My column on the “jobs summit” today. Bottom line: It’s the entrepreneurial churn that’s most important.

UPDATE:

An e-mail:

Subject: Jobs that create growth and jobs that don’t.
All Work Is Not Equal
There is a real difference between a government job and a job in the private sector. Private sector jobs contribute to the growth of the economy because the private sector employee produces a product or provides a service that the consumer wants to buy, thus generating income, producing wealth, expanding economic activity and thereby providing the basis for increasing employment.
No government employee produces any product or service that the consumer purchases. Hence government jobs produce no income, create no wealth, generate no economic expansion, and provide no economic incentive for job creation. What’s more, all government jobs are paid for with revenues taken from the private sector in the form of taxes on individuals and businesses, thus siphoning economic resources out of the productive private economy and dumping them into the non-productive government economy.

Another e-mail:

Mr. Lowry;
I think your correspondent goes too far with the blanket statement “No government employee produces any product or service that the consumer purchases.” I can think of several examples — A patent issued the US Patent & Trademark Office is paid for and wanted by its applicant, and the patentee uses that patent to create value in the economy. As a private pilot, I buy gov’t printed navigational charts routinely. I find them to have value (by providing safety), and contribute to the greater economy by my flying, which is enhanced by those charts.I can agree that the private sector has an advantage of more efficiently allocating resources in many or most situations, however. Wasteful government jobs, e.g., paying one person to dig holes and another to fill them in, does not yield any benefit to the economy.