And they’re all scarce resources, including (especially) labor. It is not the case, as Mr. Myerson puts it, that “actual human workers are increasingly surplus to requirement.” (Consider those words for 60 seconds and then tell me again how it’s capitalists who take an instrumentalist view of humanity.) The purpose of labor is not to collect a paycheck and spend it, thereby pumping up aggregate demand. Jobs are a byproduct of the productive process, as Ronald Coase argued in “The Nature of the Firm.” They are not an end in and of themselves, though we mistake them for such, which is perhaps why we have a sometimes distorted view of them. (I know what you are, but what do you do?) We could put the entire population to work in one of those WPA-style make-work programs that so enthrall the likes of Robert Reich (and our friend Conrad Black), but we would soon all be dead of starvation or cholera. The views of my economic-gardening correspondent (and those of Paul Krugman, newspaper columnist, if not Paul Krugman, economist) notwithstanding, money sloshing around from hither to yon does not put a chicken in anybody’s pot. Poultry farmers do that.

Work is not created — work creates.

Every man and woman sitting idle because there is no work to be had — or because idleness literally pays better — is a potential poultry farmer gathering no eggs, somebody who could be growing roses or baking bread or proofreading romance novels. Say’s Law — that we produce in order to consume — is not a mere economic abstraction, and scarcity is not the product of economists’ imagination. They are features of the real world — they are physical facts. Every barrier that politicians put in the way of dealing with scarcity through free exchange and the division of labor — every tax, rule, and regulation — not only separates a worker from a paycheck but, more important, separates a worker from work, from the process of production and experimentation that enables us to, among other things, eat, and live in houses, and read J. K. Rowling books to our children.