Bernie's Bad Math: Creating Jobs, Not Value
Bradley Thomas writes at FEE about Bernie Sanders' proposed universal jobs decree -- creating a job for every adult in the workplace.

Bernie has the econ acumen of a drunk kindergartener.

Thomas quotes Henry Hazlitt on "the fetish of full employment," which he called fool's gold.

Prioritize Production to Create Jobs
Instead of focusing on policies to maximize employment, Hazlitt declared, "We can clarify our thinking if we put our chief emphasis where it belongs--on policies that will maximize production."

Why focus on maximizing production rather than jobs?

Creating jobs is easy. As Hazlitt wrote, "Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself."

The key to a healthy economy is increasing production using less and less labor.

Economist Milton Friedman was once traveling overseas and spotted a construction site in which the workers were using shovels instead of more modern equipment like bulldozers. When his host responded that the goal was to increase the number of jobs in the construction industry, Friedman replied, "Then instead of shovels, why don't you give them spoons and create even more jobs?"

The key to a healthy economy, conversely, is increasing production using less and less labor. Trying to exclusively "create jobs" or provide universal job guarantees can lead to perverse incentives like restricting workers' access to productivity-enhancing capital goods in order to require more workers than necessary to produce goods and services.

Under a plan like Sanders's, a project would be considered more successful the more people it employed relative to the value of the product of the work performed. In short, success would be measured by making labor less and less efficient.

I volunteer one day a week in LA City Hall. As Thomas notes in the piece, regarding the idea of government-created jobs, government is a place of un-innovation. It's anti-innovative. The tall poppies with the ideas get smacked down or transferred to a place and job where they can't be heard.

We need less government job creation, not more -- lest we set ourselves on the path Bernie dreams of: the path to our becoming Venezuela. (You know that old commercial: "Beef! It's what's for dinner!" Well, in Venezuela, just substitute the name of the family dog -- that is, if he didn't get eaten years ago.)