Do you recall that great environmental lesson that natural forest fires are a necessary evil, occurring to rid the forest of old life to make way for new? The same argument can be made with respect to the economy, or more precisely, employment.
When Steve Jobs returned to the helm of Apple in 1997, he carried with him a very big axe, chopping 3 000 employees from the payroll and transforming Apple from a computer company to an engineering, technology support, and retail giant. At the end of the day, this transformation resulted in the creation of the world’s most valuable public company, still growing and enjoying soaring employment levels.
You could argue that Apple’s resurgence is a microcosm of what needs to occur with our economy, as a whole; a purging of “old world” jobs to make way for the jobs of tomorrow. But those jobs of tomorrow are now at our doorstep and will soon seek other shores should we fail to act. Governments forced to keep antiquated companies on life support with our tax dollars ultimately do us all a disservice when those dollars cannot be deployed in the creation of new jobs. The problem with many governments is that they try to do both and when that fails (as it’s doomed to) they will attempt to "pad their stats" by hiring more public employees.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that 10 of the 15 richest counties in America are now in the Washington D.C. area. I guess if you can’t use tax dollars to create jobs, you might as well put some of those dollars in your own pocket.
Shame.
