There Are Too Many Jobs That Do Not Add Value

 

The Liberal government under Mark Carney's leadership has just unveiled it's first budget, and as expected, the plan is to increase Canada's debt load; again. If you recall all the way back to December of 2024, the final nail in the coffin of Justin Trudeau's tenure as the Prime Minister was the deficit that his government was projecting in his fall fiscal update. Keeping that in mind, the Mark Carney budget is projecting a deficit that is almost twice as much as what was projected at that time. This while we are living in a time of soaring costs of living, and this government, lead by the highly acclaimed elite world banker, is just continuing on the same path of printing money that the previous government did. It just goes to show that a Liberal does not know how to manage a budget or an economy. I really wish people would remember that the economy grows and people get wealthier under a Conservative government, while social services grow and people get poorer under a Liberal government. This is why we fluctuate between the two parties so much in our elections. Times get good under the Conservatives, but people want more government oversight of their lives and get tired of the decisions of a responsible government, so they elect the Liberals; then times get hard and people are sick of the tax burden that Liberals impose in order to support their bigger government and expanded social services, and they elect a Conservative government. And back and forth we go.

But however you look at things, our economy is in trouble and it has been for a number of years already. This is due to Liberal overspending since 2015. Justin Trudeau promised small deficits for four years and then a balanced budget. That balanced budget never materialized because economies do not grow "from the heart out", as Trudeau stated was his "plan" for economic growth. In Trudeau's tenure as Prime Minister, he increased the national debt more than all the previous Prime Ministers; combined! And now we are stuck with another Liberal Prime Minister who seems to have the same idea of using government spending (our money, not theirs) to spend ourselves into prosperity. Have you ever tried that with your own finances? If you are strapped for cash, does it work for you to spend money you don't have in order to get wealthier? It doesn't work, either for personal finances or for national finances. Yet the Liberals try this again and again, and those who vote for them fall for this again and again.

The reason that the Liberals have gotten away with this is two fold. First, they have been able to claim that the financial rating of the country is still solid when one looks at the assets to debt ratio, but they have managed this by adding the Canada Pension Plan funds to the government assets list when the government does not own that money; the citizens of Canada do. This is not a national asset, and removing it from the assets list suddenly plunges Canada's asset to debt ratio into frightening territory.

The second reason that the Liberals have gotten away with their financial mismanagement is that they have been able to claim that the debt load as a measure of how much each Canadian owes is manageable. The way that they have achieved this is to open the flood gates of immigration and to count every person that enters the country, even if they have done so illegally, as a Canadian. By increasing the number of people in the country, they are "decreasing" the national debt load of each Canadian. The problem is that a significant number of the immigrants that have come to this country in the last decade are not contributing to the tax system, but instead have been a burden to the social welfare systems of the country. The Liberals are masters of financial manipulation in order to hide their incompetence, and this current budget is just another example of this, particularly with the sleight of hand that Carney is using to separate the operating expenses from the "investment" side of the budget. Those who are paying attention know that Carney has moved certain operating expenses into the investment column in order to make it look like the operations budget will be balanced in a few years. It won't be; it will only appear that way while our debt continues to sky rocket.

All of that is to introduce the fact that our GDP has plummeted in the last couple of decades. This is not only the fault of the Liberals; the Conservatives have been in power over that time frame as well. This has really come to my attention as I have been in the job market for the last couple of months.

 In my last article, I included the following statement; "The point is that there is a huge portion of society whose productivity is focused on things that are of no value, in order to entertain or "inform" or "support" people, which only serves to reduce the productivity of those who would otherwise actually produce necessary goods and services." I wrote that sentence in the context of the information overload that people are facing right now, and in particular it was aimed at the ungainly beast that is the CBC. But there is more to that thought than bloated production costs of a government funded propaganda firm.

As I have been looking at job opportunities, I have realized that there are many positions that can fall under my own areas of experience that are purely administration positions and they add nothing to the economy. There is no product produced by the efforts of those who are in those positions, and not even a real service is provided. The position exists simply to fulfill a requirement that exists due to regulation.

One particular example of this is the Workplace Safety Officer. This is a role that I had to fill as an aside to my main position when I was employed as a Jobsite Supervisor for a general contractor. As I was going about my duties to ensure that production continued and questions were answered and issues were addressed, I was also looking out for hazards on the jobsite and I had to chair safety meetings on occasion as well. Now, that same company has a full-time Safety Officer to do what I accomplished in literally less than three hours a week along with the one other Jobsite Supervisor who did the same thing on his sites.

I am not saying that a safe workplace is not of value. Nobody wants to see someone loose life or limb in the course of their work, but the regulations have become so gargantuan that nearly every company now has to employ someone whose job it is to make sure that people don't get injured or killed on the job. This used to happen organically when I was younger by people being responsible for their own safety, and quite frankly, those who were too dumb to look out for themselves were simply removed from the jobsite through unfortunate means. We used to have a saying when I was growing up; "Survival of the fittest". That seems to have been replaced by "Even the weakest must survive". This is how species become weakened, and the human race is severely weakened right now.

This is simply one example of people who are getting paid to do a job that produces nothing of value. While money changes hands from the employer to the employee, the employer gains virtually nothing from the transaction. This employee is simply a drain on the resources of the company. So does a company simply absorb this drain on it's profits? Absolutely not. The profits are what keep a company successful and growing. No, the cost has to be recouped, and that is done by increasing the price to the consumer for the product or service that the company provides. We all pay for this.

Now imagine this for virtually every company that you deal with in at least one area of that company's organization, but likely in other areas as well. And now compound this with those who receive remuneration for creating products that add virtually nothing to the economy. For example, podcasts and videos that we find online. They provide entertainment, or maybe they inform us or educate us about something, but unless you are subscribing to get behind a paywall, the revenues that are generated by this content are derived from advertisements that the listener or viewer is subjected to; many of which go ignored or skipped whenever possible. This type of labour doesn't invite investment to the country. This does not fuel the growth of the nation. While a few people are making money doing it, it provides almost no value to the national economy as a whole.

We are witnessing the financial collapse of the western world because it's citizens produce nothing of value anymore, while the developing world is growing it's manufacturing base and is reaping the benefits of taking over the production of products that the world actually wants and, more importantly, needs. China, Taiwan, the Philippines, India and Indonesia have picked up the dropped mantle of manufacturing that built the western world to what it is today while we spend our money paying for employees that produce nothing and products that offer only short term entertainment. What is more, the products that are coming from these countries are made cheaply so that the fat westerners will be able to buy more of them. The production no longer exists to fill a need, but to fill a want. We expend energy and materials into things that will just end up in the landfills in a few months having added little value to our lives along the way. And we wonder why everything is getting more expensive all the time.

Over regulation is driving up our cost of living by forcing us to pay the wages of people who produce nothing. I will admit that I have applied for more than one safety officer position, but I have done so with a bitter taste in my mouth, having realized that this is a useless position that only drives up the price of the end product and accomplishes little else. Having come to this realization, I have been finding myself looking for employment that actually produces something of value, however I realize that my small act of protest in my search for personal productivity will make no difference in the world of corporate responsibility and government oversight. I can only hope to find employment that fulfills a need for myself and for others and which adds value to the economy. After all, the government keeps adding to my debt load against my will as they burn through money that is not theirs.