John L. Perry
Wednesday, Mar. 03, 2004

John Kerry, who may become the Democratic nominee, wants to create more jobs. And raise taxes by killing President Bush’s tax cuts. Is somebody nuts?

Ralph Nader, who also wants more jobs, thinks America has been occupied by enemy aliens – that is to say, American corporations. Therefore, round them up and ship them out, presumably back into outer space.

Everyone would like more jobs. But there’s one small problem: The real world doesn’t work the way Kerry and Nader see it, peering out squinty-eyed from their far-left collapsing house of mirrors.

Old Shibboleths Never Die

The left is congenitally incapable of accepting the fact – and the logic flowing from the fact – that no government wand can magically create non-government jobs. Its campaign rhetoric blatantly suggests otherwise. In actual practice, most of the non-defense-related jobs that government tax-funded action has ever been capable of creating are jobs for government employees.

Leftists like Kerry and Nader furiously refuse to comprehend a simple, historically documented fact: By what it does not do government can – simply by getting out of the way – allow private capital and initiative to create private-sector jobs. It does this by foregoing additional or excessive taxation of private income and accumulated potential investment capital.

Using taxation to chase corporations, large or small, out of business is no way to increase private-sector jobs. Most businesses that pay people to work for them are incorporated. Most new jobs are created by small businesses. If corporations are taxed increasingly, leaving them less capital to invest in plant capacity that creates more jobs, who’s going to create the new, additional jobs?

Try Selling Job-Wanted Ads

Let’s see. Maybe tax-exempt corporations. Maybe widows and orphans with modest inheritances. Maybe the Salvation Army. Maybe the National Football League. Maybe the National Association of Fairy Godmothers.

Are Kerry and Nader out of their cotton-picking minds? Where does Kerry think his wife’s (and thus his) fortune came from if not from ketchup factories owned by a for-profit corporation? Who do those enlightened ones think bought all that ketchup, if not tax-paying consumers with jobs? Where else do they think nearly all those jobs came from if not from corporations? The Ford Foundation and the United Nations?

Where do they want ketchup-consumers’ jobs to come from now? The government of course. How silly not to have known that all along.

Lots of folks already work for the government today. So why not everybody?

One, Big Happy Collective

Let government own and operate airlines, auto plants, computer-chip fabricators, potato-chip fryers, fast-food restaurants, slow-motion cameras – heck, let government have everything.

Then all Congress would have to do is pass a law saying every government operation should hire such-and-such many more workers.

Problem solved. Paradise! Why didn’t someone – other than Dennis Kucinich – think of that before?

Well, someone did, and everyone knows how dandy that worked in the good, ol’ Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Those eager to see that tried again, raise their hands.

Tax the Taxed

But suppose Kerry and Nader manage to sell the idea. The money to pay all those government employees has to come from somewhere.

Taxes of course. How stupid not to think of that sooner.

Well, that takes care of that.

Not quite. To collect taxes to spend, government must have someone to collect taxes from. Oh, that.

Wheel of Misfortune

With no corporations to tax, that leaves, let’s see ... of course, the government employees ... who get their money from the government … which gets its money from taxes … which come from the only people left having any money to tax … the government workers who ….

How long do Kerry and Nader think that circle of silliness will last until taxpayers run out of income to tax from not receiving their wages that were supposed to be paid out of taxes raised from their now-extinct incomes waiting to be paid from ever-increasing taxes no longer capable of producing revenue …?

Bet that’s not how they declare dividends from selling ketchup cooked up in the Heinz-Kerry corporate kitchens.

Next: Voting for a Living

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

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