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For example, if I forgo heavy equipment operated by a single person
and instead employ one hundred people armed with plastic toy shovels
while attempting to dig out the foundations of a house, I have
technically ‘created’ ninety nine jobs over the first case… but it
is likely that the cost of employing them outweighs the benefits
gained from building the house.

This scenario requires that their is only one house to be built. It very much reminds me of the amazing Kurt Vonnegut’s first book Player Piano and its Reeks and Wrecks ( http://ijustreadaboutthat.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/kurt-vonnegut-player-piano-1952/ ).

The argument extended, that eventually if government programs continue, everything will be fixed, is sort of like saying that if fish keep mating they won’t have any room in the ocean to swim. Don’t forget Achebe: Things Fall Apart. Through hubris or the millstone of time.

“Not to mention that almost every study that has been done
demonstrates that government workers are more efficient than
comparable workers in the private sector.”

Now that’s a claim that will have to be backed by a citation.

The only citation in this article of any reality is an offhanded reference to a watered-down policy, then runs away into the land of “rarely”s and “most of us”s. There is so much silliness here it’s hard to know what to even touch on, so I’ll just address this idea of taxes, which stemmed from a statement so wonderfully enigmatic I almost feel this might be a Colbert-esque take on the subject. You wrote:

The insidious notion persists that government job creation
actually generates an increase in employment. According to this
view, if construction companies increase employment by 100,000
jobs due to a $3 billion government spending program to finance
highway construction, then employment is 100,000 jobs ahead of
what it might be in the absence of the program.

Oh, insidious logic unchecked. After you talk about bureaucratic mishandling of funds to provide a profit, and I can only assume you were attempting to set up one of the most classic lines:

Since most of us will agree that we can spend our income more
efficiently than can the government

This is why most of us aren’t in charge of running things. We are generally bad with money. OK, that too is vague, so let’s just look at the cost of your 3 billion dollar tax project which creates 100,000 jobs which would potentially be created with individual small purchases. According to an actual citation: http://www.bls.gov/cps/ there are 154.9 million people in the US workforce. That puts the cost of the 3 billion 19.37 (but, adding in those 100,000 new employees, it drops to 19.35 a person in the civilian labor force). As taxes are spread out for a period of time, let’s just call the arbitrary 3 billion project which needs full new funding a 12 month tax increase. Those 100,000 jobs cost the average worker a whopping $1.61 a month.

I guess a lot of it boils down to the function of government in your mind. If you think it has something to do with providing for the general welfare of its citizens, (http://www.usconstitution.net/const.html –see the Preamble and also Section 8, you know, the first power of congress to lay and collect taxes for said purpose) in this case providing employment to the unemployed, then this cost does not seem an outrageous one, as there isn’t a toll on most highways which would be the capitalist way to handle the repair cost.

If we the people had that $1.61 a month, though, we could spend it on consumer products which help the economy, right? We can’t buy more than a cup of plain coffee, but we can have a slightly larger capital pool to buy a printer or a piece of construction equipment from General Electric, Caterpillar, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Chevron, Cisco, Intel, Stanley Works, Merck, United Technologies, and Oracle. A Wall Street Journal report indicated that those companies created 2.4 million jobs during the 2000 decade… overseas that is. In the US those companies alone cut their work forces by 2.9 million jobs. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704821704576270783611823972.html)– and let’s not forget that GE got a tax rebate last year as opposed to paying any taxes on their $5.1B in US operations profits from 2010. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/business/economy/25tax.html?_r=3)

Also, you must consider that the now employed 100,000 people earning an income are not hoarding it under their mattress. They have rent, bills, stomachs, hygiene responsibilities, so, say even if the jobs were at the federal minimum wage $7.25, which they wouldn’t be even legally based on state minimum wages I’d rather not adding in as I don’t know which roads would be fixed, but even allowing that much “overhead” for materials and bureaucratic tomfoolery, that is a brand spanking new $1,160 a month minus taxes (including the insidious $1.61 tax which enabled the job). Since taxes from a government employee is essentially a shuffling of imaginary numbers, those can be overlooked as money never spent. So this new $1,160,000,000 is injected almost directly into the economy every month. I think your numbers are a bit off between jobs and cost, but you get the point. The money does not go into a black hole when it is given to a government employee. It is spent, and when given out in checks of $300-900 every week or two, that encourages much more spending on things aside from spending their $1.61 a month on service goods (are we truly striving to create more jobs as waiters and baristas? Is that how we build the economy as opposed to their growth being a by-product of an economy filled with more employed people?).

Also, there is the actual product of fixed roads. Fewer potholes and cracks and collapsing bridges means less damage/repair to tires and shocks and the lives of 13 people in Minneapolis (http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/2007/bridge_collapse/victims/). One could argue, from a ideological perspective that even deaths put some money into the economy in the form of funerals, but “most of us would agree” that people making that argument are jerks.

Interesting comments, but you seem to beg the question. The article was on “why government can’t create jobs”, not whether the jobs they create, in turn, create the greatest value. That is a separate, empirical question. Are the jobs in the public sector educating the labor force that ultimately allows them to be more productive in their private sector jobs more or less value producing than the end jobs in the private sector? Do public or private sector schools produce better education WITH COMPARABLE STUDENTS?

In examining the value producing ability of jobs in the public sector, though, we also can’t lose sight of the fact that in our society we have to use a different measure of value in regard to government jobs. Thus, in a free-enterprise system the private sector would have to include the cost of sustaining unemployment in the wages it pays in order to make it rational for an individual to accept employment. In our capitalist society, though, the private sector socializes that cost through unemployment compensation and welfare. (Just as it socializes the cost of training and transporting the labor force.) As a result, it can increase productivity at the expense of unemployment knowing that it will reap the benefits of productivity while society will pay the costs. Granted that its customers also receive those benefits, but from the perspective of society as a whole they are externalities.

For government, however, the cost of laying off an employee to increase productivity is simply a transfer from one part of government to another. Therefore, it might be rational to have one hundred people dig a foundation with shovels rather than have ten do it with machinery and pay the other ninety unemployment compensation or welfare. Hence your private entrepreneur can use a different calculus but that doesn’t mean that s/he is producing more value.

Similarly, you have to keep in mind that while in the long run the market might absorb unemployed people into more productive jobs, in the short run they create all sorts of negative societal conditions, e.g. civil unrest, and dealing with the costs associated with these might well outweigh the productivity benefit. Again, it is an empirical question.

It just seems that market strategies work much better in theory than in practice.

I seriously doubt it’s as cut and dry as you claim. Where did those figures come from and what do they signify? What do they measure? What statistics do they incorporate to get to the conclusion they claim? What is the meaning of ‘wealth’ and ‘income’ that they use?

Citing a study is reasonable; throwing up numbers out of thin air with no source is not.

There was a video linked to on this site before about common problems with income/wage gap statistics but I just can’t seem to find it…

“If, for example, a wealthy individual would spend $1 million of his/her income on a yacht that creates 10 jobs while government taxes and spends that same $1 million on schools that create 20 jobs, than it would appear that government has created 10 jobs.”

Keep in mind that an increase in the number of people employed is largely irrelevant to determining whether an investment was valuable, useful, or led to sustainable long-term prosperity.

For example, if I forgo heavy equipment operated by a single person and instead employ one hundred people armed with plastic toy shovels while attempting to dig out the foundations of a house, I have technically ‘created’ ninety nine jobs over the first case… but it is likely that the cost of employing them outweighs the benefits gained from building the house. Very few people will be able to buy such a house, and it would have probably been better for me to employ fifty of those one hundred workers in one twenty separate jobs, making houses and cars and boats, refining metal, wood, plastic, and providing services. Better for me, as an entrepreneur looking to make money, and better for the country, since the country gets much more in goods and services for half the hours worked.

“Full Employment” in it’s economic definition is the goal, not merely employment.

Typically, it is assumed that the private sector is both capable and willing to choose the second option over the first, and even to seek out ever more possible solutions so that society gets the greatest benefit at the least cost, and so in this sense it can be assumed that an increase in employment from 1 worker to fifty is correlated with more productivity and value. This is because the private sector has a direct financial stake in the outcome, and would lose money in the first venture and gain in the second.

But note that a decrease in employment may be good as well, say for example the economy transitions from the first option to the second. Even though employment has been cut in half, the value of that employment is several times as high; typically in developed economies you’ll see the unemployed half supported by the employed half and society better off as a whole, with more leisure time and more productive employment.

For more information and similar arguments see:

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/creating-jobs-vs-creating-wealth/
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-absurdity-of-quotsaving-jobsquot/
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/what-is-employment/

“As to the ‘bureaucratic overhead’ that Mr. Ahlseen also decries, the last time I looked bureaucrats were employees who spent their wages overwhelmingly in the private sector.”

The problem is they get paid more than they’re usually worth. I private entrepreneur may seek to employ two for the price of one to do twice as much work and thus produce twice as much value (whether the entrepreneur would succeed is another story, but at least there the goal is to make things more efficient). Another entrepreneur would use some of the proceeds of slashing the bureaucrats wage in half and invest it somewhere else. Either way, the money will end up spent in the private sector; the goal is to employ people in the most efficient and effective way possible in the mean time.

“Not to mention that almost every study that has been done demonstrates that government workers are more efficient than comparable workers in the private sector.”

Now that’s a claim that will have to be backed by a citation. Given the fact that government (at least the US) is perpetually spending more than it can take in, it’s very obvious who is budget-conscious here. But I think I know what kind of ‘efficiency’ you’re talking about, and how it can be refuted… but feel free to cite it anyways.