Creating Jobs

Purpose: For most commentators, creating jobs is a good thing. The more jobs the better, the fewer the worse. Public policies are commonly evaluated on this basis. The purpose of the present paper is to argue the exact reverse: employment is bad, albeit it a necessary evil. Forced unemployment is a very different matter; that is indeed a bad. And, it is caused by government. The solution is laissez faire capitalism. Findings: It makes no economic or any other sense to elevate jobs as the sunum bonum of economics. They are, instead, an expenditure of a valuable resource, labor. They are a necessary evil, not a positive good. If only we could have all of the goods and services we wanted, jobs would be a thing of the past, and good riddance to them too. Design/methodology/approach: The design/methodology/approach of this paper is to utilize logic; this is not an empirical paper. Rather, it fits into the tradition of Austrian or praxeological economics. It employs the method of reductios ad absurdum. Social implications: The social implications are laissez faire capitalism. If the analysis of this paper is incorporated into public policy, the government would adopt a strict hands-off policy toward labor markets, neither trying to create employment (e.g., through subsidies), nor to undermine it (e.g., by boosting required wages above productivity levels) Value of paper: To combat the view that is all too often in currency among commentators,professional economists and others, to the effect that jobs are the desideratum, in contradistinction to the products that employment makes possible.