Jenny, We're Still Waiting on those Jobs

We've spent the last several years in Michigan waiting on Jennifer Granholm's blessed green jobs of tomorrow. You know, the types of jobs that Ms. Granholm envisions will spring from the soil like mushrooms in feculent barnyard dirt if only we allow her to sufficiently manipulate the feedlot environment.

Among her most notable achievements are the addition of business and profit killing regulations, an unyielding support for an unproductive and adversarial union dominated labor force, policies designed to keep the consumption of Michigan energy artificially high, and the fascist-dappling habit of blessing particular businesses and industries over their unfortunate competitors.

Each of these (and other) strategies are intended to put Michigan at the helm of tomorrow's job creation--what with today's jobs being relatively uncool.

The jobs she seeks are those that dance about within the confines of her own nearly empty cranium and not those that would naturally be created by unrelenting free-market forces. What Granholm's unwavering quest has helped to do is drive nearly a million Michiganders out of work, others out of state, and even more out of hope.

Granholm's strategy is really nothing more than a garden variety socialist's misguided attempt to wag the dog.

By and large, private businesses will locate in and invest within cities and states that allow them to grow profitably. (That is, those that don't receive a state franchise to produce something that the free-market cannot afford to produce on its own.) Private businesses will hire workers in areas where they can achieve a profitable status.

What Granholm either ignores or misunderstands is that hired employees (and the wages they collect) are simply byproducts of a profitable business environment and not a spontaneous formation in the furrows of her experiment.

Michigan is now stuck with an unemployment rate that has either rivaled the nation's worst or been the nation's worst for much of her disastrous administration. Jobs have not miraculously chased down her retrained workers. Hiring businesses have not sufficiently relocated here to take advantage of her green-jobs paradise. In fact, in ever larger numbers children born in Detroit, Lansing, and far reaches of the northern woods are now living and working in exotic locations such as Dallas, Casper, and Atlanta--their tax payments now being made to different cities and states. (No worry, those that stay here can always pay more.)

But, she reasons, when the jobs of tomorrow come knocking on our door we will be thankful. It will all have been worth it. Prosperity will return.

And yet, Forbes has an interesting take...maybe the unemployed are unemployed because they are looking for work in the wrong place.

Bad interviews or a lack of experience may not be the reason you can't land a job. Your location may be to blame.

People, go where the businesses are. They are not coming to you. Then again, I suppose you already know that.

If only Jennifer would figure it out.