Jobs Cannot Be Simply Created

One thing that is a near constant in all discussions regarding the current economic situation is that they entirely neglect consideration of ultimate causes and instead focus on particular manifestations of the underlying problem. The result, of course, is always failure.

Take recent discussions about jobs. It has not, at any point, been off of people's minds the past couple years or so, and president Obama just released a new jobs plan. The common belief is that a few policy decisions - a tweak here, a tweak there - can "create" more jobs. And then the economy will get better. The end.

Everyone ignores the relationships and tensions between employment levels, wages, productivity, and profitability. For example, the fact that under capitalism there is a necessary ("natural") level of unemployment, without which the system would cease to function. Or the fact that new jobs will ultimately be superfluous if the system lacks the general conditions necessary to sustain the profitability of capitalist enterprises: conditions that relate more to the current organization and scale of production than to simple considerations of supply and demand.

One popular idea is that the government should make it less expensive for employers to hire new people (e.g. by reducing the payroll tax). This is yet another move in the several-decades-long trend toward shifting the costs of labor more onto the laborers themselves. If the government makes it less expensive for employers to hire people, what they are doing, in essence, is further subsidizing the cost of labor. Instead of employers bearing all the burden of the costs of the labor from which they derive their profits, the responsibility is pooled with other employers and all of the laborers themselves. And since some major corporations and wealthy individuals get away with paying practically no taxes at all, that is quite a large shift in burden.

Capitalist enterprises have become far less profitable over the past few decades. Capitalists respond to this situation, not by addressing the structural problems that are ultimately responsible, but by trying to reduce the costs of labor bit by bit in order to keep turning out a profit. Of course this is unsustainable in the long run (for one thing it reduces demand), but capitalists do not think about the long run (particularly when the long run does not look good for them either way). They think about how much money they can milk out of the system here and now, even as they watch it collapse.

So, we focus on making it "easier" for capitalists to hire. And easier for capitalists to hire also means easier for capitalists to skim off the last bit of profits before everything falls apart.

If you want to talk about jobs and capitalism, consider this: capitalism was only able to develop as a result of unemployment. If there were no mass of landless, unemployed peasants, capitalism as we know it would not exist. Clearly, seeing everyone employed is not a capitalist's top priority.

The best way to keep everyone employed is to get rid of capitalism.