Ideas on Liberty

BY DEAN RUSSELL

THE IDEA that “government should provide a job for any person who wants to work, and can’t find employment” became a permanent part of the American economic philosophy during the terrible depression of the 1930s. Over the years, that idea has developed from “a job of any kind, however undesirable and low-paying” into the idea of “a meaningful job at an acceptable rate of pay.”

But as is always the case when our government interferes in the market place, there are unforeseen “neighborhood effects.” And as often as not, these unanticipated consequences are destructive of the very persons the programs were designed to help. The Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA, a program to help disadvantaged people get jobs) is an excellent example of these government programs in action.

When CETA was proudly launched in 1975, it was announced as a program to bring order to the sprawling field of government job-training activities that had cost us taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars over the past 25 years. I suppose our congressmen were getting tired of being reminded that unemployment was increasing (not decreasing) as these government make-work projects continued to expand and grow.

From 1975 to 1982 (the first eight years of CETA), the government agency “spent over $60 billion. . . . but the unemployment rate is higher now than when it started.” (Policy Review, Spring, 1983) The unemployment rate climbed steadily, even though “Local governments began openly subsidizing payrolls with CETA money to the point where 15–25-30 percent and more of their employees are now drawing Federal paychecks. . . . David Meiselman notes in a penetrating study of public-sector jobs, ‘more unemployment results as workers wait longer and search longer for preferred public-sector jobs rather than take private-sector jobs.’” (The Reader’s Digest, August 1978)

But the unforgivable result of that program is this: “CETA has become . . . a fraud . . . on the disadvantaged people whose hopes for lasting, useful employment it has falsely raised.” (Digest, above.)

We’re all now pretty well inured to the wasting of billions of tax dollars by the government; it’s so commonplace it’s just not news anymore. But to raise the expectations (and then destroy the hopes) of human beings is just not nice.

Here’s how I personally got involved in what turned out to be the “wasting” of one more human being through CETA and its claim to help people who are “educationally handicapped.” Apparently that’s a euphemism to identify those who can’t get jobs because they have no job skills; so why not use the taxpayers’ money to train them so they can get and keep jobs? Sounds logical enough, and even charitable. And no one can seriously argue with the idea that it’s more expensive to pay persons to stay on welfare forever than it is to pay for a program to train them to perform useful jobs. So (presuming that the government is going to do one or the other), the CETA approach appears to be more logical than most social programs by government.

My university agreed to participate in the CETA program. My department was asked to provide a job for one CETA employee, who had already been trained as a typist/filing clerk in another government program. We were told that the hiring of this employee would cost us nothing. I was appointed to “look into it” and to make a recommendation to my fellow professors.

I discovered that, while we had no budget for an additional typist/filing clerk, most of us professors were more than willing to have a private typist instead of sharing the three in the departmental “pool.” So there was no problem in finding a place for her. In fact, the competition for her services became so keen that we soon decided just to add her to the pool, where her services would be available to all.

Then I discovered that the Federal salary guarantee was for one year only. After that, we were supposed to fit her into our regular budget. But that was already set for the next two years. So at the end of the year, our choices would be to “let her go,” or keep her and fire one of the three regular civil-service-protected typists (fat chance), or to allocate a large chunk of our “travel money” to pay her salary (also, fat chance), or to cut our budget for office supplies, and so on. No one was willing to make the needed sacrifice to pay for the unneeded job we were creating. So I finally recommended that we decline the Federal offer of a free typist.

I was overruled; my colleagues were simply appalled at my heartlessness. “After all, she needs the job.” So the young lady came aboard. She could type but not well. She could file, but only under supervision. She was indeed “educationally handicapped” and truly needed help, which we all gave her as best we could.

The end of the year came. Since there was no money to pay her, it seemed she’d lose her job. But as I had anticipated all along, that proved to be awkward if not impossible. She liked her job “working with the fine people at the university.” And after all, “You did hire me, you know.” Expectations.

We eventually found the money in one of the administrative budgets to pay her for another year; after that, we hoped to work her job into our regular budget. The “recession” of the early 1980s appeared. Not only did we get no increase in our budget, but it was actually cut by three percent. There wasn’t even a raise for us professors. (Now that just won’t do, not at all.)

Thus the CETA typist had to be fired. I believe the preferred academic euphemism is, “Her contract was non-renewed.” Whichever, she lost her job.

There were tears, of course. But that wasn’t nearly as shattering as her look of total incomprehension. I felt terrible. We had led her to believe she had a real job when it was only a make-work job. She was bitter, as she had every right to be. The learned explanations made to her by my learned colleagues were not helpful. In fact, I suspect I was the only person who really listened to them. I just wanted to see if they, themselves, had any comprehension of what had happened, and especially why. In essence, most of them merely said, “The government should do something about this sad case.”

I didn’t bother to tell them it was the government (egged on by us do-gooders who were sincerely trying to help) that had created this disastrous situation that was about to destroy another human being. If I were to try to tell them, I’d only get looks of incomprehension—plus puzzled stares at a “cold-hearted colleague who would let people lose their jobs and starve.”

Dr. Russell is a writer and retired college professor. He was a member of the FEE staff during the 1950s.