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Any politician who said the Earth is flat would get booed — and probably laughed — off the podium. Everyone in the audience would know the Earth is round, and would realize that any politician who doesn’t grasp this basic fact of how our universe works is too stupid to entrust with their future.
Senators create jobs, but only on Discworld.
Change two things in America and you will fundamentally change the relationship between citizen and state:
It’s like this. No one is going to go very far in the Republican party if they admit to being an atheist. So even if someone doesn’t believe in God, they are going to pretend that they do if they want to run for president on the Republican ticket. By the same token, if someone wants the Democratic nomination for president they have to claim that the free market is the enemy of prosperity, even if they don’t believe it. The Clintons are such accomplished liars, there’s no way to tell what they really think.
While I fully agree with the larger point, being a politician who “creates jobs” is also a now a figure of speech–it means being a politician who supports policies that allow jobs to be created. I don’t think we have much hope of wiping out that usage.
I think our next Senator from Montana, the current Rep. Steve Daines has figured out how to market conservative free-market ideals to economic know-nothings. His campaign slogan is: “More Jobs, Less Government”
Hi, Claire,
It’s a great pleasure to be communicating with you, if only by email. I’m among your many fans.
I take your point, but I think it’s worth making a big fuss about this. We’ve simply got to educate voters to understand that the politicians don’t create their jobs. If we let them get away with this, it won’t be long before they’re claiming credit for the meals we eat, the movies we watch and, at least for younger voters, the dates they get on Saturday night.
Liberals that I interact with believe that government creates jobs. They believe that government does this by creating programs that spend government money which hires people to do a thing. Maybe it’s building a bridge or running a program in the inner city or its regulating the toothpaste industry, that’s someone who’s got a job and is getting paid. It doesn’t matter that they had to take the money out of the economy to do it. When you raise this question, they’ll just tell you that it’s the rich that pay for that. Of course then they tell you that the rich don’t pay their fair share. So it’s like this endless circles of things that don’t connect. But none of that matters. Because all that matters is that they want to help the poor. Let’s go down and get a caramel mocha frappuchino at Starbucks and I’ll explain it to you. Oh, sorry, you have to go to work? Boy, the man has you by the short and curlies, doesn’t he?
I know people made fun of him, but Ross Perot did a very good job of explaining stuff in his campaign. His infomercials explained economics in a way that my grandmother could understand. He had the right of it, if you want somebody to believe in your goals you have to actually set out to explain them to people in a simple enough language and concepts that they can relate to. If a party was to do that, it might have a chance on getting the American people to follow their lead.
It’s certainly true that Thatcher very often made a point of saying, “The government doesn’t create jobs, people do.” But just as an empirical question–can you think of any major American politician, of any persuasion, in recent memory, who has never used the phrase? (Asking you to prove a negative isn’t fair, I know, but maybe you’ve got an obvious example in mind–one that’s suggestive, if not proof.)
And thanks for the kind words about being my fan!
Since many people do not understand economics, it should be taught. It never was when I was in high school. One had to go to college to be taught Econ 101, for either micro or macro economics. Unless one is trying to develop new extensions to economic theory, all one needs is what is taught in Algebra I, for the math needed for Economics, so it should be taught in High School, as a Junior level subject. A basic understanding of economics reflecting ideas of Adam Smith could be taught in 7th or 8th grade, and precursors for economics could be woven into curriculums as early as 4th grade. We need to take a long view, and try to improve economic education. Now if we could just keep Marx and Keynes out of the teaching except as examples of ideas that don’t work, over the next twenty five years, maybe we could make some progress.
The Clinton ideas about economics are as skewed as their ideas about family and marriage:
Here’s Hilary saying “Don’t let anybody tell you that raising the minimum wage will kill jobs–they always say that. . . . Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs,”
I agree, but we should keep in mind that politicians do create jobs for one of their chief constituencies: public sector workers.
That Scott Walker’s modest reforms provoked so intense a reaction shows that the public sector unions and their allies understand what is at stake.