Create Jobs or Create Wealth?

This has been going on for years. All that we hear from politicians and their ilk is that we need to create jobs. It seems simple enough. We have high unemployment, so creating more jobs would help that. It sounds innocuous enough, and it is true that more jobs are better than less, but I think that we are focusing on the wrong subject. Yes, jobs are a problem, but what about production?

We could have full employment by paying everyone to dig holes in the ground and then refilling them. However, we would all be poorer in the scenario. Instead of those people eventually finding jobs and doing something productive, they would be creating new wealth and we would be paying them for it!

With investment, we measure success by seeing if we earn more than we put in. Thus, if we put $100,000 into a business, but get only $50,000 in value back, then we consider this a loss. Hiring someone, along these lines, is much like an investment. It is only worthwhile if you get more than you put in. So when we hire people for a freeway project or a rail project, are we getting more money back than we put in? I do not think that this is usually the case (at least we have no way to measure the success of this, so maybe government intrusion here has lead to the absolute failure of rational economic calculation).

So sure, we can create full employment, but we need to make sure that the investment is worthwhile. If not, then this focus on employment is just making us all poorer.