Political Entities Assign Jobs and Ration Resources
Whenever you hear a politician say they are going to make jobs, there’s an implicit misconception, that inscrutable financial wizardy is involved.
It’s not actually complicated. Political entities assign jobs, that’s what they do. Think about it. Whether you are talking about a small tribe of hunter/gatherers, a medieval monarchy, or a modern nation-state, that’s how political entities operate.
The other thing that political entities do, is ration resources.
These two concerns, assigning jobs and rationing resources, involve respective political and social considerations. What’s the best way to use our resources? Do we have enough resources to meet our needs? What expectations and conditions for resource access do we impose on each other? What do we need to do to conserve resources and use them effectively?
If you think that governments have a shortage of jobs, you’re thinking about the problem backwards. Governments need to give out jobs, collectively, we actually lose resources by failing to assign people to productive tasks. On the other hand, as constituents, we need resources, and government’s authority over resources is what obligates us to participate in job programs. You can see these ideas at work whether you’re talking about the smallest social groups or the largest political entities, it doesn’t matter!
It’s important to note how the economic term “demand”, fits in here. Economists often throw that word around without a clear concept of what it means. Demand is perhaps best thought of as a measure of “internally” generated productive assignments, between social peers. You pay your neighbor’s kid to mow your lawn. He uses money he earned to save for a bicycle. In either case, government establishes rules we are required to follow for rationing resources, and it defines the terms and conditions under which we are permitted to use money or otherwise make demands of our neighbors. Any shortage of “demand” either means that the individual needs of community members can be met, without using up all of our time available for work or other productive tasks, or some people are excluded from financially expressing their needs with a sufficiently influential voice, often because they don’t have a job, or their job doesn’t allow them to meet all their needs.
Whenever you hear news bites about politicians struggling to “create jobs”, or frantic apocalyptic stories about robots, productivity, or china stealing jobs, you can dismiss either case as misinformed nonsense.
