Where do jobs come from?

It is a universally understood "fact" that rich people create jobs. Unfortunately, rich people can only create jobs with their after-tax income. Therefore, the ultimate job-creation environment is one in which rich people pay no taxes whatsoever.

That carefully crafted ode to Joseph Goebbels' Big Lie Theory has attained the status of fact through no other mechanism than rote repetition. Watch the business networks for awhile and you will soon learn that the terms "job creators" and "rich" are 100% synonymous. This fact free-floats above empirical reality, completely immune to the demands of logic or proof.

It's just obvious.

It's just something everybody knows.

If you're a fan of the annual billionaire lists put out by the likes of Forbes et al, you will no doubt have noticed that year after year there are fewer people on that list who can claim to have had any net positive impact on job creation whatsoever. Quite the opposite. As the rise of the Rumpelstiltskin economy shows, the attainment of great wealth is more and more the province of creative paper-shufflers.

So if jobs aren't the product of rich people giving back to society in appreciation for their low tax rates, just where do they come from?

Long before the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford was a successful engineer who tinkered with self-propelled vehicles in his spare time. Like many other inveterate tinkerers of the era, he was driven by a curiosity, quite independent from any lust for riches, to see if his experiments could rival or surpass the achievements of the other tinkerers.

That drive led in due course to the Ford Motor Company and tens of thousands of jobs being created, not because Ford was a wealthy man, but because he had come up with a product that the general population found useful.

Wealth followed.

A manufacturing enterprise will grow if it succeeds in producing a product that consumers want to buy. Once that happens, the job growth will of necessity follow.

That pattern is universal throughout the manufacturing and service industries. The Waltons, love them or hate them, didn't become America's biggest employers because they were really rich and created jobs in return for the low taxes bestowed upon them by the state. They built stores and hired people because the public had an appetite for the way they delivered consumer goods.

Wealth followed.

Real wealth has always been the result of real people providing products and services that others find useful and are willing to pay for. This holds true regardless of the marginal tax rate levied on "the rich".

The next time you hear that claim that "job creators" will stop creating jobs if they they have to pay more than 15% in taxes, remember this; the paper-shufflers objecting to paying taxes don't create jobs to begin with, and generally attain their wealth through non-productive economic activity. Taxing speculators and hedge fund artists at 100% would have utterly no impact on job creation.

So let's tax them!