Could there be a labor shortage?

Rhetorically, employers routinely play up the idea of a labor shortage to pray for state intervention to either secure labor at lower prices or other incentives. The central issue move is to deflect blame from their own inability to retain or train workers, toward the workers themselves. Twinned with this deflection is a rhetoric of entitlement to labor, in the fantasy world of an American business owner, there should always be throngs of people waiting to work for next to nothing. Also, they should bring their own tools and train themselves. In our economic melodrama the heroic job creator is thus…