Harry Reid announced recently that millionaire job creators are “imaginary,” just like the “unicorns” that apparently advise him on economics:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) suggested on Monday that millionaires who create jobs are a mere figment of Republicans’ imaginations.
“Millionaire job creators are like unicorns,” said Reid from the Senate floor. “They are impossible to find and don’t exist.”
Setting aside the possibility that the Senate Majority Leader has consumed a copious amount of recreational hallucinogens, there are some obvious responses that come to mind. The short is that Harry Reid has obviously never heard of Steve Jobs.
But here’s the longer refutation, anyway.
If you listen to his quote, the central piece of evidence cited to sustain the claim that millionaires don’t hire anyone is the failure of government-funded NPR to find a millionaire willing to answer an inquiry for a story. Is anyone surprised? What possible good would it do for a businessman to paint a bright red target on his or her back? Have politicians not already proven the lengths they are willing to go to punish such malcontents?
It’s become entirely clear to the business community that to speak out in this environment is akin to playing a game of whack-a-mole, and they’re the moles. And being the mole, it’s far better to stay down and hope the whacker gets bored, or finds something else – or someone – to beat on.
But the real problem is that Harry Reid’s unicorn economics is pure fantasy. Even if millionaires did not directly create new businesses or hire workers for any reason – they do – Unicorn Harry would still have it wrong. Every investor is, in fact, a jobs creator. Every dollar left alone in the market, unmolested by pompous central planners like Harry Reid, is working to create jobs. The more of those dollars extracted from the productive sector and sent to the unproductive sector of the economy, the fewer dollars available for real, productive jobs.
