Something I’ve been thinking towards lately is that the benefits of a free market economy are actually side effects.
For example, the general idea of “competition-driven constant innovation in the form of amazing new products” (ideal outcome) or “marginally improved products at the same prices or the same quality at lower prices”. It appears to me that it’s merely one of the many ways to get market leverage rather than the desired outcome, and at some point it hits diminishing returns pretty hard.
I have a lot of experience dealing with ISPs and saw the mechanism first hand. First we have the amazing benefits of a de facto monopoly who could get away with shit like $100 for dial up speeds in ADSL era being forced to offer cheap fast internet, fast forward a year and we descend into shit like shady under the table deals, dishonest marketing, and guys cutting our fiber to create an impression of unreliable service.
And that’s internet. You can take it or leave it. If you knew what goes on with food you’d never want to eat again.
Try applying it to labor and it becomes obvious why politicians have so much trouble “creating jobs”. Capitalism hates “creating jobs”. Jobs are a cost. “Job creators” do not want to “create jobs”. They want to make money. The jobs are, to them, an undesirable side effect.
I thought that much was obvious from the term “job makers”. The claim that job makers make jobs out of the goodness of their heart implies that they don’t like doing so.
I don’t think the people using it (or rather, the target audience of the people using it) really understand the full implications that the jobs aren’t something that’s wanted by the incentives in the system itself. I think how they understand it is that if only the government would stop punishing these “valuable job creators”, then the job creators would create jobs.