Of course progress and increased production leads to job loss.

Job loss in the sectors where the improvements are made.

But a job GAIN in the industry that creates the innovation.

Put it this way, the creation of tractors eliminated the need for horse and manual labor. How many laborers lost their jobs?

But then think about what goes into a single tractor.

Think about all the people involved in creating the parts, in distributing the tractors, in fueling them, in mining the materials that make those tractors.

This is true in virtually any area of production.

An innovation in a steel mill that reduces the need for those employees from 1000 to 100 does not come out of the ether. That innovation is what? Technological likely right? Well, someone must produce and maintain that technology. The loss of those 900 workers probably created jobs for many times that number.

Creating jobs is easy. Creating productive jobs is hard. If we wanted to merely create jobs, we could do things like changing the rules for operating elevators.

Create a Million Jobs

Of course, this would make us all poorer, but everyone would be employed, doing something that has been made useless in almost all situations.

This is exactly how the government always "creates" jobs. It uses the valuable production of taxpayers to pay for the less valuable production of many government workers.

Or worse, government pays for people to interfere with and watch over the productive people, for fear that they will use their unusual intelligence to cheat and steal from their employees and customers. Intelligence is little understood in government because it is so unusual to find it there.

Remember, Karl Marx revealed that business owners are leeches on society, draining away the wealth that rightfully belongs to the workers. At least, the ones who have jobs.

"Remember, Karl Marx revealed that business owners are leeches on society, draining away the wealth that rightfully belongs to the workers."

Annnd our President just made a speech claiming that capitalism is a license to steal.

Marx, reincarnated.

"Annnd our President just made a speech claiming that capitalism is a license to steal."

This would be easy enough to demonstrate. Let the government declare some place- city, state, whatever- as a capitalist zone, where government would do nothing but protect property rights and see what happens.

Of course, the government would never allow this to occur if they thought their claim would be proven wrong.

When my dad was a teenager, he had a job as a pinsetter in a bowling alley. After each ball thrown, he had to gather up the dead wood, pick up the ball, and put it back at the top of the ball return. And of course, after every second ball, he had to set the pins back up. Wiseacres would come in and bowl with the heaviest balls they could find, so the pinsetter would have to break his back picking that ball up and putting it back at the top of the ball return. And a sure way to start a fight was to bowl while the pinsetter was still standing in the lane.

@Not Sure
This was done in essence in China; Hong Kong under British rule was a capitalist oasis in in an otherwise socialist society. When Hong Kong reverted back to Chinese rule it remained a vibrant capitalist city that showed China the way to prosperity and has influenced the business culture that has swept that nation.
Obama is doing the reverse here. Increased regulations, restrictions, etc while demonizing the business owners with class warfare rhetoric and stepping up wealth re-distribution schemes.

When coal miners became unionized and demanded higher wages, the coal companies responded with increased mechanization to keep costs down. That not only cut the number of jobs, but it also made the work vastly safer. The same thing happened to the lumber industry.

I'm confident President Obama has never worked in a steel mill or any other heavy industry.

I worked three summers in an abrasives plant while I was going to college. We'd leave work coated with a fine black dust despite taking a shower - it seeped into your pores. The dust was silicon carbide, think grinding wheels or that grit on black sandpaper. It got in your nose, throat and lungs. It would seep into sealed watches and grind them away to failure in a year or two. Your Timex might take a licking, but it won't take being ground down. I'm ecstatic that my kids could never work in a place like that.

I worked with a guy who got into IT when he was injured in a steel mill accident. He was lucky, he was struck a glancing blow by something that fell off a crane. A few inches in another direction, and he'd have been crushed.

Those jobs are gone, and it's a good thing.

I'm pretty sure that Thomas Friedman is the name of a piece of software that someone's written to mock the pretenses of lugubrious Liberalism. Because his columns are amazingly redundant and predictable: America has Fallen > We Need Big Ideas! > How About Fascism? > Horray for Big Ideas!!

It's probably an upgraded version of the post modern essay generator - http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/.

To Jimmy,

A great link, thanks.

"I'm confident President Obama has never worked."

There. Fixed it for ya.