Two Opinion Pieces in the Los Angeles Times

The paper headlined Dimitri B. Papadimitriou’s piece "Need Jobs? Call on Government".

The subheadline is:

International experience shows that direct job creation by governments is one of the very few options that has succeeded at raising employment levels more than just marginally during a crisis.

Here's how the text starts:

Is high unemployment as certain as death and taxes? Of course not. But if we depend on the private sector to bring rates down, joblessness could join those two certainties.

Huh.

It's unreasonable to expect private enterprises to solve these problems.

That's like saying it is unreasonable to expect food to feed people. You're right - it is unreasonable when you have oversized and overly intrusive government inefficiently handling the food and impeding farmers.

Full employment isn't an objective of businesses.

It's not an "objective of business" to innovate, either, but that's what businesses to do to make profits.

In contrast, direct public-service job creation programs by governments have a history of long-term positive results.

Yeah, it's worked out so well in Greece, hasn't it, Papadimitriou?

At the theoretical heart of job-creation programs is this fact: Only government, because it is not seeking profitability when it is hiring, can create a demand for labor that is elastic enough to keep a nation near full employment.

But who is the government? It is the people. Specifically, in the sense he's writing, the government is People in Group A forcing people in Group B (some of whom are not in Group A) to pay for the things Group A deems worthy.

Government jobs that are funded through taxes depend on the private sector for funding. The more people employed in such government jobs instead of in the private sector, the greater the burden on the private sector. In theory, it would be better for someone who is unemployed and collecting redistributed (tax) funds to perform some work for that money, but the problem is government jobs tend to persist beyond their need, or when a private sector job could do the same work more efficiently. Perhaps government shouldn't be involved in charity in the first place?

Alexander Edmonds wrote a piece the paper titled "Is It Time to Ban Cosmetic Surgery?"

Go head. Conservative women are naturally hot. It's the Left that will suffer. And would such a ban include addadictomies, like the one Castity Bono is seeking?

The faulty breast implants made by the French company Poly Implants Protheses, or PIP, have grabbed headlines around the world in recent weeks, and it's no wonder. The prostheses are more prone to rupture than other models, and they contain an industrial grade of silicone never intended for use in a medical device.

Is this going to turn out like the Dow Corning thing, in which hysteria and fraudulent opportunism destroyed a legitimate enterprise?