From a solely material perspective, which is the only perspective that the government ought to consider, there is nothing wrong in our body politic that can’t be made at least a little better with more jobs.
With due respect to Harry Reid, Barack Obama and other great priests of the Do-Nothing State, providing more leisure time for people to pursue hobbies like, oh, protesting Broadway Joe’s fur coat, occupying houses they didn’t pay for, or erecting a monument to Satan in Oklahoma City, might not be the best way to find our way out of the crisis of confidence that these priests have put us in.
Idle hands, as they say, are the Devil’s playground.
“According to the Divine decree of our grandfather Adam,” wrote Peter the Great in 1696, “we are eating our bread in the sweat of our face.” Peter at the time was engaged in building a great fleet of ships, personally wielding an axe as a ship’s carpenter.
That’s one of the various reasons the tall, energetic czar was considered great.
Oh, think of what a website he would build.
Or an Olympics he would run.
Not so with government today.
And while I’m generally OK with the government not doing their job—or better yet any job really-- I think that they ought to at least let us do our jobs.
And that is the rub, isn’t it?
The government that can’t run our housing sector, the banking business, the healthcare system, the CIA, EPA, insurance or even a loan program to private businesses, now wants to have more responsibility for doing much more that amounts to nothing at all, while telling us all to do nothing too.
Because, like many of the policies pursued by the administration, that’s what the proposal by Obama to hike the minimum wage actually amounts to: higher costs for the same productivity; or to put it this way: doing nothing for more cost.
That’s like saying you can keep the insurance plan that you like, it will just cost more, with a higher deductible and a different doctor.
You’ll bleed the same when the needle pricks though.
See? Same. Exact. Plan.
Yeah.
So let’s just agree that the minimum wage plan amounts to Obamacare for the economy by other means.
If you like your job, you can keep your job, except that it will be a different job, working for someone else and you’ll have a long wait on the unemployment line to go through first before you reap the benefit, especially if you are unemployed already.
Because a minimum wage hike will mostly affect the people who are least likely to be able find employment right now.
And they’ll bleed exactly the same when the needle pricks.
See? Same. Exact. Job. That is, no job at all.
All economies run on the creation and maintenance of jobs.
You want more people to have health insurance? Provide more jobs.
You want to cut our deficit? Provide more jobs.
You want increase taxes? Provide more jobs.
You want to start to stabilize the Social Security Trust Fund? Provide more jobs.
Jobs will not, in fact, solve every problem that we have in the country.
But nothing looks quite as bad if the economy is creating jobs.
The high priests of the Do-Nothing state should do nothing in this case, and let wages—and jobs—look after themselves.
Things would look brighter that way.
And, oh... that must be their problem with it.