David McElroy

A new poll from Zogby is going to get plenty of attention in the next day or so, because it shows Herman Cain is the top presidential choice of 28 percent of GOP voters. My view is that it’s irrelevant and won’t hold any water, but I’ve been wrong many times before.

Rick Perry is at 18 percent and Mitt Romney at 17 percent. In fourth place is Ron Paul with 11 percent, and then there’s a host of others who really aren’t worth mentioning at the moment.

Writing at Human Events, a writer commented on Paul’s steady poll performance: “Paul’s the most solid performer in Zogby’s polling history for the 2012 GOP race — his 11% might as well be chiseled in stone.” While this sounds like a compliment, it’s more evidence of what I’ve been saying for some time. As much as I like Ron Paul — and would be quite happy if he won — he has no chance of winning.

It’s very simple. There is a very solid core of support for individual freedom. It’s right around 10 percent. It’s not going to get much bigger than that anytime soon. You can bemoan the fact. You can be angry. You can deny it. It’s not going to change. People just don’t want what you and I want. Period.

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The bureaucrats at the UN’s International Labor Organization are worried. They say the world’s economies are heading toward a “massive job shortfall.” Who would have thought that if you destroy the incentives to start new businesses and take risks, jobs would go away?

The problem is that bureaucrats have things backwards. They want policies designed to create jobs, as though jobs are manufactured and come stacked up in boxes. That’s insane. Jobs are simply by-products of economic activity. When you restrict economic activity and make it more difficult for people to be productive, you’re going to get less economic activity — which leads to fewer jobs. What’s so hard to understand about that?

People such as the economic illiterates waving their signs about “green jobs” are just as ignorant about this as the government bureaucrats. They all believe the focus should be on jobs, not understanding that the focus has to be on letting people pursue their own self-interest — at which point the jobs will be there.

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The Obama administration has claimed that “stimulus” spending created or saved 300,000 to 400,000 jobs each quarter while its money was being doled out. Does anybody seriously believe that number? I don’t.

I was already a skeptic — to put it most politely — of such self-serving econometrics, but two things this week have made me even more skeptical.

First, a source who can’t be identified provided me with copies of documents that his company was required to fill out as a vendor on a contract that it was awarded by a school district. It was made clear to the company that it was expected to report that jobs created and saved, so that’s exactly what the report back to the district showed. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 workers had jobs only because of this project, according to the paperwork reported back to the federal government. In truth, nobody was hired just for the project. Nobody would have been fired if the project hadn’t come along.

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