It seems odd to write about what is otherwise a political subject but something recently attracted my attention — an article claiming that it’s a fallacy that government creates jobs. This article was a hit piece against “Keynesian economics” which was claimed as the philosphical underpinnings of govenment bailouts of the late 2008 recession. It struck me that there was a missing piece to the argument.
That missing piece is technology, of course.
The article claimed that the government cannot create a job, that the best it can do is take money from us to redistribute; i.e. the money has to come from somewhere to pay for that job’s salary, hence there is no net gain.
Interesting take, to say the least. Does it stand up, or is it rhetoric, theory, wishful thinking, what? It seems clear that historically when government wants a particular problem solved and technology is involved, wealth is created. e.g. the computer industry as we know it got started when the government poured money into ways to solve artillery and ballistics problems. Semiconductor chips were needed for ICBM guidance. The internet was needed to have a redundant and reliable military and/or command and control level communications network. I could give more examples, but your eyes may bleed. Suffice to say that when government is providing the spec and the money for a new technology, wealth is created as it becomes implemented. No fallacy — the government can, will, and does create jobs. And not only that, they’re among the best paying. Most of the jobs it creates aren’t those in direct government pay; governmental funding is the mechanism which later enables these to exist.
I posted this observation online. Oh, the humanity! The outrage! The most thoughtful of the critics said that this was a constitutional exception, that this was limited to the military, a constitutionally enumerated power.
Ummm… no. That’s just hand waving. Energy seems to also fall into the same category. TVA and other massive well known hydroelectric projects were done via “make work” programs. Providing energy created wealth, the same as funding technology did. Not an enumerated constitutional power. Not the military. Same result. My guess is that one could find a number of places where government has provided initial funding to kick start something achieving the same result. And as soon as I typed that sentence I remembered I’d just watched a documentary about aviation that showed that intial aviation progress was financed through the government. One of the first problems they wanted to solve was mail delivery. There’s a lot of geography to cover in a country this size. How about that? That one wasn’t the military either. And the required heavy lifting/cargo capacity was adapted for loads of paying passengers, and the airline industry as we understand it was born. So much for the enumerated powers argument.
Since much (perhaps all) of the criticism of this nature comes from the political right wing, it seems that somehow a crucial piece of the picture is missing from arguments that start from there. Note that left wing seems to have little (if any) problem with the concept that government plays a role in technical development. And yet I’ve taken the political left to task here on this site as well; at the left extreme seems to be the belief that government can mandate development and engineers poof stuff into being (technology creationism.)
Overall the only conclusion that makes any sense is that neither the technology creationists nor their anti-government polar opposites seem to have much understanding of things. They start with a philosophical belief and argue from there. There isn’t a spot in the middle that they can meet at, either. This isn’t helpful to discourse. No wonder politics are so polarized: neither side wants to deal with facts so much as to interpret facts to fit their belief system. Political science, then, isn’t a science in any meaningful understanding of the word “science.” I think this study would be better described in the medieval fashion: Rhetoric.
