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In the past, I took aim at the concept of “job creators.” This term has been manipulated and contorted into a Fox News slogan for reverse classism — pitying the 1 percent because they are somehow being threatened. Well finally, someone at CNBC — Jim Cramer, no less — is critiquing the great myth of the American job creator class. Go Jim!
What’s your take, can private equity firms like Carlyle and Blackstone create jobs? Why or why not?
For too long, big businesses and media conglomerates have propagated messages that suggest that only wealthy individuals can be graced with that moniker: “job creators.” The time has come to reappropriate and annex this title from the privileged minority.
News outlets are masterminds at twisting words to fit this greater script. Their training must be incredible, because they’re naturals at it. The trite, overused, and vapid phrases support a message that “wealthy people create jobs.”
The wealthiest elite stole the term, job creators. Instead of saying “rich,” “wealthy,” or “top one-percent,” the term puts a positive, flattering spin to scary inequality. What could possibly be wrong with job creators? Why would we want to discourage job creation? We need to help these job creators do their job — create jobs! (You can find beautiful examples of this media manipulation on Fox.)
This widely circulated logical fallacy has long been hurting the masses. Billionaires are often seen as the lubricant for our great American society. The dream that we are born into is promoted by their unique skill set, intellect, and economic wherewithal. Where would we be as a country, people, and world without the wealthiest people creating jobs? What would the world look like if we just removed the economic power that is trapped within the economic elite — our infamous one-percenters?
Let’s clear up this myth real quick. Below, I have ten (off the top of my head) of the greatest entrepreneurs of the last few decades. None of them were billionaires or part of the wealthy elite prior to creating thousands of jobs.
There’s no doubt that we’ve benefited as a world and country from these entrepreneurs. But to suggest that their billionaire status created jobs would be naive and dangerous. They created jobs through grit, timing, and intellect, but it came before the money.
Jobs was tripping on LSD and going through spiritual journeys, and then segued to the computer industry.
“[Steve Jobs] never finished college, dropping out after 18 months to take random, creative classes (such as that calligraphy, which he said is one of the main reasons why the graphics look so great on Apple devices). He was dropping in on these classes and just grabbing as much knowledge as possible without actually getting a grade in them. During the course of that he slept on the floor of friends’ dorm rooms, returning Coke bottles for food money, and getting weekly free meals at the local temple. (Source)”
He wasn’t wealthy, just a hippie looking to find salvation in the next great technology.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin were mere graduate students at Stanford University when their lives were forever changed. They weren’t rich, just motivated entrepreneurs.
We have entered a centralized, monopolized, anti-trust-ridden epoch where only a select few companies, organizations, and people control the dialogue. Fox News shouldn’t be able to manipulate the American people into thinking that wealthy people are job creators. And the short answer: they’re not.
Today, we must reclaim the title of “job creators” to their rightful owners: consumers and small business entrepreneurs. Every time we choose to search through Google, check/update our Facebook status, click and clack over our Apple keyboards, and slip on that Under Armour for a run, we are making an active, consumer-based choice. We are supporting jobs for that company and industry. That purchase and usage is our choice; ultimately, we create and support those jobs through this spending.
Trickle-down economics doesn’t work, and neither does trickle-down job creation. Let’s get our title back.
