The politician's version of economics is inclined to view "jobs" as something to be "created" - things, like munitions in wartime, the economic model to which the politician is irresistibly drawn. Compared with the economy of everyday life, a war economy is a wondrously simple thing. The complexity of competing wants, of which economics is the study, is reduced to a single overriding purpose: making weapons. If not enough weapons are being made, it is merely a matter of getting better managers, with brighter ideas.

Managing is something politicians understand: It is why they go into public life. Some of them are pretty good at it. And all of them tend to see the economy as something to be managed - like an army, or a team, if you prefer peacetime analogies - its results measurable on an unambiguous scale. If, then, more "jobs" are required, the answer is as always: better management and brighter ideas, the kind that a cabinet committee might drum up in a few weeks.

Or if brighter ideas are not to be found, there's always the old standby: more money. For if the economy's sole task is to "create jobs," then any step that might lead to a measured increase in "jobs" is to be desired. Hence our long experience with regional development, infrastructure programs and the like. Indeed, judging by the eager grunts to be heard of late from Art Eggleton, the infrastructure minister, the chief purpose of the "jobs" committee seems to be to justify the introduction of a sequel to the original $6-billion roads-and-bridges plan with which the Liberals bought the last election: Porky II.

Now, the problem with these sorts of plans, and this way of thinking about the economy, is not the paltry numbers of jobs that, even on their own reckoning, they actually create: In the wildest fantasies of Liberal campaign literature, the infrastructure plan was to create only 60,000 jobs, at a cost of $100,000 a job. Nor is it that, as the Auditor-General has lately reminded us, such claims usually emerge from thin air. Although the Western Economic Diversification program, for example, boasts of creating 42,000 jobs since 1988, the Auditor-General notes that "the department has no assurance that the 42,000 jobs projected at the time of proposal actually materialized."

A more fundamental objection is that these are, always and everywhere, gross estimates of job creation, not net. They count only the jobs created by the allocation of public funds. They do not count the jobs destroyed. For just as surely as a subsidy creates jobs at one firm, it destroys them at others: The sales and investment diverted toward the lucky subsidy recipient are sales and investment denied to its competitors, while the higher taxes and/or higher interest rates needed to finance the subsidy destroy jobs in unseen ways across the economy.

More fundamentally still, to think of employment policy in this way is to misstate what a job is. A job is not a thing. It is a relationship - a contract between an employer and an employee. If not everyone who wants to work can find paid employment, it is not for lack of things to do - the demand deficiency thesis - not, at any rate, after four years of recovery. It is rather that there exist a range of impediments to willing buyers and willing sellers striking mutually agreeable contracts in the market for labour.

These impediments are not terribly unfamiliar, and they do not need a cabinet committee to investigate. They are the subject of an entire field of economic literature. Indeed, one of the more significant impediments, the peculiar present design of the unemployment insurance system, is shortly to be addressed by a senior minister within the same cabinet, Lloyd Axworthy. That he will very likely fail to present serious proposals for reform points to the real problem for employment policy: not a shortage of bright ideas, but the political interests that usually manage to block any attempt to liberalize labour markets.

The sad fact is that many of the things that make life easier and more pleasant for those who already have jobs - mandated employer benefits, minimum wage laws, union premiums and the like - are the same things that make it harder for those without jobs to persuade employers to hire them. If the cabinet "jobs" committee can solve that riddle by Christmas, it will have earned its appointment.