[kabar]

While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic

Then instead of shovels, why don’t you give them spoons and create even more jobs?” Friedman inquired

[JoeFromSidney]

While traveling by car during one of his many overseas travels, Professor Milton Friedman spotted scores of road builders moving earth with shovels instead of modern machinery. When he asked why powerful equipment wasn’t used instead of so many laborers, his host told him it was to keep employment high in the construction industry. If they used tractors or modern road building equipment, fewer people would have jobs was his host’s logic

This idea is not new. A Roman emperor refused to allow the use of canal-digging machinery because he wanted to create jobs. As someone once put it, when you use 20 men to do a job that could be done by 1, you haven't created 20 jobs, you've split a paycheck 20 ways. Workers can be paid only out of the wealth created by their productive activity. If you use more workers to create the same amount of wealth, there's less for each one.