- Jobs American's Won't Do

When it comes to the unemployment issue, my wife believes in efficiency. She sent out one resume, had one interview, and got one job. Piece of cake. Actually, she has the one absolutely essential job skill for the Obama administration, she’s a CPA. And in Obama era where regulatory compliance is the principle difference between success and failure, CPA’s have never been in more demand.

For those of us who need more time to find a job, it’s painful to watch. Her first job search in over a decade and the entire process, soup to nuts, took less than a full business day. It took me 6 months to find an appropriate position, and my equally intelligent, and probably harder working brother even longer.

Then again, she was applying for a job where she is vastly over qualified and equally underpaid. But making a ton of money isn’t her first concern. Accounting can be brutal on your schedule, and she still considers her first job ‘parent’, so she wanted something to bring in a few dollars but wouldn’t require the skull crushing overtime that it usually involves.

Given the relatively low pay, she’s probably taking a job that an ‘American CPA’ wouldn’t do. And since the CPA is an American certification, there aren’t any foreign CPA’s (and certainly no illegals). It’s entirely possible that my wife was the only CPA who applied, and she only liked it because it was close to home and fit her unique scheduling demands. Besides – she’s Hungarian, and those Hungarians work like… well like Mexicans with college degrees.

I heard that ‘jobs Americans won’t do’ dribble turn up again today on CNBC when Andrew Ross Sorkin brought up the agro companies that tried to hire Americans to do fruit picking only to find that they Americans wouldn’t do the job for the wages that were being offered. Collecting unemployment looked to them like a better deal.

But the solution to this is so idiotically simple that even a NYTimes reporter could understand it. Simply raise the wage. For 700K per year I’ll be the best strawberry picker on the planet. In fact, I would probably never get the chance because the wage will never get that high My bet its that the last agro job opening will disappear at a price level far, FAR below an equivalent of 70K per year.

So how do we know what the right price is? By far the greatest mechanism for determining what wages should be is the free market. Let the wages float, and eventually, every one of the available positions gets filled. Of course – this means you’ll have to let the price of strawberries float too or no-one will grow them. And that might mean some very expensive daiquiris for a short time. But eventually those high prices will attract more people to growing strawberries, and everything will find its level.

It’s like nature. It’s just the economic circle of life.

The problems really only show up when the government decides that someone somewhere needs a fixed wage. Before you know it, some union buys themselves a politician and the talk becomes all about a minimum wage, or a living wage. But when the job is required by law to pay more than X, and only returns an economic value of Y, if X is less than Y there is no way to make money. So companies that can move go to Mexico or China, and those that can’t violate the relatively lax labor laws and hire illegals at an illegally low wage.

The economic circle continues to turn, it just includes people that aren’t effected by the law.

One of the great vanities of government is that you can pass a law on anything. And while that’s true as a tautology, there is nothing compelling people to obey it. So to the rational eye what our very substantial illegal alien problem should be telling us all is that our attempts to regulate wages are pointless and irrelevant.

There are only two ways to get a higher wage – do something no one else can do, or do something no one else wants to do. Politics can’t set a wage anymore than it can set a level for high tide. And at a high enough wage, Americans will absolutely do any job.