Is There Such A Thing As “Too Much Employment”?

 Yes, Virginia, there is.

The tweet highlights two CNN headlines. For the announcement of 330,000 new jobs reported, we get what could be a DougJBalloon headline:

By contrast, the same CNN (can we step twice into the same CNN? That’s a question, isn’t it?) posted this when 178,000 new jobs were created under Trump:

Because the MSM loves Republicans? Maybe. But more likely because economic theory likes unemployment.

The more people at work, the fundamentally harder it is to force people to take low pay. Low unemployment can mean higher costs because employees can demand higher wages. The success of union negotiations recently is no accident. Nor is it necessarily a cause of inflation. Auto workers were famously well-paid in the’60’s, but inflation was not a problem.

But low unemployment means it’s harder to fire people because it’s harder to replace them, as if they were widgets. (The term is almost one of art in law. It means fungible goods, not little “windows” on your phone screen constantly updating information.). Low unemployment strikes at a foundational principle of our economic system: exploitation.

“The laborer is worthy of his hire,” said the second century Didache. But that idea quickly turned from being the laborer’s worth to what does the employer think the laborer is worth?  And in simplest terms, if there are lots of laborers around, no one laborer is worth much. But if they all have jobs….

The principle is simple: scarcity drives up value, which drives up costs. Make something scarce, “corner the market,” and you control the cost. We don’t like that, and with good reason. But labor is not a precious metal like gold, precious in part because it is rare; and it isn’t a commodity. It’s people. But when labor costs too much money, we complain, because we’re people, too. And “they” aren’t.

They’re just “labor.”

So sure, it’s the media selling eyeballs to advertisers with stories we are comfortable with (rising prices make us angry, and “labor” is benefiting “too much” from this economy, which is not fair to “us”), because we feel better when there’s someone to blame when that someone is not us. But it always comes back to us. “A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.” We have agency here; and we really don’t like that.

The news, the world, someone else, is always telling you something. How you take it, is up to you. Just because the polls say so, or statistics say so, or the headlines say so, doesn’t mean it is.

What is, is ultimately, for you to determine. 330,000 jobs, for example, is going to cost you. But cost you how? And if the number of new jobs were far lower, who would that cost? Cui bono? And who pays?

For whom does the bell toll? It always tolls for thee.