Shouldn't happen except in a dead economy where entrepreneurial behavior has been smothered. Even in poor countries, people generate their own employment. The idea that a job is something someone gives you is part of the problem. It comes from a top-down mentality.
But another part of the top-down mentality is the necessity of permission before you can engage in some kind of entrepreneurial activity. Its a self-reinforcing vicious circle.
You have a job because someone gives it to you. He gives you a job because someone gives him a contract. Entrepreneurs despair of getting permission to do what they do and eventually wander off to where the air is freer.
Of course, the more restrictive the economy is, the more certain that the living breathing part of the economy is off the books.
I asked my 95 year old mother how they had survived the depression. They raised their own food. No food crops allowed in my subdivision; likewise no farm animals. They didn’t have property taxes so they could stay in the home they owned without any income. My property taxes have gone up several hundred percent since 1994. My grandfather took big jobs from constructing buildings to moving safes to second floors, to installing windows. Each of those jobs today requires permits, insurance, safety inspections; money, money, money before you can even attempt to bid a job. My grandfather hired employees as needed to help him. Today he’d have to pay unemployment insurance.
If you want to make money the government is going to be your noisy, intrusive partner who takes, but gives nothing.
The higher education scam in the developed world is producing many graduates with degrees that lead nowhere. This is precisely what happened in Egypt in the decade before Egypt’s current explosion.
Graduates with worthless skills and an inflated sense of their own value are fodder for movements like OWS.
America's shining gem is our personal liberty and freedom.
Free to think and act on our thoughts without encumbrance.
I stepped back and read what I just wrote and need to clarify;
We are free as capitalists to think and invent and act on what we've thought.
THAT has been our crowning achievement and contribution to mankind and the planet ...
I don't know the percentage of what nation contributed what (though I'm pretty sure the muslims have contributed nothing, no matter WHAT the fascilitator in chief may say), I DO know that many men have left other lands to come here and take that silly, unreadable scratching on a cafe' napkin and build an empire from it (I made that up, but you get the idea)
As long as we think, and act on our thoughts, we are free ... and mighty ... men.