Businesses Fall For Oldest Trick in the Book

Dear Business Community, you’ve been had.

By revealing just how you’ve been duped, I may be branded a heretic and cast out of the temple, because the false god that I will cast down has been elevated to the top of our pantheon of economic deities.

The change was so subtle that it was hard to notice.  We substituted the new god for the old, with many of the same rituals, and we never really questioned the change, or even noticed that the change had occurred.

I am speaking of the deity called Job Creation.  Job Creation is worse than irrelevant in our economic struggles – it is, in fact, the repackaging of a liberal god that has fallen from favor:  Transfer of Wealth.

Before you begin casting stones, I should tell you how I came to understand this.  I was working out at the gym, and I began thinking of the amount of energy it takes to power the various machines that we use to get our bodies to burn energy.  I began to wonder what could be produced if, instead of requiring energy, those machines harnessed the physical activity of those exercising to actually produce energy.

I imagined the simplest arrangement – stationary bikes like my wife and I use in spin class.  What if a room full of stationary bikes were connected to electric generators, and those generators produced current?  That current could be used in a thousand different ways to produce something of value.

And there it was, right in front of my eyes.  Value.  The one, true economic god.

You see, I imagined two rooms, one arranged as it currently is in my gym, the other as a powerhouse to capture the energy expended by human physical exertion.  Now, what if I employed 10 people to ride a bike for 2 hours per day? That is Job Creation.  But here comes the kicker – does it matter which room they ride in?  In only one room will they actually produce Value.

So we have been fooled into using the term Job Creation in the place of Value Creation, so much so that we even refer to ourselves as the “Employer Community”.  But worse than that, we’ve allowed our one true god to be vilified.  Those who promote “Wealth Redistribution” recognized the negative connotation of this term, and, quite impressively, turned that negativity against us.  “Wealth” became a bad word, even more so the term “The Accumulation of Wealth”.  How selfish of us, to accumulate wealth!  But “Wealth” is simply the liberal pejorative for “Value.”

Businesses survive by creating value – they exist solely for this purpose.  They do not exist to create jobs.  Imagine a business consisting of a single supercomputer, running genetic algorithms to produce newer, more efficient designs for existing products.  This is the perfection of the business form – massive value production, minimal cost.  And, coincidentally, zero job creation.

Now, those who will brand me a heretic for saying this will cry, “What about the poor workers?  How does Value Creation benefit them?”  To which I say that every person desires value and not employment, including the worker.  Workers who are employed by a business that creates value will ultimately enjoy that value as consumers in society.  And those workers must produce enough value to also provide for the government jobs that produce less value than their cost.  The builder must produce enough value to support all of the inspectors, permit writers, and other bureaucrats whose jobs depend on the builder.  Otherwise, the builder himself will not survive the harsh realities of economics, or will come to rely on the government to transfer someone else’s value to him in order to continue to function.

So I say to you, the Business Community, cast down this false god called “Job Creation”!  Any fool can create a job.  It is the creation of value that is both difficult and important.  It is the creation of value that is so difficult that it is nearly impossible for government.  And it is because America has been so successful at creating value that we have forgotten the importance of it and allowed ourselves to be tricked into believing that it is unimportant and that instead of value we should create jobs.  It is time to return to the principles that brought us our unparalleled prosperity.