A LIBERAL VIEW OF THINGS: It isn’t that hard to understand

There remains a strange concept that keeps permeating our political debate: government does not create jobs.

Nothing could be further from the truth. People would see that if they studied how we became the most powerful and richest nation on Earth with the best infrastructure, public education and health-care system the world had ever seen. Instead, our “learning” is centered around “gotcha” political games predicated on a gross error in judgment and philosophy.

I am talking, of course, about the false theory of Milton Friedman: supply side economics. The Reagan Administration embraced this faulty theory because big business and big banking told it to. One has to go no further than Reagan’s chief of staff, Donald Regan, the former chief executive officer of Merrill-Lynch, who fronted this ideology and “managed” the Reagan Administration’s actions to implement it.

President Ronald Reagan kept telling us government is not the solution, but the problem.

What that really meant, as we’ve come to see, is that it was corporate/banking America that wanted government out of their lives so they could do what capitalists do: Whatever it takes to maximize economic profit and gain at the expense of exploiting people and resources until they are exhausted.

To return to the theme about government creating jobs, one only has to look at the history of our infrastructure. No president before Reagan suggested anything like “government does not create jobs," because it was government sponsoring private enterprise that got everything built.

Even though most of our past presidential administrations were in bed with corporate/banking America, there was work to do and money to be made from the taxpayer … lots of money.

The fact is, our government creates jobs that matter to the country as a whole.

From the discovery and settling (some would say invasion) of the Western Hemisphere by European immigrants to the purchase of the Louisiana, Gadsden and Alaska territories; the building of ports, subways, railroads, aqueducts, canals, bridges, water and sewer systems, public sanitation departments; paving city streets, roads and highways; the creation of our public school and university system; the electrical grid, Internet and the space program — nothing would have happened if not for a political decision. Without these projects, we would still be riding horses and throwing our sewage out our windows.

Yes, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but the streets would still be dark if some politicians had not voted to allocate taxes to install street lights. All these projects were built by the private sector, but that was after the government put up the tax dollars to start the project.

Government, through taxation, creates the opportunity from which the private sector profits. That is the American economic formula for progress. And that is how we will rebuild our present economy: by creating jobs that matter.

In my infinite naiveté, I expect most people to see the jobs pump must be periodically primed for our nation to make progress to lead the world in so many areas. I expect my fellow Americans to see that the minute education or health care is turned over to private enterprise, it starts faltering and becomes mediocre or elitist for the sake of profit and at the expense of the people.

Certain things that serve our citizens and our nation simply shouldn’t be for profit. There are countless other projects, like rebuilding our inner cities, which will provide plenty of profit for our capitalists and bankers.

All we need to have is enough leadership in government to prime the correct pump by ending our preoccupation with wars, and directing our tax money to rebuilding that infrastructure. Civil distress in this country is a function of poverty.

There are plenty of opportunities for all boats to rise. In our class-stratified society, the seas may not all be the same level, but everyone will have a boat that floats and enough to eat so that rowing won’t be much of a hardship. Our working people deserve the chance to row their own boats.

Turner is a retired teacher and industrial engineer who lives near Marble Falls. He is an independent columnist, not a staff member, and his views do not necessarily reflect those of The Tribune or its parent company. "The Voter’s Guide to National Salvation" is a newly published e-book from Turner. You can find it at www.barnesandnoble.com/ebooks. He can be reached by e-mail at vtgolf@zeecon.com.