printIn the Connecticut Senate debate, Republican Linda McMahon floored Democrat Richard Blumenthal with this simple question: “How Do You Create A Job?” Via the Free Republic: “Blumenthal stammers like an idiot. When he gets done, Linda McMahon schools him on the correct answer.” Writes David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner: “If you’re willing to suffer through Blumenthal’s answer, the response is pretty good”:
McMahon touches on the most important part of the production process: profits.
“Profits are the street signs of the free market—without profits there’d be no products.” [That’s Mercer, not McMahon.]
McMahon ought not to have used the active form of the verb, “create,” as it suggests that a central planner is involved in the creation of jobs. Her response, however, was instructive and refreshing. She might have also taken the opportunity to point out that production and jobs begin with savings and capital accumulation; not spending, as the DC establishment will have you believe.
But for an impromptu turning of the tables on a vile opponent (which is what McMahon’s performance was); she did a good job.
UPDATE (Oct. 7): Want to boost the employment prospects? “Do food stamps and unemployment insurance,” says Nancy Pelosi: “It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance — the biggest bang for the buck.”
Repeating the line twice was a form of self-persuasion.
Hot Air explains the liberal calculus whereby you forcibly take money from producers and hand it over to consumers and it magically multiplies:
“Pelosi, for her part, continues to insist that food stamps and unemployment stimulate the economy, and claims that every dollar spent in food stamps returns $1.79 to the economy. She floated this notion earlier this summer while trying to defend more borrowing to pay for yet another extension on jobless benefits rather than funding it through monies already authorized in Porkulus. That argument assumes that the $1 food stamp in question got plucked off the food-stamp tree at no cost to the government, rather than costing the full dollar plus the administrative costs of distribution and accountability. Even then, that dollar won’t generate a 79% ROI as it travels through the retail sector; if that were true, investors would put their money into nothing else.”
Job creation is the offspring of economy creation. In other words, leave people alone (low taxes and minimum governmental inteference) and the jobs will appear. Why? Because left to their own devices there are a bunch of folks out there who will invest and invent and hustle and work and what do you think will happen? Businesses will appear and they will hire people. That’s how you create jobs. Not following the dictates of some Stanford or Berkley marxist PHD who never worked for a living.
It is very easy two-step process to create a job in the public or “public contractor” sector:
STEP ONE – Obtain money. Common methods: (a) Theft (taxation), (b) Counterfeiting (inflationary printing), (c) Borrowing.
STEP TWO: Spend the money (that’s the real fun part – how to win friends and influence people!)
OUTSIDE FANTASY ISLAND – Creating jobs involves 2 or more people PRODUCING items with scarcity and value and then freely exchanging such items. If enough can be PRODUCED, more people need to be involved. Some of these practices, known as capitalism, still occur in isolated segments of the planet but are becoming scarcer with the passage of time.