Jonathan Alter has seen the light on teachers? unions, but he still doesn?t get the fallacy associated with government ?creating new jobs.?
Alter reveals in the latest Newsweek that his pet project is national service:
Consider this: for 1 percent of the stimulus, about $7 billion, Obama could create 8 percent of the 3 million new jobs he has promised. Those 250,000 new national-service slots would simultaneously fulfill his campaign pledge to young people.
Alter does not stop to consider key questions: What is the source of that $7 billion? How many jobs would that $7 billion create if left in the hands of the innovators and entrepreneurs who would steer it toward its most productive uses?
As Amity Shlaes has explained:
[I]n the ?30s, of course, in the New Deal, they believed that growth came from the government and ignored the fact that the best kind of growth tends to come from the private sector because that is where people do the most productive things that create more widgets and generate more stability. Government can make a job for a year, but it cannot make stability with a short-term fix-it job.
