Rick Lowe

I must admit to swearing under my breath every time I read or hear a politician, home or abroad, say they created thousands of jobs during their term in office or over the past year etc.

It's absolute bunkum.

Jobs are created when entrepreneurs risk their savings to go into business and hire people. If they succeed, they grow and hire more people and so on.

Oh politicians can take tax dollars from one group and give jobs to another group, but beside the immoral aspect, nothing new has been created.

Now many politicians are certainly good at creating regulatory barriers that slow the entrepreneurial process. Or they'll subsidise one business over another, usually the politically correct group of the day, but here again this is creating nothing new. In fact it's slowing down the "creative destruction" of businesses that are no longer viable.

Maybe it does their collective egos good to beat their chests and say look how great I am, but it's not a politicians "job" to create jobs in the first place. But they should concentrate their efforts at reducing this regulatory burden.

As John Stossel wrote for Reason back in December, in an article entitled Job Creators Fight Back;

Politicians rarely understand this (how bad the regulatory burden is). One who learned it too late was Sen. George McGovern. After he left office, he started a small bed-and-breakfast and hit the regulatory wall he helped create. Later, he wrote, “I wish during the years I was in public office I had this firsthand experience about the difficulties businesspeople face….We are choking off business opportunity.” (added)

In the final, rhetoric does not make facts.