HEAD MORON AT MSNBC

The commercial seems like a parody, but that sure looks like Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC’s “Last Word.” In the spot O’Donnell mocks politicians who say that “government can’t create jobs.”

“The government created your job!” O’Donnell fires back, smiling triumphantly.

Imagine: In a battle of wits with a phantom politician, O’Donnell lost. Of course he doesn’t know it.

On the off-chance this is not a “Saturday Night Live” bit, let’s take a closer look.

First—I don’t even know where to start—it’s so ridiculous. How about this? The claim that government can’t create real jobs is not refuted by the existence of politicians. Must that really be explained?

Perhaps O’Donnell would applaud a proposal to make every adult American a member of Congress, paid a salary drawn on the Federal Reserve. Unemployment would vanish overnight.

But maybe that wouldn’t satisfy him. He might want at least some people working to make useful things. What do politicians make? Besides messes, that is.

But what things? Here’s where it gets tricky. Alas we live in a world of scarcity. People making widgets can’t also be making wudgets (a similar but not identical product). Should the government create widget-making jobs or wudget-making jobs? Neither? Some of each? How many? And how would the program administrators even go about making the decision?

In a freed market a process exists for answering those questions. Prices generated by free consumer purchases and producer competition for inputs guide decisions about what to make, how to make it, and in what quantities. In contrast, government “job creation” is like flying in a heavy fog without instruments: Prices are absent.

It has to be said yet again: In economic terms a “job” is not mere physical or mental exertion for which one gets paid. As someone once put it, “A thing cannot have value, if it is not a useful article. If it is not useful, then the labor it contains is also useless, does not count as labor, and hence does not create value”  Think POLITICIANS!!!!

Karl Marx said that. Yes, Mr. O’Donnell, Karl Marx understood that exertion aimed at making things no one wants is not real labor. When I say “things no one wants,” I don’t mean intrinsically useless things. In a world of scarcity, if we consumers believe we have enough widgets but not enough wudgets, then efforts to produce more widgets at the cost of wudgets are counterproductive no?  Inputs are transformed into things we want less badly (if at all) than other things those inputs could have been transformed into. Value is destroyed when it could have been created.

Admittedly it is technically wrong to say, “Government cannot create jobs.” We must concede there is some SLIM chance that a government program could finance a project that would have been undertaken in the freed market. But it would be pure luck, and we couldn’t know for sure it had happened even after the fact because government, which procures its resources at the point of a gun and doesn’t have to offer its “services” to consumers free to say no, faces no market test.

Persistent high unemployment does not demonstrate a need for government to create jobs. On the contrary, it demonstrates a need for government to get out of the way so the market process can undergo the correction called for by the earlier government-induced boom, which itself was an unsustainable jobs-creation program. Politicians (read--Liberals) aggravate an already bad situation when they generate a tax and regulatory environment in which anything can happen. 

Obamacare vs the Supreme Ct is on deck.