How Many Jobs, Two?

In New Orleans, you can walk down the street with a drink in your hand as long as the container is not glass. Fun, but does it increase jobs?

My suburban town prohibits liquor stores (but not private drinking). Does it reduce jobs? I don’t think so; people just drive a few miles to the town next door. Jobs are reallocated but not prevented. I think a very large number of regulations just move jobs around without limiting them.

By contrast, minimum wage laws or pro-union laws may reduce the amount of labor demanded nationally.

Regulations can change the type of job without reducing the number of jobs. Carmel California has a lot of regulations to create s certain style of urban environment. Do they destroy jobs? Not obvious. Tourists come to Carmel because they want to experience that special type of environment. If Carmel deregulated and become just another tacky and trashy beach town, it might create one set of jobs but destroy another set. On balance, nothing is gained, but something unique would be gone.

I recommend you consult the Tiebot model of competition. We can have “diversity,” including diversity in regulations, and still have jobs.

Let’s say a liquor store in established operation requires 10 people to staff it ensuring cashier and stocker shifts are covered, etc. Now the store in the B.B.’s next town over has 12 people on staff to cover the business that includes that driven over by B.B.’s town policies. A new liquor store in B.B.’s town could be expected to reach the steady state of 10 employees while the older store might lose enough business to drop to 10 employees for a net gain of 8 jobs.

This, of course, doesn’t address future potential. In my city is a knife distributor. The guy started out in the ’70s selling pocket knives out of his lunch box at a munitions factory. Now he has a large warehouse here with lots of employees and some operations in other countries as well as his own line of knives which someone manufactures. Fortunately, there was no law prohibiting the sale of pocket knives from lunch boxes, well at least back in the ’70s.

I often get drawn into watching “Unwrapped” on the Food Network. I’m always amazed at how many companies started in the late 1930s given it was the Depression. Then it hit me, no jobs due to government interference but an easing of the New Deal micromanagement of business. So people needing income were finally able to start selling candy and snacks because the government had loosened its grip spawning several large businesses today.

An example of this is in the story of McKee Bakery, makers of Little Debbie snack cakes and a rather large employer, now.

The McKee story began during the height of the Great Depression when young entrepreneur O.D. McKee began selling 5 cent snack cakes from the back of his car. He was just out of college and newly married, and he was eager to get into the baking business. Soon after, he and his wife, Ruth, bought a small, failing bakery, using the family car as collateral. Money was so tight they had to put up a sheet near the back of the bakery for the family’s living quarters.

Selling homemade cakes out of the back of a car and living in the back of a bakery? Which of these might incur a fine or jail time these days?

Another example is Wisconsin recently enacted the “Pickle Law” to permit the sale of homemade pickles, salsas and jams by unlicensed home canners at farmer’s markets. Might we see a new employer or two sprout from this bit of free enterprise when someone’s recipe catches on so as to surpass the $5000 annual sales limit?

@JKB,
Great story!

Actually it’s illegal to drink on the street in Las Vegas but the law is very rarely enforced. I vacation in WDW and it’s also a weird novelty for me to be able to walk around with a drink there.