> I do not believe investment creates jobs, I believe increased consumption and protective economic policy create jobs.
You are entitled to your beliefs, but factually you are completely wrong. Without investment, you have no goods to consume. A bicycle consists of many parts. You can’t buy a bicycle without someone willing to mine the metals necessary to make those parts. You can’t mine metals without money to hire people and buy equipment to extract and process those ores. Since people don’t work on contingency, it requires an investment in order to pay people and buy stuff to extract the ores and then someone has to buy the resulting metal and create the tooling to create bicycle parts — which requires capital.
Let’s say government can do all of that — where does government get the money? Taxes. Where do taxes come from? They come from taking a share of people’s production. If people aren’t producing anything, they have nothing to tax.
I suppose investment doesn’t create jobs if you have a society of pure slavery.
Protective economic policy doesn’t create jobs — it stifles them. North Korea isn’t known for its booming economy (or full employment) because they don’t have much outside investment.
Investment absolutely creates jobs because there is one human truth that can’t be escaped — people need to eat and thus they need to be paid. Getting by paid comes from capital and capital comes from investment.
Almost the entirety of Silicon Valley was built on investment. And that creates millions of jobs around the world. Apple alone employs hundreds of thousands in China — jobs that would not exist without investment. Don’t believe me? Have a look at the Chinese poverty and unemployment rates in 1970 long before they began opening up to outside investment.
I get it that’s many people seem to dream of a socialist utopia — however that is a fantasy. It doesn’t exist and it never has because people are fundamentally driven by their need to eat.