The argument Mitchell makes assumes a vacuum.
Government creates jobs all the time… e.g. Navy needs an aircraft, this isn’t something that you buy off the shelf. Space program needs stuff. Not on the shelf. New SDI initiative wants to build an orbital boost phase missile detector. Not off the shelf. Army needs to have sat based locator system for battlefield management. Not off the shelf.
You could possibly argue that the same resources that are used to create these new things are taken from other jobs. In the case of military hardware… what jobs? Working the iPod line? Not really.
Moreover, take *just* my last example re the Army. This resulted in GPS. You buy them in your cars, or you can get portable units at walmart for $100 and up. Think of how many jobs there are that never existed before this.
One problem is that Mitchell is talking short term, whereas the government can be very very good at “trickle down” jobs. And make no mistake, when the government invests in technology there are jobs created. By the bushel. Computers, semiconductors, the internet. All of it jumpstarted by government investment. Today’s economy is vastly different than that of the 1950′s. You may not be able to even count the jobs government created.
The other glaring problem with this article is that it, as I said, assumes a vacuum. It’s almost Marx level simplistic, where Marx assumes that there are owners and workers, and that’s going to be the way things are. He never considers that new technology is the wild card that changes the equation. In a similar fashion Mitchell ignores technological growth completely, assuming some sort of artificial stasis where the government job creation engine is seen as the technological equivalent of working at burger king. But that’s not real life, which is that every time the government orders an aircraft and demands a spec of this or that, this spec filters into the civilian world later and creates jobs.
Possony and Pournelle wrote a short book entitled “The Strategy of Technology” which was at one time part of the course requirements for military officer training. You can find this online (thanks to government and DARPA of course.) Use google. Technology is and what has been what separates the US from the rest of the world. Much of what we have today is the direct result of the dreaded military-industrial complex. I reckon economists and poly-sci people, most of whom are abysmally ignorant of technology, ought to start recognising that their blather about jobs creation is based on a stasis that simply doesn’t exist and never did.
