Re-employment That Kills Jobs

Quote on job generation and public policy.

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"In fact, many Germans say they are sick of labor-market micromanagement from above. They note that German growth in the 1980s yielded nothing like the 18 million jobs created in the United States in that period. Indeed, 8% of industrial jobs disappeared from Germany last year. Many argue the German system shuts job creators out of the market. . . .

"'It's pretty funny,' says a bank economist, who notes that in the same months Mr. Reich [U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich] was writing his [worker retraining] program, Germany was privatizing part of the function of its job centers. 'While the U.S. is going one way, Germany is going the other.'

"'I know we made fun of those McDonald's positions,' says another economist, referring to the jobs, many for the unskilled, created in America in the 1980s. 'But tell me again,' he asks a reporter. 'How many million were there?"

-- From "Re-employment That Kills Jobs," by Amity Shlaes, in the Wall Street Journal (April 26, 1994), one of the most cogent articles on job generation and public policy to appear in many a moon