builders were able to build houses without any hindrance and so they built plenty of them, providing a nice living for themselves and their workers and at the same time fulfilling the housing needs of all the Freedonians. The Sylvanian gang was eventually forced to reduce it’s extortion demands a little so at least some people could afford to build there and not just move to Freedonia. By Oliver and Sweeney (Todd)’s logic, the criminal leaders of Sylvania were busy “producing” housing because of their slightly reduced extortion requirements, whereas the leaders of Freedonia were a bunch of do-nothings that allowed privateers to run rampant.
Politicians can not produce productive jobs. The key word here is productive. In the Soviet Union everyone had jobs. In Cuba everyone has a job. The problem is those kind of jobs, created by politicians for their political utility instead of by businessmen based on market demand, don’t produce wealth, they destroy it. Some public sector jobs of course are necessary but they should be kept to a minimum. The only entity capable of producing wealth-creating jobs is the private sector, and politicians like Oliver and Sweeney (Todd) have spent their entire careers making it as difficult and expensive as possible for the private sector to operate in New Jersey. More than one study has pegged our state as the absolute worst in the country for business. How can this pair that has inflicted on us one job-destroying law after another, way too numerous to fit on this page, claim with a straight face that they are going to “create” jobs?
More money spent on job training is not going to help. The only way to create real jobs, wealth producing jobs, the only kind of jobs worth creating, is to undo all the harm done by New Jersey politicians. They need to learn to stay out of the way of wealth creation. Putting Oliver and Sweeney (Todd) in charge of job creation is the equivalent of hiring arsonists to run your fire department.
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