'A Simple Observation about Job Creation And The Free Market'

Via Patterico's Pontifications:

When we talk about how many jobs some government official or entity has created, we are missing the point, and falling into the trap of using the other side’s terminology.

In connection with Karl’s point below about regulation: government doesn’t create jobs, except when government actually hires people. Government creates jobs by getting out of the way.
The free market isn’t some crazy abstract libertarian concept. It is what happen when millions of individuals make decisions on their own about what is best to buy and sell. When those decisions are free and unfettered by government intervention, the results of those decisions are determined by the collective wisdom of all those millions of people. When the decisions are handed down by a central authority, the results are determined by a handful of people who think they are smarter than the country as a whole.
I employ this model in blogging. I rely on readers because I don’t believe in the model of blogging where the blogger is like a cult figure, to whom everyone pays obeisance and talks endlessly about how brilliant they are. I believe in the model of blogging where you bring a bunch of smart people together to form a community. No matter how smart any one blogger may be, chances are their audience is, collectively, smarter. That’s because groups of people tend to have more collective brainpower at their disposal than any one person.
The same goes for the economy. When the central Soviet authority decided who was going to grow how many crops where, they didn’t know what the farmers knew. And people starved.
The free market is just free people making decisions for themselves.
So let’s not talk about who created more jobs. Let’s talk about who got out of the way — and let employers create more jobs.