Quit thinking about ‘jobs’; Think about what value you can provide

By David McElroy · October 5, 2011

Have you seen the maudlin photos that the Wall Street protesters are encouraging people to make? That’s an example on the right. I know they’re supposed to make me feel sorry for these people, but many of them make me feel just the opposite instead.

As a society, we’ve become fixated on the idea that someone “provides a job” for us. It’s as though a job is a good or service that someone produces and delivers to our doorstep. I’d like to suggest that it’s time for people to quit acting like consumers and start acting like people who are eager to figure out what value they can provide to others — that those others are willing to pay for.

Let’s take the woman in this random example here. (You can see the various tear-jerking stories here.) This woman is fairly deeply in debt because she has college degrees that are close to worthless. She has a bachelor’s of fine arts and a master’s degree (presumably in art or art history). I’m sure she got the degrees because she loved the subject. But there’s not much of a market for art historians or for teachers of art history. When economic times are good, schools spend more money on such things, because they can afford extras. Right now, they can barely afford to do essentials. Guess what isn’t in demand?

This woman is apparently angry because she is in debt and isn’t employed by a college, but she seems to be overlooking the fact that she’s the one who make the choices that led to her situation. Nobody forced her to choose to study a subject with almost no market value. Nobody forced her to run up $41,000 in student loans to pay for those worthless degrees. She made those choices on her own.

I’m a big believer in trying to do what you want to do — in trying to find ways to follow your dreams. I don’t object to her attempting to make a living with art. I’ve spent my entire life going against the grain and doing things that sometimes made it hard to make it financially. But it was always my choice. Nobody ever forced me to take that difficult path. I could have stayed in a “safe” business culture and done the things that most responsible people did. I didn’t. I took risks. Sometimes they paid off. Sometimes they didn’t. I was happier because of living my life my way — but I’ve never suffered from the delusion that anyone owed me an income because of my choices.

Sometime in the last hundred years or so, we started thinking of a “job” as something someone provided for you. Before the Industrial Revolution, I think it would have seemed like an odd concept to people. As boys grew up, they learned that they had to figure out a trade or skill that they could use as adults to provide for themselves. They didn’t expect companies to do it out of the goodness of their hearts. They didn’t expect a government to do for them. They knew that if they didn’t find something to do in exchange for money (or food and shelter) that they were going to die.

Today, we’re too good for that. We are a rich enough society that we believe we should do something that we want to do and that other people should make sure we’re taken care of. This isn’t reality. It’s not the way the world works or ever will work.

If you’re lucky enough to be able to do what you want for a living, there are generally going to be sacrifices you make because of it. If you’re able to survive that way and do well enough to support the people who matter to you, I highly suggest that you do it. But if your attempts at that fail, the solution isn’t to blame Wall Street bankers or to demand jobs from politicians. The solution is to figure out what you can do that other people are willing to pay for. It’s your problem. Nobody else’s.

By the way, I can tell many of the people holding up these sad photos that managers at fast food restaurants make pretty decent money, especially compared to being unemployed. If they’re willing to work hard and move up through the ranks, they can support themselves. Every fast food joint I’m familiar with is still hiring all the time, but they couldn’t care less about what you know about art history.

Note: I’ve written recently about the left-wing political views of the Occupy Wall Street types, and the Mises Institute has an excellent article about the economics of the issue today.

Update: One of my Facebook friends posted this picture Wednesday afternoon as a response to the pictures being posted by the Occupy Wall Street types.

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When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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