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Or take traffic in a city. What's the fastest way to get where you want to go? Drive forward until you can't go forward any more without hitting anything; then when traffic moves you go forward again. Seems reasonable, right? If I'm trying to get from here to there then the closer I get to there then the closer to complete my trip will be. A ten mile drive starts with the first hundred feet of car movement. (Or something like that.) But if you gridlock intersections, and other people do too, then traffic slows to a crawl for everyone. If, on the other hand, you don't actually try to drive forward quite as aggressively, and leave the intersections open so that traffic can flow, then all of traffic moves faster and everyone benefits. Life is like that sometimes; you have to embrace paradox. (Maybe I'll write a book: "Zen and the art of not spoiling the commons".) So here you are with chronically high unemployment and you'd like more people to have jobs, right? Obviously the thing to do is to make it nearly impossible to fire anyone. After all, the more people get terminated, then the more unemployment there is. Seems reasonable, doesn't it? Apparently it does to 80,000 Europeans who demonstrated at the EU meeting in Brussels, because they asked for efforts to decrease unemployment and also strengthen the influence of the Unions. It strikes me that those are contradictory goals. The fundamental problem isn't so much to avoid destroying existing jobs as to encourage the creation of new ones. If a company cannot lay people off during an economic downturn then they'll be very cautious about putting people on during a boom. From their point of view it's better to have too few people and turn away business than to have too many and go broke. If they staff up too aggressively then they have a chance of going OOB on the next economic bust. So if these folks really want to increase employment, they should be campaigning for decreases in Union influence. Or so it seems to this American. (discuss) |
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