Jobs, Jobs, Jobs (Fibs, Fibs, Fibs)
The maudlin creepiness of John Edwards's stump speech has been accepted with little complaint by the media. Routinely, he paints America as place where fathers come home, look in their daughter's eyes, and confess what apparently is the greatest insult/failure that can befall a dad: He's lost his job!</br></br>Mr. Edwards has spent his life as a lawyer, a sector of the economy that never experiences a recession, so perhaps he's unaware that it's quite routine for people to lose jobs. Census data show that job destruction in manufacturing has been remarkably stable over several decades, averaging about 10% a year. The normal toll in the service sector is even higher. That's a lot of devastated fathers and daughters.</br></br>You can also look at it on the basis of business failures: Of the 9,000 companies big enough to list themselves on a stock exchange, some 200-300 fail every year. Small employers fail at an even higher rate, about 8% a year. In fact, of the million or so small businesses started every year, most will have failed in ten years.</br></br>Of course, such "normal" job destruction is accompanied by even greater job creation. The ever-churning U.S. labor market manages not just to absorb natural population growth and immigration, but a massive movement of married women into the workforce. This is a healthy economy at work, not a crime against humanity.</br></br>Mr. Edwards obviously has spent too much time in front of gullible juries. In New York the other day, he bleated that his free-trade critique is a "moral" stance, asserting that children overseas are dragooned to do the jobs being stolen from American fathers. Get it? Just stop trade and all children everywhere will be happy and smiling!