{"id":21642,"date":"2011-08-10T05:23:10","date_gmt":"2011-08-10T10:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=21642"},"modified":"2011-08-07T12:32:01","modified_gmt":"2011-08-07T17:32:01","slug":"jerbs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=21642","title":{"rendered":"Jerbs"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been one of the left’s counter-tacks both in St. Paul and DC this past few months; they get that knowing, smug little curl in their lips (you can see it even if they’re writing on Twitter or a blog) and that semi-animated look that says both “Ooh, I have a chanting point that is just going to Pwn3<\/em>\u00a0you!” and, almost inevitably, they are about to get rhetorically shredded (although they never know that in advance. \u00a0Never, ever)\u00a0and titter “Oh, yeah, GOP? \u00a0So where are the jerbs?”<\/p>\n

To which one responds “What jobs do you want? \u00a0A bunch of government jobs – perhaps those “shovel-ready” “infrastructure” jobs that The One was yapping about two years ago? \u00a0Which were at best glorified temp jobs designed to buff up union dues collections, and at worst just more money to be spent after being extorted from the private sector or the private sector’s grandchildren, to help the government pick the desired winners and losers?”<\/p>\n

Which generally makes them pause a moment, and repeat “where are the jerbs?”<\/p>\n

“You want jobs…er, “jerbs”? \u00a0Deregulate large swathes of our economy; the energy sector, for starters, if you wanna make the whole western half of this country and the Gulf Coast perform like North Dakota. \u00a0That’d put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work and, more importantly, do something no government “jerb” has ever done; create new weatlh, make a bigger pie for us all to split”.<\/p>\n

The usual response, after a slack-jawed moment or two, is “your ugly”, including the spoken bad punctuation (don’t ask me how, they just do it), but every once in a while you get one who just sits with that vegan deer in the headlights look.<\/p>\n

I take pity on them. \u00a0“Government can create “jerbs” by deregulating industries”.<\/p>\n

“Hah!”, they respond. \u00a0“I told<\/em>\u00a0you government could create jerbs!”<\/p>\n

It’d be a worthwhile trade.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been one of the left’s counter-tacks both in St. Paul and DC this past few months; they get that knowing, smug little curl in their lips (you can see it even if they’re writing on Twitter or a blog) and that semi-animated look that says both “Ooh, I have a chanting point that is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-conservatism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21642"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21643,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21642\/revisions\/21643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}