Job: Creation

What do you do with the sentiment that the government or Barack Obama or John Boner or the Times editorial board or whatever is/are failing to "do enough" to "create jobs"?  We need more jobs!  Yeah, um, okay, why?  What are these jobs?  Are they merely make-work for the purposes of providing people with money whereby they might reenter the cycle of consumption?  Well, um, yes.  I mean, read any random Krugman column, and that is the takeaway.  Now a better Marxist than me might observe that there is what the Washington press would call "a disconnect" when labor is alienated from production; me, I am merely a bad sophist, and so I will ask instead what happens when work is alienated from meaning, when labor is not only unproductive but literally insignificant.  Certainly in the white collar professions the problem in America is not an absence of jobs but a surfeit of them; even in these days of high unemployment and slow hiring, the office towers and corporate campuses are crowded with useless jobbers battering endlessly against the need to write more macros.  The problem is in fact not that people need jobs but that people need money, and hobbling them to a desk or factory floor is the only moral and legitimate means of funneling currency into their empty jugs.  We need to have fuller employment so that more people are getting paid so that the consumer economy expands ad inf. and repeat as necessary.  There are, if you consider it even briefly, a half million or so unexamined assumptions underlying all of this.  Why not simply provide for people whose employment is extraneous to actual need?  Or, why not aim for economic shrinkage and negative population growth?  Or . . . Well, look, I will not be the first to point out the near-total spiritual impoverishment of Homo economicus, but it's a point that bears infinite repeating; if the most essential function of each individual human life is that it be employed to do something, anything, for four decades of its existence, if that is the true measure of man, then we should all commit suicide forthwith.  There is no reason to go on living.  There is naught but despair and untimely death.  Better to pick the manner of one's own departure.  If the final purpose of your being is to toil for sustenance and then to die, then you are among the lowest orders of animals, a bare step beyond a paramecium.  Look, I am tired of telling you that Democrats are ridiculous, that Republicans are ridiculous, that Barack Obama is a murderer, that Thomas Friedman is dumb, that Matthew Yglesias is silly, that teevee rots your brain.  Beyond the merely pecuniary and the venial: what does your life mean to you beyond your paystub and your appetites?