Last night the Republican candidates and many of their potential GOP voters in South Carolina made more or less the same point: the creation of jobs and the creation of welfare support (food stamps, subsidies, whatever) are not compatible. Well, that's probably not true but it got me to thinking.
One of the advantages of Capitalism, at least as articulated by Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, is that market forces (as opposed to physical forces) create efficiencies in production and marketing. That is, when Capitalism works well, things become more available, more cheaply available, more widely available. So, fine. What are we to do when everyone needs a job but jobs for everyone are not needed? That is, in a Capitalist economy, as envisioned by, say, Mitt Romney, what if the economy (that "thing" that underlies the "market") produces enough and distributes enough and sells enough with only, lets say 80% employment. That's the goal of Capitalism, after all, isn't it? That the market should drive food production and clothing production and housing production and general goods production to such efficiencies that some of the people can make and deliver and sell all the stuff that all the people need.
So, what, then, does it mean to "create jobs"? Wouldn't jobs for that 20% of "surplus" workers be, in the context of capitalist efficiency, the same as "welfare"? There is, of course, no mechanism within a Capitalist framework for people without jobs to get access to any of the "stuff". In a Capitalist framework, they are not "needed". They should be made to go away. It looks to me like we're there, now. There's certainly plenty of stuff, probably more than enough to go around. But of course it doesn't go around. Why can't we just make it go around more? What's so bad about distributing the stuff, of which there is plenty, to everyone? The Capitalists will say that that will cause the 80% to stop working and then no one will have stuff. But I don't think there's any evidence for that. The alternative is to make the unemployed go away. Where should they go?
