The Oxymoron of Jobs - Government

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves.
To stop being conned, stop conning yourself. James Wolcott

Its clearly an Oxymoron - Jobs and Poverty to be tackled by the Nigerian Government. 

It's insanity to think that the Nigerian government can and will create Jobs! Doing the same things since 1960 and expecting different results in 2020.

The underlying notion of such proposal by the 'rulers in office' that they can create jobs and the government can solve poverty — is riddled and an economic fallacy.

The logic underpinning a government jobs creation program or a so-called poverty alleviation program was best epitomized by an advocate who declared that, “The goal in and of itself is job creation. You create the job to fit the person.” and Julius Nyerere illuminatingly submits that “Capitalism means that the masses will work, and a few people – who may not labour at all – will benefit from that work. The few will sit down to a banquet, and the masses will eat whatever is left over”!

I guess every Nigerian except the Governors, Senators, Reps, LGA 'Chairs', and the Bigger Animals of the Assemblies will agree that the previous paragraph mirrors the alleviation Program of the Nigerian state. Interestingly, employment is not an end in and of itself. Instead, it is a means to an end: namely the increased standard of living that the worker obtains by trading his labour for wages.

In a free market, employment is a value creation process — with jobs stemming from the wants and needs of consumers as conveyed through the price system. It is this productive nature of free-market jobs that make them desirable and capable of increasing a worker’s standard of living.

Wages spring directly from, and are proportional to, the degree in which a job creates wealth by helping to satisfy an unmet need. As is the case for all mutually-agreeable trades in a free market, both sides gain and wealth is created: the worker receives wages that he values more than his labour and the consumer receives a product or service he values more than its price.

In other words, a worker’s wages are reflective of the additional wealth he helped create, which enables his newly improved standard of living. Thus, government-created jobs are devoid of this wealth creation process, they are merely a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the program’s beneficiaries.

This is made clear by taking the argument to its logical conclusion and considering a government proposal that paid one set of workers to dig ditches and the other set to fill them back in. While there would be a virtually unlimited number of jobs that could be created under such a program, there is clearly no value creation of any kind. Throwback to Abuja, a government regime paid contractors to build speed breakers on the roads and next regime came along and paid for its removal.

Thus, a government-mandated job omits the very thing that makes employment desirable in the first place — Value creation.