First, one may ask: how can Obama and his economic advisers know what kinds of jobs will position our economy to “lead the world” in the long term? Indeed, how can we expect anyone to know what kinds of jobs will be able to offer such a guarantee of wealth and security, considering the enormous complexity of our world? Billions of individuals are constantly making decisions based on their own expectations about the future. Potential ideological shifts and their inevitable changes to policy funding and support complicate matters further. This is without considering technological advancements that can turn the best-laid central plans into white elephants. There is little an individual or group can possibly know or predict for the future, particularly on such a large scale as three to four million jobs.

However, assuming Obama and his advisers are right—that his plan will indeed save or create that many jobs—what proof do we have that it will leave us better off than if it’s not implemented at all?

In his essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen,” the French classical-liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat explained that there is a tendency to recognize only the intended consequences of an action (what is seen). However, there are often other, subsequent effects that are not perceived as connected to the action (what is not seen). Furthermore, the short-term effects of an action can sometimes be quite different from the longer-term, unseen consequences.

In the case of public works, Bastiat explained that government produces nothing independent from the resources and labor it diverts from private uses. When government borrows money to create jobs, what is readily seen are people employed and the fruits of their labor. However, what is generally not considered are the many things that could have been produced if the capital had not been removed from the private sector to fund the government programs in the first place. Such policies necessarily benefit some (the favored workers) at the expense of others (those who would have had the jobs that were not created) and eventually the taxpayers, who have to repay the debt.

What is Seen

New Deal public-works projects provided plenty of evidence for Bastiat’s theory. They not only failed to help lift the economy out of the Great Depression but also served to make it “great.”

First, many jobs created under FDR benefitted few besides those employed—in things like studying the history of the safety pin, collecting campaign contributions for Democratic Party candidates, chasing tumbleweeds, and cataloging 350 different ways to cook spinach. (See Lawrence Reed’s Great Myths of the Great Depression, www.tinyurl.com/7eecje.)

In addition, much of the “job creation” was directed according to political preferences, rather than where jobs were arguably needed most. For instance, a disproportionate amount of public relief went to western “swing states” expected to help Roosevelt win votes in future elections, rather than to the poorest states, such as those in the South, which were already solidly Democratic during this period. Relief and public-works spending also seemed eerily to increase during election years, and it has been shown that votes for FDR correlated closely with jobs and other special government benefits given. (See Burton Folsom’s New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America.)

What is Unseen

New Deal job-creation projects also impeded productivity by discouraging private firms from adopting new technologies. A prime example is a government farm in Arizona where a dairy crew discovered that it could turn a profit only by using milking machines, rather than milking by hand, and eliminating some jobs. But that would have violated the terms of a government loan. So the machines were not brought in, and the staff members who made the suggestion were fired. (Amity Shlaes tells the story in “The New Deal Jobs Myth.”)

Roosevelt is still celebrated for his job-creating measures because the people who gained employment were easily seen. However, what wasn’t (and isn’t) so easily recognized is that to pay for his public-works experiments, the government sucked up much of the available capital by selling bonds and collecting taxes, including a 5 percent withholding tax on corporate dividends and ever-rising income taxes. The top income tax rate hit a staggering 90 percent. Thus the New Deal had the unintended consequence of prolonging the Great Depression by diverting resources that could have been used to create wealth.

Barack Obama and his advisers should take a lesson from history. The New Deal and its public-works projects were a disaster, and it would be remiss to think they should be given another try. As Bastiat explained, government doesn’t create wealth; it only diverts it. When government controls wealth it inevitably tends to serve political ends rather than consumers. FDR’s New Deal policies are a testament to that, and if they are repeated in response to our current economic crisis, it will only hinder the recovery.

But wait. Only 3.5 million jobs? Why so few? It’s not like creating jobs is difficult.

Egypt built more than 100 pyramids beginning sometime in the third millennium B.C. to house the corpses of the pharaohs and their significant others. Think of all the jobs that project created. I’ll bet the unemployment rate was something any pharaoh could have proudly campaigned for reelection on—if he faced election, that is. Pyramid-building is one heck of a public-works project.

Pyramids, Earthquakes, Wars

Its economic significance was not lost on that great advocate of full employment through public works, John Maynard Keynes. The British economist, so in vogue today, famously wrote in The General Theory on Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), “Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth.”

In fact, pyramids are even better than the usual government project. Keynes said: “Two pyramids . . . are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York.”

Ancient Egypt’s success has many applications today. We could have full employment overnight if the government simply outlawed machines. Today’s 8 percent unemployment rate would vanish.

Again, we find an endorsement in Keynes’s General Theory: “‘To dig holes in the ground,’ paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services.”

Exhibit B is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I don’t mean his public-works projects, like the Civilian Conservation Corps. I’m talking about his most serious job-creating operation: the draft.

If You Can’t Employ ‘Em, Draft ‘Em

In September 1940 Roosevelt signed the Selective Service Act, which ordered all males 21–35 to register for military service. “Of the 16 million persons who served in the armed forces at some time during the war, 10 million were conscripted, and many of those who volunteered did so only to avoid the draft. . . .” writes Robert Higgs in Depression, War and Cold War.

The draft marked the beginning of the end to the double-digit unemployment that had plagued America for a decade. Two years earlier, Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, lamented, “[A]fter eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started.” The draft was the answer they had sought all that time.

So creating jobs is not difficult for government. What is difficult for government is creating jobs that produce wealth. Pyramids, holes in the ground and war do not produce wealth. They destroy wealth. They take valuable resources and convert them into something less valuable.

Instead of iPods, great art, cures for diseases and machines that replace back-breaking work, we get the equivalent of digging holes and filling them up.

Under President Obama’s “stimulus” plan, jobs will be created to weatherize buildings, construct schools and wind turbines, and repair roads and bridges. But outside the market process, there is no way to know whether those are better uses of scarce capital than whatever would have been produced had it been left in the private economy.

Since government services are paid for through the compulsion of taxes, they have no market price. But without market prices, we have no way of knowing the importance that free people would place on those services versus other things they want.

So although we’ll see the government putting people to work and even some new schools and bridges, we won’t be able to calculate how much wealth we’ve lost because scarce resources were misallocated by the politicians.

Nevertheless, we can be sure we will have lost. If the government’s projects were truly worthwhile, they would be undertaken by private efforts, and in their quest for profits, entrepreneurs would handle them more efficiently.

Remember this when President Obama begins to boast about how successful his stimulus plan is.