By Bruce Walker

The
Left has long confused work, jobs, and worth.  The Stimulus Package, the
grand catastrophe, was intended to create and preserve jobs which could make
America poorer, not richer. A century ago nearly everyone in America had a “job,”
and most had jobs on farms.   Men, women, and children got up before
sunrise.  Women slaved with iron stoves to make breakfast, while men and
boys ate in preparation for a long grueling day of generally boring work. 
Then the women, after doing all their chores, prepared lunch, and at sundown,
they made supper.

Everyone
had a job.  Everyone engaged in productive labor.  And everyone
looked toward a hopeful future in which there would be less work that needed to
be done.  We reached that goal after the Second World War.  Our
nation had what we call “full employment,” but the jobs were engineers, oil
field workers, men in factories, clerks in stores and shops.  We had
people engaged in activities that produced goods and services which people in
the free market wanted to consume.

Government
can end “unemployment” tomorrow by paying people to sit home and watch
television, reporting in every fifteen minutes.  Instead, it has done
something else.  The Left has “invented” whole areas of work which no one
really wants, except for those whose livelihood is connected to that
industry.  Consider, for moment, the civil rights “industry.”  One
reason why this noxious doctrine is defended so fiercely is that hundreds of
thousands of white collar Americans work in federal, state, local, corporate,
charitable, advocacy, school, and academic bureaucracies supervising this
meaningless work.   No one wants the dubious “goods” these
functionaries provide, but who can tell them that they are no longer needed?

Anytime
government steps into our lives, it creates “jobs” which are the equivalent of
one company of men digging a whole and the other company filling it in. 
Why doesn’t the media expose this grand fraud?  Because all of the major
news organizations, all the journalism schools, all the self-important pundits
who reside in Washington, along with all the countless armies of lobbyists need
us to believe that every single vital decision in our life is made in
Washington.  So we have a whole army of such odd creatures as “reporters
covering the Supreme Court.”  Make-work in Washington, which itself makes
nothing more than hot air, is seen as a problem, but rather the way to full
employment.

But
what do legislative staffers “produce”?  Bills which literally no one has
read or analyzed or may never fully understand?  What do presidential
Czars produce, except an additional layer of confusion regarding who is
responsible for what policies in our government.  Yet no one in Washington
can imagine the farmers, oilmen, chefs, architects, nurses, car dealers, grade
school teachers, policemen, drug companies, surgeons, heating and air
conditioning businesses or all the other folks who actually produce good and
services we want could function without the unproductive employment of Washington
and the unproductive employment invented and shipped to us from Washington.

This
accounts for some of the weirdest language in the stimulus bill.  The
money cannot be used, for example, to build swimming pools or golf
courses.  Why, in Heavens, not?  People use those.  Not only
that, but public swimming pools and golf courses can generate their own revenue
and create more actual productive jobs for life guards, caddies, and café
staff.  It would actually make sense to fund parts of the country that lacked
adequate swimming polls and golf courses, and fund their construction – if
market studies indicated even a mild chance of success. 

Building
a nuclear defense shield, if we really threw resources at it, could create a
lot of high paying jobs for scientists and engineers.  That would produce
something we could use.  Obama, in his stimulus, does not want that sort
of work.  America, to him, is rich enough already.  He wants jobs
that do nothing really but glorify the majesty of his Leftist doctrines. 
So do not look for Obama to grant each small business a big tax credit for each
additional employee hired after the stimulus was passed, although small
business is a mighty generator of real jobs.  Look, instead, for Obama to
have stimulus funds trickle down the well worn lines of federal largesse
through its many pointless intermediaries until, at some point, the dregs are
used to hire, say, another community organizer in Chicago. 

It
is hard to say whether the Left has simple contempt for productive genius or
simply fear of it, but it is very easy to see that creating nominal “jobs” with
no purpose seems noble and logical to those who have never really created a
good or a service in their lives.

                       © 2009 Bruce Walker — All Rights Reserved

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Bruce
Walker is the author of two books:  Sinisterism: Secular Religion of
the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the
Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.

http://outskirtspress.com/swastika_against_the_cross 

http://outskirtspress.com/Sinisterism