From my article “ObamaCare–The Way of the Dodo” in Virtual Mentor, a journal of the American Medical Association:

The CBO projects the law will eliminate an estimated 800,000 jobs. The fashionable retort is to note that this effect “primarily comes from workers who choose not to work because they no longer have to work at jobs just for the health insurance.” That defense fails for two reasons. First, a “job” is when Smith and Jones exchange labor for money. It doesn’t matter whether Jones withdraws the money or Smith withdraws the labor. Either act eliminates a job. Second, it’s an odd defense of a law to say it encourages people to consume without producing.

Emphasis added; citations embedded as hyperlinks.


Put differently: why should we care only about someone not getting a paycheck and not at all about a job left undone?


Update: When he’s talking about something other than ObamaCare, President Obama himself acknowledges that suppressing the labor supply is as harmful as suppressing demand. Obama laments how government policies “cost[] us hundreds of billions of dollars in wages that will not be earned, jobs that will not be done, and purchases that will not be made.”