Friday, October 08, 2010

HEY, WINGNUTS, ISN'T IT SUPPOSED TO WORK THE OTHER WAY AROUND?

Lefties may say I'm stating the obvious, but doesn't this bad jobs report offer a real-world refutation of sacred right-wing dogma:

The economy shed 95,000 nonfarm jobs in September, the Labor Department reported Friday, with most of the decline the result of the layoffs by local governments and of temporary decennial Census workers....

While total government jobs fell by 159,000, private sector companies added 64,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate, which measures the percentage of workers who are actively looking for but unable to find jobs, stayed flat at 9.6 percent....


Shouldn't the heroic, innovative Randian benefactors who grace us with private-sector employment be able to take all that money that's not being used to create (ick! pthui!) public-sector jobs and create many, many more private-sector jobs with it? Shouldn't all the TARP money that's been paid back be going into private-sector job creation? Shouldn't it just be impossible for businesses to sit on huge piles of cash while refraining from creating jobs, simply because the "animal spirits" of capitalism compel our Randian heroes to make the engines of capitalism, and thus jobs, run raster and faster?

I thought capitalists just couldn't help capitalizing -- and if some hold back, others are supposed to out-capitalist them and creatively destruct them. I thought this was the fundamental law of thermodynamics in the economic universe.

What happened?

No comments: