Politics & Power Quote by Tim Scott

Scott’s line is built like a simple syllogism, but it’s really a values signal aimed at an audience primed to distrust government competence. The move is classic conservative rhetoric: define “good economy” as something that happens only when the state gets out of the way, then treat that definition as an empirical fact. By declaring “the government cannot create jobs,” he isn’t just making a policy claim about multipliers or industrial strategy; he’s drawing a bright moral boundary between “earned” private-sector work and “artificial” public employment.

The Communism comparison is the emotional accelerator. It’s less an economic argument than a cultural shorthand: government job creation becomes synonymous with central planning, stagnation, and coercion. That jump does two things at once. It delegitimizes a wide range of interventions (stimulus spending, public works, green investment, direct hiring) by associating them with a failed ideology, and it narrows the debate to a single acceptable engine of recovery: entrepreneurs.

Context matters: this is the post-financial-crisis, Tea Party-inflected era when “job creators” became a totem and skepticism of Washington was a political identity. The subtext is reassurance to business owners and anti-tax voters that their status is not only economically useful but civically virtuous. “Allow” is the key verb: government’s proper role is permission, not production. It’s a pitch for restraint framed as liberation, with Cold War language doing the heavy lifting.