Dear Reader,
The United States Department of Labor issued January’s unemployment data Friday last.
A Dow Jones survey of economists divined that January would produce 169,000 fresh nonfarm payrolls.
The true figure came in at 143,000.
I am certain that even that “miss” will endure downward revision in subsequent months.
They nearly always do.
The latest revisions revealed some 600,000 phantom jobs in 2024.
The United States government reported them. Yet they did not exist.
CNBC:
- The revisions, which the BLS does each year, reduced the jobs count by 589,000 in the 12 months through March 2024. A preliminary adjustment back in August 2024 had indicated 818,000 fewer jobs.
Anti-Jobs
What is more, many of these jobs have been government-related jobs. That is, many of these jobs have been anti-jobs.
That is because government jobs are not economically productive. They are economically parasitic.
Meantime, manufacturing jobs — authentic jobs — have been lost.
Economist E.J. Antoni:
- Two-thirds of all jobs added in Biden’s last year were directly or indirectly funded by taxpayer dollars while manufacturing fell almost 100k –- completely unsustainable.
Completely unsustainable indeed.
Why Have Experts at All?
Thus my bottomless disfaith in experts is validated yet again.
And so I wonder: Why have experts at all?
Would you trust the weatherman who had forecast a roasting 103 degrees… when the next day’s temperature came in at 48?
Would you trust the stockjobber who told you Stock X would scale $103 when Stock X plunged to $48?
Why then should you trust a mob of wiseacres who overcount jobs by 589,000 — or 818,000?
To ask the question is to answer the question.
Have They No Shame?
Where is their amour propre, their self-respect as a professional body?
Decent men might scurry off, gushing apologies and pledging to flee the forecasting business forevermore.
But these same men will return next month with February’s divination. Most likely, with an identical accuracy.
As they will in March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January, February — and March again.
Might these wrong-way Charlies occasionally strike bull’s-eye? They may, on very rare occasion, yes. Yet I would remind you:
Even the inert grandfather clock gives accurate time every 12 hours.
Have Pity on These Poor Economists
Yet I must confess to a certain sympathy for these economists.
They are experts, men of dignity, a sort of secular clergy. The world hangs upon their guesswork.
They are under considerable pressure to strike the target.
And so they approach their prognostications with high solemnity. They take them heavily.
When they botch the job — which is nearly always — they are in for a terrible razzing.
The Evening Vanguard carries no such burden upon its slender, rather hunched shoulders.
That is because we enjoy the luxury of… ignorance.
Mr. Milton Friedman once claimed he could “give you a number or a date, but not both.”
But your correspondent is rather more modest — he can give you neither.
Nor does he try.
The Luxury of Ignorance
I do not claim to know next month’s unemployment rate. No one requests it of me anyway. And who would listen?
As well consult a bowling champion, a bartender, a justice of the Supreme Court.
Indeed — as well consult an economist.
Nor do I pretend to know this year’s GDP… or how the Dow Jones will trade on March 12, 2025… or on Feb. 12, 2025.
Yes, I pull noses and bite ankles. Yes, I point my finger and put out my tongue. Yes, I laugh.
That is because I face no consequence for my own botched soothsaying.
I enjoy the exorbitant luxury of ignorance.
The Damndest of All Damnable Lies
The unemployment rate is but a statistic. And statistics are the damndest of all damnable lies.
Imagine a nation divided equally between 11-foot giants and 3-foot dwarfs.
Does the average citizen stand 7 feet in height?
Half the population is black, half the population is white. Is the average citizen… gray?
Half are male, half are female. Is the average citizen hermaphroditic?
Here is my central tort against statistics:
Statistics are the bureaucrat’s sharpest weapon…
The Government’s Goons
It is the government statistician who collects, sorts, analyzes, worries, tortures and weaponizes economic data.
The mangled data is then conscripted into the service of government Policy X… or government Policy Y.
That is, the statistician is the government’s roughneck, its henchman — its goon.
Without his statistics the government is a plodding doofus.
It is a blinded, fumbling cyclops speared through its one and only eye.
Yet this graspless, senseless, sightless beast… in fact… presents a reduced menace than a sighted one.
More Statistics, Less Liberty
Explains the late economist Murray Rothbard:
- Certainly, only by statistics can the federal government make even a fitful attempt to plan, regulate, control or reform various industries — or impose central planning… on the entire economic system.
- If the government received no railroad statistics, for example, how in the world could it even start to regulate railroad rates, finances and other affairs? How could the government impose price controls if it didn’t even know what goods have been sold on the market, and what prices were prevailing?
Statistics form the very “eyes and ears” of government:
- Statistics… are the eyes and ears of the interventionists: of the intellectual reformer, the politician and the government bureaucrat. Cut off those eyes and ears, destroy those crucial guidelines to knowledge, and the whole threat of government intervention is almost completely eliminated.
That is, absent statistics the government could not “govern” us as it would.
Government tracks statistics as the train robber tracks railroad schedules. And for much the same purpose.
Goodbye to the Bill of Rights
I trust government statistics no further than I trust a dog with my dinner… or a politician with my vote.
And the fellow who manufactures them is often a scoundrel, a traitor to truth, a menace to American peace and happiness.
He would tell you twice two is five — if his bosses wished you to believe twice two is five.
“The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head,” said the irreplaceable Mencken, adding:
“Put it in his hand and it’s goodbye to the Bill of Rights.”
Statistics show him where to aim his gun.
I say strip the gun entirely from his hands.
Regards,
Brian Maher
for Freedom Financial News
