To Democrats, the Economy Is Just One Massive Jobs Program

To Democrats, the United States economy is nothing more than a massive jobs program, not an engine of global innovation, productivity, or economic freedom.

Just this June, the governor of Rhode Island signed the Restrictions on Self-Service Checkout Stations Act, the first legislation of its kind in the country, requiring one staffed checkout lane for every three self-checkout kiosks and barring employees monitoring those kiosks from performing any other task at the same time.

Rhode Island has become the first U.S. state to force grocery stores to keep a 1:3 ratio of cashiers to self-checkouts.

Failure to comply can result in fines of up to $500 per day.

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The law is worth examining closely, not just because of what it reveals about how the modern left views economic activity, but because the same instinct shows up everywhere, in upcoming fights over artificial intelligence, in arguments over manufacturing, in teachers' unions and public education, in nearly every corner of the economy where "protecting jobs" has quietly become a bigger priority than actually growing them.

The law, and others like it, is reminiscent of the "Lesson of the Spoons," a story told about the world-renowned free-market economist Milton Friedman.

It is said that Friedman was once visiting China, where he was surprised to see that instead of modern tractors, thousands of workers were digging a canal by hand with shovels. He asked his host, a government bureaucrat, why more machines weren't being used. The bureaucrat replied, "You don't understand. This is a jobs program." To which Friedman responded, "Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, you should give these workers spoons, not shovels!"

Take artificial intelligence. Progressive lawmakers in multiple states have pushed bills to slow or restrict AI deployment specifically to preserve existing jobs. California and New York have both introduced legislation aimed at studying or limiting AI-driven job displacement before the technology is even close to displacing anyone at scale.

The assumption baked into all of it is the same one behind the Rhode Island checkout law: that the number of jobs in the economy today is roughly the number that should still exist tomorrow, and that any technology threatening that number is a problem.

The same instinct shows up in the fight over automation in manufacturing and in warehouses. The International Longshoremen's Association, for example, spent much of the last two years fighting to block automated cargo-handling equipment at East Coast ports, eventually winning contract language limiting how much new automation ports could install, not because the equipment was unsafe or ineffective, but because it did the job with fewer people.

Amazon has faced similar pressure over warehouse robotics, with lawmakers in several states introducing "technology displacement" bills aimed squarely at slowing automation in fulfillment centers.

In every one of these fights, the logic is identical to the bureaucrat standing over Friedman's canal: more machines mean fewer jobs, so machines are the enemy. What none of these efforts ever seriously reckon with is the other half of the equation, the jobs, the industries, and the entire technologies that automation itself has historically gone on to create.

There are two ways an economy can generate solutions to its problems: through the free market, discovering uses for labor and capital nobody had yet imagined, or through protectionism, freezing today's arrangement in place by force of law.

One of these approaches has an extraordinary track record. The other has mostly produced canals dug with spoons.

None of this is socialism, not yet. But every time a politician decides government, not the market, should determine which jobs are allowed to exist, they aren't opposing the socialist instinct; they're conceding its underlying ideology.

The lesson of the spoons was never really about spoons. It was a warning about what happens when a country stops trusting the market and starts trusting a bureaucrat instead. A warning that applies just as much to Rhode Island grocery stores as it does to broader industry across the United States.

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