9.10 Employment subsidies reinforce disabilities and distort particularly important prices.

1. "The best solution is to subsidize low-skilled and low-paid jobs by paying a bonus to bosses for each full-time hire."

This is what Edmund Phelps, Nobel Prize in Economics 2006, prescribed in order to no longer "exclude the least qualified from employment" as much⁸⁵. The French schemes of "lowering charges" and "employment bonus" are subsidies for the employment of "the least qualified".

2. Employment subsidies reinforce disabilities that are not inherent in the market economy.

• They make the whole hourly wages less comparable and thus the adjustment of their differences by the social body more approximate.
• They act as if the distribution of total income does not tend to maximize total labor income and as if the latter is not subject to another distribution.
• They reduce employers' responsibilities and encourage employers to beg for more direct and indirect subsidies.
• They create thresholds that increase the cost of wage increases.
• They are a last resort in the face of too little job creation due to a lack of savings placed in permanent enterprise financing .
• They make it more difficult to achieve a balanced budget (including public charges, annual repayment of public debts, which are entirely covered by tax revenues).

3. Low wages are particularly important prices.

Low wages, and particularly the hourly minimum wage when it exists, participate, within each national economy, in the calibration not only of higher wages, but also of many other prices. However, this benchmark is all the more approximate as there are many employment subsidies. Conversely, the less approximate this benchmark is, the better collective subjectivity resolves inequalities in labor remuneration with full knowledge of the facts.

4. The best response to job destruction is well-funded investment.

On-the-job training is most effective when its full cost is part of an ongoing investment. Subsidies for post-school training for jobs in enterprises are also a last resort in the face of too little job creation: nothing sufficient can replace the lack of savings placed in permanent enterprise financing. The opening up of new outlets is first and foremost a matter of creativity and fairly wisely calibrated funding, not of pre-existing demand.