Let’s talk about this talking point. Calling businesses and wealthier people “job creators.” Instead of rich or wealthy or just a successful business.

I’m sure that phrasing came out of a focus group by some Frank Luntz (pollster and word tester) type, if not Frank himself because people are more sympathetic to business when you use those terms. For the working class, it sounds that big disparaging a job creator, we’re biting the hand that feeds us. Especially one that’s virtuous and working hard to give you a job. So back off.

Sure it sounds good. But is it true? Are businesses, entrepreneurs and the wealthy the job creators?

In one word: No. People are job creators. When a person is born, products, resources and services will be required to support than person’s life or needs. And when there are more people, there will be more jobs. Like some believe conception begins at birth. Job creation definitely does.

Okay, since job are now created because more people are coming into this world than leaving, what are businesses?

Business are job CONVERTERS. I’d even argue that business are more market induced job distributors than “presto-look-a-there’s-a- job” creators.

The idea communicated by the job creators title is that a job is created out of nothingness. Or by the sheer will of an inventors’ innovation. But most jobs aren’t converted from nothingness. Instead an idea or business model is created that causes the re-distribution of the workforce to meet the change.

In fact, I argue that a job, like other physical forms of matter, follows the Law of Thermodynamics. That “matter can be neither be created no destroyed. Just re-arranged.” Or as kids TV show Beakman’s World used to put it, “Everything goes somewhere.” In this case, you don’t create most jobs. You do create a business. But the creation of the business produces a force that distributes the need to perform work between businesses. Like a vacuum. A difference in air pressure between two points cause distribution of air until those to points are equalized. In the same way, a difference between a business or industry with a job opening and money to support that job and a industry or business that doesn’t cause distribution in workers to until the two are equalized.

When you took a job. You likely filled a position. One that was vacated from someone else. That someone else might have gotten a promotion because the person above them retired. And if you left your job for that position, someone else is filling in for your job at your old workplace. See? re-arrangement. Not creation. To say a job was created in your workplace is like finding a kickball in your backyard and saying the backyard created it. If you see the world as only your backyard, don’t take in to account the other backyard it may have come from, it looks like it was created out of nothingness.

Or let’s say a company expanded. Bigger place. More workers. Created jobs? No. They likely hired new workers from other companies in the business. People who worked in other companies that have the experience they are looking for. And companies who now have vacated jobs will do the same. So again not jobs created. Jobs redistributed.

I’ll finish this argument this week.