Economics and Job Creation.

One of the ideas that gets horribly misunderstood in economics is that "job creation" is in itself a good thing. We see it all over the place, people saying that the hurricanes in Florida would grow the economy, just think of all the jobs created in the clean up. Govt programmes are a good idea because they "create jobs", politicians crowing about spending money to do so. Green energy advocates (I nearly choked when I saw this one, from a group at Berkeley) stating that because taking the US green would "create" 200,000 jobs, that in itself would be a good thing.
What always gets missed in these sorts of statement is that there is no shortage of jobs at all. There's well more than 6 billion things to do on the planet to make it a better, richer, happier place, more than enough work to do for each and every one of us. So if we artificially create something for someone to do, we are in fact taking them away from doing something else, and as is usually (no, not always but usually) the case the new thing that is subsidised is less productive than what would have been done anyway. That's why we have to subsidise it, of course.
The extreme of this argument can be seen here in the report on Bill Gates' inbox:

The next time you're sifting through the mortgage offers, cheap Rolex watches or dubious business proposals from Nigeria, spare a thought for Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder is the most spammed man in the world, with 4m emails arriving in his inbox each day.....[...]...
Unlike ordinary people though, Mr Gates doesn't get a sore finger from deleting unwanted missives. The company has a team of people dedicated to ensuring he only gets mail that he wants to read.

Now, if you really believe that "job creation" is a good thing, then you must also state that spam is a good thing, as look, it creates jobs!!
Don't want to go down that route? Fine, stop justifying the latest lunacy perpetrated by politicians throwing around our money on the basis that it "creates jobs".