Libertarians and conservatives tend to demand karmic justice from the economy, leading to what would be insanely evil policies if not tempered by liberals, and still annoyingly evil policies even in the modern day. "He who does not work does not eat," in the modern day, would lead to about half of all Americans starving to death in the street. It is an obscene moral principle, far worse than "Juden RauB" or "proletariats unite!" This is because the number of productive jobs in an economy does not magically scale in perfect synchrony with the number of people in an economy. If one person educates himself and becomes the best qualified person for a job, it doesn't mean that we can add an additional worker in that field, since demand for that field remains stagnant, increasing the supply simply means the previously worse qualified worker in that field is fired and you replace him. Education therefore cannot increase employment in a country. In fact, only 1/3 of people with PhD's actually have a job in the field they were educated in. Wages are not, in fact, increasing in STEM jobs, and only wage increases denote a rise in demand for labor in a field. No hysterical number of lobbyists, regardless of what they say, are admissible as evidence in the face of this basic economic fact.
Nor can simply increasing people's wants and needs lead to increased demand. The meaning of demand is not just that people have a want or a need, but that they can afford to pay for it as well. Therefore you cannot create a perpetual motion machine of jobs where a slew of immigrants all do each other's laundry or feed each other meals, creating jobs ex nihilo due to meeting each others' basic needs. Somewhere in this equation these people must be useful not just to each other, but to actually productive people who sell things like houses, cars, food, and oil. Unless their labor can help these people, or people who help these people, or people who help the people who help these people, they will never gain access to the fundamental resources that drive the rest of the service economy. And when these fundamental economic actors are already receiving all of the services possible from unskilled labor, the addition of another million fast food dealers or hotel cleaners doesn't help them in the least, at most it just shuffles the jobs around in a game of musical chairs. This is how it's possible to import 31 million new immigrants without generating a single new job.
Job creation is probably the best way to help the poor, but only if the jobs are productive and profitable. Obama's stimulus, that pays millions of dollars for every job created, would have been more efficient if it had simply handed people the money for free. It is hard to see any field in America that is creating new jobs. Automation can replace jobs not only in manufacturing, but in customer support, lawyers, doctors, nurses, truck drivers, power plants, shopping markets, warehouses, and farming. There is no reason prescription drugs couldn't be handled by machines instead of pharmacists, for instance, who regularly make dumb mistakes that end up being lethal to their patients, by handing over the wrong bottle of pills, something machines would never do. In the past, government tended to hire in economies where the private sector had reached catatosis. This for instance has been the case for decades in France. But even the government's hiring of armies of useless laborers, whether for a military that never fights or mailmen who just deliver spam mail or teachers who can't teach kids how to even read, has a limit. The deficit is already 40 cents out of every dollar in America, and the national debt is already at 100% of GDP. At some point the government has to start living within its means and pay all these bills, at which point it will have to drastically cut its own workforce and remove all the parasites who have so far lived off the private sector's productivity. This could easily account for 20% of all employed Americans losing their jobs overnight. What kind of job creation, in what private sphere, could make up the difference of everyone in the public sector losing their job in order to balance the budget? We haven't even created a single job since 2000.
Every single person born into the world did not choose to be born, but was forced to live at the behest of someone else. Therefore, if you bring them into a world without any job prospects, it isn't their fault if they can't get any jobs. It is society's fault for creating life in an ecosystem that is already overburdened with billions upon billions of unnecessary people. Since we now live in a global economy, any job policy that would increase employment solely within the borders of your country is uselessly narrow thinking. If it lowers employment rates elsewhere, the overall situation is simply worse than before. Even if you don't care about people outside of your nation (and why wouldn't you, since they are fundamentally the same as people within your borders?), they could just as easily use retaliatory policies that reduce our exports or restrict imports of valuable commodities to us, leading to even greater unemployment than when we started.
The future of employment is stark and clear. A few highly trained super-geniuses will oversee giant armies of machines to provide every useful good and service in the economy. Everyone else will be unemployed and living off of charity from these chosen few. We are now living in a period of transition, like the transition between hunter-gathering and agriculture. Our economy hasn't fully adjusted to the potential and power of machines, but it's come far enough that it's obvious that hunter-gatherer cultures are doomed and agriculture will inherit the Earth. Centralization of power and economies of scale have been the name of the game for over a century. It is always best for the best worker to be given as much work as possible, because this increases productivity compared to say, sharing half the burden between your best worker and your second best. Therefore, the more power you can give this genius worker (let's say he's Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs), the more authority and capital you can put under his wing, the better off the economy will become, but the worse off the unemployment figures will grow. In the latest recession, companies fired all their least productive workers and got new heights of productivity out of their remaining elite workers, allowing them to produce as many goods as before at a lower cost -- they didn't even have to raise the wages of the workers they retained. There is no reason why this model of business can't continue indefinitely into the future. With enough automation and artificial intelligence, there's nothing stopping a single businessman from eventually owning all the capital, all the wealth, and all the income in the world. He would just have to be the original programmer who figured out how to make his patented 'human robot' that could do all the jobs of everyone else on Earth, but 24/7 and without any health care costs. Then what?
"He who does not work does not eat" doesn't fit into this system any better than "he who does not hunt does not eat" fits into the agricultural revolution. It was a good idea when work was readily available to everyone and therefore no one had any excuse not to work, but it has no relevance to the world we find ourselves in today. Clinging to formulaic moral systems without ever investigating what circumstances are necessary for them to actually be moral is the sign of a shallow and incompetent mind. When circumstances change, so to must our thinking. Wake up and smell the coffee -- no new jobs since 2000, 31 million new Americans. The math simply doesn't add up for old "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" gibberish.
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