Though ‘the economy’ is manifestly where we go to work, our definition of leisure as the household product indicates that economic activity should not be considered a source of jobs. If the economy is doing the best it can for us, it is incorporating innovation into growth and thereby increasing wealth. A wealthier population will then consume more things, along with a greater portion of leisure in which to enjoy them. Economic growth, in and of itself, relieves unemployment by making the general population content with the rewards from doing less work. Only culture can modulate a general accommodation of hours worked with goods produced for enjoyment in the hours not worked. To the extent that custom and moderation prove themselves insufficient for this task, government will invite itself to perform it.

Jobs are, in any case, the touchstone of our public conversation. There are few who do not desire settled arrangements that provide for one’s needs into the foreseeable future. The desire for job security is of course especially strong for those whose work is the only support for others in their care. It is therefore quite understandable that political creatures will style themselves as the source of employment. A population properly schooled in economic science would not suffer this appropriation:

In the social sense, a job is someplace to go where duties are performed in exchange for remuneration. If this were all there is to it, there would never be a reason for anyone to be out of work. A central authority, suffered in office on the promise of keeping the population busy, would merely appoint the place of work, assign duties to be performed, and pay for the output produced. And, indeed, history shows a great many instances of governments doing just that — often at the insistence of their constituents. Few of these regimes turned out well; and, where claims persist as to success, we are entitled to certainty in that the actual circumstances are misrepresented.¹

In the economic sense, a job is work at a wage equal to the marginal value of what one produces. The worker given a higher wage is being subsidized at the expense of someone else. The worker given a lower wage is being exploited to the advantage of someone else. Of course the slippery notion of ‘value’ at the center of this analysis is only quantified when the worker’s output is priced by the market. Here the value of work is set by what a volume of output produced is worth to the economy at large. Thus the wage for work and the volume of output from work are not specifiable as separate entities. In free-market economics, they are two ways of describing the same thing.

Governments' complete incapacity in these matters can only be concealed by the exercise of their true talent, i.e., corrupting words: ‘job’ will be artfully defined in lieu of jobs being provided.

Medieval schoolman masticated upon, but did not resolve, the notion of a fair wage. Their debates continue today. We see their several definitions for a just wage brought together in our neoclassical premise that a worker’s wage must settle at the marginal value of what he produces with the time and effort he invests in his job. But economics only formalizes this question without really answering it. Scholasticism’s inherent insufficiency on the just wage question impelled Marx to replace economic science with his labor theory of value. There is no measure of what is fair to a worker other than what we observe him to be doing with his time.

Yet even an outright surrender to empiricism induces still more questions:

There is more than one worker; therefore workers with varying urgencies of need can be pitted against one another. And, even when these contentions are resolved in culturally settled living standards, workers from other cultures with lower standards are naturally induced into the system.

There is also more than one class of household; and classes are distinguished by the proportion of income earned by wages versus that arriving passively through ownership of capital. No one’s right to the self-interested disposition of his property can be allowed to override another’s right to survive in some (but how much?) dignity.

In capitalist regimes these questions are resolved in the limited warfare of labor activism. The ‘just wage’ comes to be defined as ‘what a free association of workers is willing to strike for’. Capitalism gives place to unionism because it accepts that those living from paycheck to paycheck are not, as individuals, the equal of property owners in bargaining for their wages. Economic reasoning confirms society’s wisdom in these arrangements: workers must ultimately have the means to purchase what they produce if returns to capital are to be maximized; and determination of the optimal rates of consumption requires that the wage negotiations be conducted among more or less equal antagonists.

The time when workers organized to achieve parity with capitalists in their wage negotiations has all but passed for private-sector employment. Organized labor has raised workers to middle class status, and they now have enough property to effectively negotiate their remuneration as individuals. One of capitalism’s great impulses has been creation of a middle class that works for wages, yet also participates in investments providing significant political independence for the individual, as well passive income for his retirement.

Private investments have now grown to a point of inviting appropriation by the authorities established to foster that growth — a potential attractive to those adept at organizing discontent for advantage. The focus of labor militancy has moved on to represent the demands of a metastasizing public-sector workforce, while the surviving bastions of union power are amalgamating themselves, their workers, and their industries with governance.

The organization of government employees against taxpayers contains a peril that was not there when laborers organized against capitalists. In the private sector, wages can be expected to stabilize when they equal labor’s marginal value. Public sector work, having no calculable product, has no calculable values of marginal product. Where the criteria of economic optimality exert no control over wage negotiations, militancy is the sole criterion upon which government remuneration might be limited. The average 30% premium observed in government wages suggests that the product of governance is becoming its own expansion, which is perpetuated through outright purchase of the ever-expanding number of its own votes.