Is Job Creation Really A Good Thing?

Politicians are always bragging about how they have a plan to create jobs and their opponent’s plan is a job killer. Like many other Americans, I work. Most people I talk to hate their jobs or at least would rather be doing something else… like sleeping, watching television, playing on the interwebs, etc. There seems to be a disconnect here.

I get it; the conventional wisdom is that people need to work so that they can get paid and live their lives. But even with the conventional wisdom the goal is to live our lives. Work is merely a means to that end. It seems to me that maybe there can be another way.

It just seems like as a society we shouldn’t be creating jobs as an excuse to pay people. Can’t we just pay people without making their lives less enjoyable? We only live once and it just seems to me that we should want to kill jobs. In most cased, people would be happier if they had less work and more leisure time. So shouldn’t we as a society be trying to maximize leisure time and minimize the jobs to occupations that are absolutely necessary to the function of society?

With our current system, politicians are rewarded for creating work and whether that work has any real function in society is less important than whether or not it pays people to do it. If that is what we really want in our society, then why don’t politicians have a plan for people to dig holes and then fill them again? That’s a job. We can pay people to do it. We can even pay them a lot of money if we wanted. We could unionize it too. But at the end of the day the job’s only real purpose would still be an excuse to pay people so that they can live their lives. It’s just that this plan is more honest about the end purpose.

I guess my point here is that I don’t think we should be “creating jobs” as an excuse to paid people so that they can live. Can’t we just pay people so they can live without making them waste their time and energy needlessly? I think we should be minimizing the amount of work to what society absolutely needs and just pay people a “basic wage.” Those who enjoy their jobs can still do them and still get paid to do them. They can make more than the basic wage. Some people will choose to work jobs they don’t like so that they can make more than the basic wage. Then there are people who would just be happy making the basic wage and they can spend their lives enjoying life and creating art and/or enriching themselves and society.

Just think of how much better the world would be if we didn’t have to work forty to fifty hours a week. We could work less and spend more time with our families or doing the things we love. With more leisure time, people would probably be healthy too. We would be less stressed and have more time to exercise. We could raise better children and not have to always worry about dividing time between work and kids.

The basic wage idea serves pretty much the same function as “job creation” without the middleman. In this case the middleman is the actual job. It’s different if there is a need for a particular job but we shouldn’t be trying to find jobs to do just so we can pay people to do them. We should just pay people a basic wage and then pay others to do the jobs that actually need to get done. We could get rid of welfare and other serves, which only serve to make people feel bad about being poor. If everyone got the basic wage, then there would be no poor. Everyone would have enough money to live off of without worrying about having enough to pay their bills.

Of course there will be problems that will develop from this plan, but I think it is worth trying out. What do you think? Comment below.

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