Tuesday
The paradigm shift that is underway in western civilization is composed of minor trends. The distinguishing feature of all these trends is that they are negative.
One of the trends is unemployment; it rises inexorably. The free market of yesteryear created businesses; those businesses supplied not only products, but also jobs. It takes a degree of foolhardiness to start a business in the current environment. Foolhardiness is not a positive attribute for the CEO of a new start-up. Established businesses are more inclined to cut production and thus jobs because of the faltering economy.
The normal progression of the era has been for people to study at school and college to obtain the best qualifications that they could and then to emerge into the ‘jobs market’ where they utilized their qualifications to obtain the best job that they could. In an economy which, structured as it is, is doomed to permanently contract, there are an ever diminishing number of jobs awaiting them.
It is important to grasp that this is not a temporary phenomenon caused by a temporary economic slowdown. The era where western society could rely on businesses, both large and small, to supply jobs is finished. Businesses are now burdened by regulations and their associated costs to the degree that the straw has broken the camel’s back. The weight of regulation has killed the economy. Taxes are a lesser curse because the negatives of too high a rate of taxation are obvious; usually even to politicians. The regulatory burden is not so obvious, even to many business people. Whether the profit margin is destroyed by taxes or regulations is irrelevant to the result.
This whole modus operandi is now kaput. It is useless for unemployed youths to sit around waiting for jobs to appear or to return to their studies waiting for good times to return. They won’t. Retraining for a new profession is also useless. All professions are subject to strangulation by regulation. It is even more useless for governments to spend billions on job creation schemes. That is simply further waste to add to their prior destruction of capital.
There will be no meaningful job creation until the myriad regulations are wiped from the statute books. That is a fact, irrespective of its political palatability.