From Matthew Yglesias, this gem:
Hey, if we just expand government enough, soon everyone will have a job! Working for the government! Paying more taxes to create more government jobs with! It’s win-win-win!
Eat your heart out, Maxine Waters. Matt’s view of rescinding the filibuster is pretty hilarious too, given that he called any restriction on it “abuse” back in 2004.
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I remember when I used to read Yglesias with some regularity, but then, like many other lefty bloggers, he seemed to have gone over the edge during the 2004 election and became narrowly focused on trench warfare partisan politics.
Anyway, the above is, sadly, a fairly typical populist economic argument – that job creation, regardless of its utility is of the utmose importance. This thought process suffers from Bastiat’s “broken window fallacy.”
The other blind spot there is the idea that jobs only count if the State makes them directly.
If jobs are made by the actions of the market, rather than by a “plan” or other action of the State, well, that’s the same as no jobs at all.
(One even more uncharitable than myself might ascribe that to, rather than just a Statist blind spot, partisan blinkers such that “jobs that don’t benefit my party aren’t important” (or worse, “jobs that benefit the other party’s worldview are worse than unemployment“, but I think that would be unfair on the available evidence.)
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