The Law of Intended Consequences: Jobs and Economic Growth

Critics of President Obama's jobs summit cite government intervention in the marketplace (the gamma risk) as the primary element of resistance to economic growth and, therefore, jobs.

The critique poses to proffer the empirical evidence that explains the continued resistance to job creation. These same critics, however, fully intend to resist employment by systematic means of a cyclical trend that is falsely characterized as an unmanageable, unintended, ontology. This is nothing but a trick, a rhetorical ruse that phenomenologizes what is empirical truth (truth being whatever it is believed to be in spite of the evidence).

The argument, the ruse, is really teleological: resistance to job creation (economic growth) continues to strengthen because it is the goal of the job creators (the people that manage the economy). Rising unemployment is not the result of a natural, inexorable, unintended ontology foolishly exacerbated by government intervention. It is, rather, a fully intended outcome--the goal of a continuously consolidating command economy extending from a free-market legitimacy. The means to the end is operationalized with government to both legitimately manage it from a central, elitist authority and to serve as the cause of the problem--the fall guy--when the system exceeds its tolerance for managing the risk of achieving its goal--accumulating wealth and power, and keeping it (the accumulation of a retributive value).

What we do empirically know is that this system predictably defaults into ontological crises. The system has evolved, and been selected by design, to predictably effect the goal by default, and the default presents as an ontology.

Systematic pursuit of the goal includes unemployment and the economic benefit it accrues (the accumulation of capital into the ownership of a small, socio-economic elite). The macro result is command and control of the economy with the appearance of an ontological legitimacy, like a free-market legitimacy of process. Plutocracy is shammed with the rhetoric of democracy. The crisis of accumulated capital requiring a distribution to technically correct for it is shammed with the rhetoric of "let it be."

The technical correction needed is not an organizational typology of continued consolidation (state capitalism or state socialism), but deconsolidation into a legitimate ontology of macro pluralism (free-market economics). Then "let it be." The consequences will be what We all fully intend, and government, instead of being the fall guy, is fully free to ensure it in priority.

A jobless recovery only indicates the intention to reorganize the problem into "hope" for "change we really need" always receding just below the horizon. It indicates the intention for recovery to be most effective from the top down, and the benefit will trickle down--what is an empirical failure. For the investor, large caps are squarely in favor for the next 24 months as productivity per worker rises while wages and salaries continue to fall during this consolidation phase of the business cycle.

Employment will not recover until consolidated business entities get tax cuts for employment. Rising employment will then serve to pay the public debt which has been bought by those that have the money accumulated to buy it. That is: the distribution (the correction) required will occur when the only funds available to pay the debt are held by those who own it. This suggests the fully intended "law" for employment policy across all jurisdictional government boundaries: job creation is for creating the tax base. What is not fully stated as the benefit is that it is to cure the assured risk of consolidating capital and markets to destroy the hands that labor to feed it.

Employment will not occur to relieve the burden of the unemployed but to harness them with the burden of paying the public debt. The unemployment trend will be reversed to maintain the Hamiltonian model of power and political economy (a policy of continuous indebtedness and recurrent crises of insolvency that keeps power consolidated and in elitist command and control).

Not only does labor finance the declining rate of profit with its jobs, but the accumulated debt with a regressive tax burden. John Boener, leading proponent of the extremely regressive tax burden that led us into the depths of the current crisis--the Bush tax cuts, said in regard to the Obama jobs summit that the deepening unemployment trend is due to the current administration's tax policy which will raise taxes on businesses to pay the debt.

The only change in tax policy that has occured was the immediate regressive tax to finance the SCHIP, and regressive taxation is deflationary. Nancy Pelosi and the progressives happily added the huge tax increase to an already oppressive regressive tax burden and budget deficit. Pelosi reminded us during the summit that creating jobs will pull more money into "the public till" (expand the tax base) which, she says, is the best way to control the budget deficit (to pay the debt). Thus, the priority for government action is, "jobs jobs jobs!"

The duopoly of political choice, and political will, toward change we really need is fully wanting and clear confirmation of the law, the teleology, of intended consequences. The deliberate consolidation of power is masqueraded as the model of efficiency with the negative effects, like inflation and unemployment, argued to be an ontology of unintended consequences.

The likely conclusion and policy direction suggested by the jobs summit is to provide tax breaks for small businesses which will be few by the time it comes to pass. The tax break will not accrue to entities too small to survive, which defines the efficiency of the business model "too big to fail" by default.