Why any politician who runs on "jobs for the middle class" is blowing smoke

NRO has an interesting piece today. It's an interview by Neal B. Freeman, whose association with National Review goes back to having been personally acquainted with Frank S. Meyer and James Burnham, of Kevin Williamson, who, longtime LITD readers know, is regarded around these parts as one of the most eloquent and principled defenders of our Three Pillars writing today.

In the course of their conversation, they touch on the rank protectionism implicit in Squirrel-Hair's position, such as it is, on international trade. That in turn leads them to a look at what S-H and his Bot minions are attempting to do: Play upon post-Americans' yearnings for some kind of proverbial good old days.

Williamson makes two points that are really of a piece regarding the reality of human work and human advancement's effect on it:

FREEMAN:​ A related question, then. All elections, as they say, are about jobs. Traditionally (by which I mean, self-obsessively, through the span of my own lifetime), one party has been about new jobs, the other about old jobs. That is to say, one party, usually the Republican, promotes policies that it says will create new jobs, while the other, usually the Democratic, promotes policies to protect existing jobs. This year both parties seem committed to saving the old jobs. Has the party of fear routed the party of hope? Is this what a tipping point looks like?

WILLIAMSON:​ Maybe not a tipping point, but an unfortunate period of confluence. The average life of a Fortune 500 company in the early Sixties was about 75 years. Today it’s about 15 years and declining. Even if you have the most sought-after skills in the world and the best career plan ever, it’s nearly impossible today to get out of school and go to work for a company where you’re going to stay for the rest of your working life. Add to that the facts that production lines have shorter lifespans, skills become obsolete more quickly, and markets change more rapidly. There is very little “job security” for anybody.

FREEMAN:​ And that explains the nostalgia for the old jobs?

WILLIAMSON:​ What people miss about those old jobs — at least as they existed in our national mythology — is that they were stable. They paid crap. Go back and look at how expensive ordinary food staples such as butter and sugar were in the Sixties as a share of the typical household income, to say nothing of meals out or travel, and it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that these people were poor, and quite poor, by our standards. But they had — again, the mythology isn’t quite the reality — a measure of stability that is no longer available even to the highly skilled and highly educated, and many of us long for that, intensely. 

The S-H camp is not the first political movement to make that the lens through which it would have voters view the defining issue or their time. Mitt Romney prattled about "jobs for the middle class" in 2012, and there were precedents to his rhetoric.

The fact is, anybody who asks the public to hire him or her to assume a position in government on the basis of being able to "bring good jobs back" is taking a leftist line, even if he or she claims to be a conservative (maybe even a "severe" conservative). Like health care, which is a subcategory of general human endeavor, work only happens when someone somewhere comes up with an idea of providing something of value to his fellow human beings. There is no over-arching entity that can possibly guarantee that there will be something for anyone to do that can earn one a living.

Real conservatism requires faith in human ingenuity. And that's only unleashed when all collectivist constraints upon it are removed.

Conservatism is a real, fleshed-out worldview. "Populism" is a mere hodgepodge, a sentiment, an unfocused insistence that some caped superhero ride in and restore things to some mythical stability.

We'll do a lot less fretting when we think, regarding this matter of work, in the least centralized terms we can. It boils down to the age-old question: What would you like to do, and is there a market for it?