First-Rate Economic Analysis in a Political Cartoon

I woke up this morning in Albania, after a string of speeches for the Free Market Road Show. One of my topics was the terrible jobs outlook for young people.

I sought to give audiences some basic understanding of economics, most notably telling them that businesses won’t create jobs unless the total revenue generated by workers is greater than the total cost of employing those workers.

But I also explained that people don’t have much incentive to find jobs unless they can enjoy better lives while working than they can enjoy while not working. In other words, they may not bother accepting jobs if there’s no significant increase in their living standards.

In other words, you can’t give people lots of handouts and then expect them to be aggressive job seekers.

I should have shared this Robert Gorrell cartoon. It makes the point in a much simpler fashion.

This cartoon is quite similar to this Chuck Asay gem, and also has the same theme as this excellent Wizard of Id parody (which tied for 5th-place in the political cartoonist contest).

I did share these two amazing charts (here and here), so the audiences did get some powerful data showing that the welfare state is dramatically undermining incentives to provide labor to the market.

P.S. At least one honest liberal has recognized the danger of government-created dependency.