🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Jan3.212307.6498@athena.mit.edu> solman@athena.mit.edu (Jason W Solinsky) writes:
>In article <38069@uflorida.cis.ufl.edu>, djohns@elm.circa.ufl.edu (David A. Johns) writes:
 
>|> You don't think that American workers benefitted from having had 10
>|> percent of the population excluded from the job market?

>They probably did. I would say that that was another reason in favor of the
>"preference" if it weren't for the fact that the same people that had an
>easier time job hunting payed significantly higher taxes to finance the
>salaries of those abroad.

I completely disagree, and I think you need to take a much different view of
economics in order to see it.  The most important action of workers in
an economy with regard to individual well-being is not how many jobs are
"filled", but how much production is going on.  If 10% of the population
is not producing (or not producing as much as before) then the overall
wellbeing which can be achieved is going to be roughly 10% less.

Jobs do not exist in some static quantity in order to be doled out and 
divided up.  This view of jobs as some kind of natural resource is the
source of an awful lot of confusion in economics if you ask me.  Perhaps
of the educationists started treating production as the primary goal of
economics rather than the distribution of what has been produced, we wouldn't
see so many economically naive views being so popular in the political realm.

Remember Say's Law:  You can't consume more than you produce.

--Brian