Unemployment and the Economy

    We have heard about unemployment and the poor economy for many months, and it is time for little perspective.
    Unemployment results when there is a surplus of goods and services in an economy. Have you recently been to your local super market and look at breakfast cereal offerings? If you have a favorite cereal, it may take you five minutes to go through the two aisles of offerings. Or, suppose you want to buy a new shirt, and you go to Wal-Mart. Again, there are a great many offerings. How difficult is it for you to find a barber to cut your hair or someone to do your fingernails? What if you need a new water heater for your home? Do you have to get on a waiting list or is it immediately available? What if you want to buy a new house? Is there a shortage of houses?
    The answer to all of these questions is obvious. There are no shortages of goods and services, and since that is the case, there is no need for further employment, in the traditional sense.
    However, there are various ways to make jobs. Some of these may sound obnoxious or ridiculous, but they have been used in the past.
    We could have riots, in which mobs destroy property, such as stores and public buildings. This leads to the need for people to supply building materials and for re-construction.
    Similarly we could develop a major war. This would involve employing people a as soldiers, which directly employs them. Also, many soldiers and civilians would be killed to reduce the need for employment. Property would be destroyed and require goods and services for reconstruction.
    We could engage in employment activities, which would not be constructive or which were of questionable value. This would include mostly government jobs, which are self perpetuating, as opposed to private industry where standard economics will decide the merits of job continuance. Some examples of irrelevant government jobs are preparing and enforcing regulations inhibiting profitability of private industry.
    Lastly, we could also develop a whole new attitude toward progress that would be primarily to make the pie larger. Rather than offer to the consuming public a new breakfast cereal, the public could be offered a new form of entertainment, a lower-cost food supply, significantly reduced costs for housing and transportation, etc..
    Such progress would be accomplished primarily by private industry. We have many historical examples of such progress. We owe our home lighting primarily to Thomas Edison. We owe most of our telecommunications mostly to Alexander Graham Bell. We owe most of our air transportation to the Wright Brothers and Boeing. We owe our mass private transportation system to Henry Ford. Who knows what advances and benefits for society will be accomplished by the next entrepreneur?
    Where does government stand on this? Generally speaking, elected officials and their subordinates are so busy politicking, which is another way to say they increase their power and personal benefits at the expense of the general public, that they make no valuable contribution to the society. In addition, they usually are not qualified to aid in making new product and services available, because they tend to look at all matters from a legal perspective. Subordinates hired by elected officials in many cases come from universities, where their expertise has been in teaching, rather than the realities of goods and services, other than education. This tends to develop within government a sophistication, which can be intimidating to the voting public and foster continuity and expense unjustified by results. In other words, jobs are made where none are needed.
    It would be ideal if government had the ability to develop a perspective based upon practical potential realities. The closest it has achieved is in the activities of NASA, which has shown tremendous progress in developing our understanding of interstellar space and other worlds. The difficulty is that it has no foreseeable improvement to the standard of living of the voting public. However, this is not an indication that an interstellar space program should be discarded. It only means that it should be put in the perspective of basic research, with a limited application of funds. We can place it in the same category as Capt. Cook's sea voyages around the world, which had little purpose except to see what he could find.
    The basic question is whether government has the capacity to develop a technological society of better advantage to its citizens, without inhibiting personal freedoms. Up to now, it has not shown that capability. We are presently engaged in a program of using the same size pie and dividing it among more people of the world. It is not that we should avoid improving living conditions in our fellow man in other countries, but that should not be our main objective. The US is a country and a society, and the major obligation of its government should be to its citizens.
    Government has shown some slight capability in looking for developments "outside the box". Picking up on the investigations of Mann, a university professor, government has engaged in a project of climate control. It has also reduced the essence of climate control to emissions of carbon dioxide which have no scientific basis other than supercilious speculations of sophisticates. The objective of government in this operation appears to be an opportunity for increased taxation, redistribution of world wealth, and increased political power of elected officials. As indicated previously this comes about because of opportunism without associated capability.
    Conversely, while private industry is also opportunistic, it does have associated capability. However, one of its deficiencies is a lower capacity for capital than can be obtained by government. This limitation only limits the sort of projects in which private industry can be involved.
    While government has been engaged in an ill-conceived attempt at climate control, it misses the more obvious possibility of weather control, with more direct associated advantages., in the middle of a US drought. Simultaneously, there have been disastrous floods in China and India, and even in sections of the US. It would seem much more reasonable to try to control weather than to control the larger aspects of climate. This might involve more extended possibilities of trying to control where it rains and how much, but also might involve avoiding that more direct problem and concentrating on equalizing availability of water for agricultural use.
    The Southwest is traditionally known as an arid area, which is deficient in water for maximum agricultural production. Why not develop an irrigation system to supply agricultural water in the whole area east of the Rockies to Iowa? How do we do this? There are two obvious possibilities. The first is to pipe water from the Great Lakes to the Southwest. One problem is that the states associated with the Great Lakes consider this their private reserve and will not make the water available. The legal eagles in the government can battle that one out.
    Another possibility is to desalinate ocean water. Salt water, from either the Pacific or the Gulf of Mexico, can be piped to a high elevation, where it can be desalinated by membranes to agricultural quality and subsequently flow by gravity to irrigate the Southwest. Advantages? Construction opportunities for engineers, pipe manufacturers, dirt movers, new farming, farm equipment, produce handling, ad infinitum.
    Any other major projects that should be considered? How about birth control? That's would reduce the need for jobs, but would also reduce customers. How about malaria control? That would increase the population, but would also increase personal energy and productivity.
     Until we can see such opportunities for new developments, how about improving efficiency of our current operations? We know that the general standard of living is boosted by increased energy consumption. What can we do to improve our energy supply? Should we be reviewing various governmental restrictions to determine what is practically necessary and eliminate others?