Why Is the Government Publishing Labor Statistics?

President Trump’s choice to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics is sparking tumult over a suggestion that Uncle Sam dispense with monthly employment reports. The White House is walking back the idea, saying its “plan” and “hope” is to keep posting the numbers. Yet the contretemps raises a larger question: Why on earth are bureaucrats in the federal government in the business at all of publishing labor statistics? The brouhaha stems from remarks made by Mr. Trump’s nominee to head the bureau, E.J. Antoni, prior to the president’s choosing him. The idea of ending the monthly jobs report is giving the liberal press the fantods. It would be “enormously disruptive to the Federal Reserve,” Politico reports. Plus, too, it would rile “Wall Street trading firms” and other companies that “depend on accurate and timely economic information,” Politico avers.This outcry, though, suggests that the press, and many in the world of finance, are in effect confusing the cart and the horse when it comes to economic data. There is, after all, already a reliable system of job statistics supplied by the private sector. The data emerge not only monthly but in effect instantaneously via the hiring decisions made every day by private enterprise. This is called the labor market, and the statistics that it provides are known as wages. Our view is that the price of labor, set by the free market, is the best guide to employment in America — and more accurate, to boot, than any statistics provided by federal bureaucrats. Or at least wages were the best guide to the employment picture until the federal government began infringing on the right of contract by setting wage minimums, and taxing incomes, both of which distort the workings of the free market in labor.In the same way, it is redundant for the federal government to track inflation via, say, the consumer price index, when the free market has its own guide: the price of gold. The government’s job was to set in law the definition of the dollar as a fixed weight of gold — about a 20th of an ounce, in the Gold Standard Act of 1900. The discipline of gold convertibility kept inflation low and prices steady. Between 1790 and 1913, inflation averaged but 0.2 percent a year.It’s no accident that the CPI was birthed in 1913, the same year that Democrats in Congress, by creating the Federal Reserve, would set in train the debasement of the dollar to less than a 3,350th of a gold ounce in today’s trading. Two years later, in 1915, monthly jobs data started to be issued by the federales. Yet some of America’s fastest growth — indeed, our rise to industrial dominance — took place in the decades before the advent of federal job reporting. The rise of federal employment data collection since then has been intertwined with increasing efforts to interfere in the economy — and, with the purportedly scientific management of the dollar under the Fed, the decline of honest money. If it’s hard to see the positive results from either of these innovations, never mind whether Mr. Antoni, or Mr. Trump for that matter, shares this free-market philosophy.It would be naive to ignore that today’s scrutiny over the BLS’s job data comes amid Mr. Trump’s gripes about the numbers failing to reflect robust growth. Mr. Antoni’s remarks remind that if Uncle Sam is going to be in the statistics business, by all means ensure that the data are reliable. Better, though, to revert to the system that prevailed before the statistics bureau was formed, and let the employment data be reported by labor’s price.

Why Is the Government Publishing Labor Statistics?

Why Is the Government Publishing Labor Statistics?

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