In the New Scientist last year (June 13 , 2011) there was an interview – A field guide to bullshit – with London-based academic philosopher Stephen Law about his book – Believing Bullshit: How not to get sucked into an intellectual black hole. I thought about that when I was reading the documentation relating to the latest con by the British government – its StartUp Loan scheme which will give tiny loans to vulnerable youth to launch businesses into a recessed economy. In fair times, the failure rate of small business is very high. Put inexperienced youth in the frame and it gets higher. Overlay a double-dip recession that will get worse (with perhaps an Olympic blip delaying the decline) over the next 12 months and you have another policy that will do very little to bring the 1 million plus youth unemployed back into productive life. The neo-liberals in the UK are increasingly chanting slogans like “MAKE A JOB DON’T TAKE A JOB” to extol the virtues of people creating their own work as a way of covering up the fact that the Government is deliberately destroying employment prospects (especially for the young). Schemes like the StartUp Loans join a long history of proposals designed to deal with mass unemployment which fail to understand the cause of the problem. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) tells us that mass unemployment arises because the budget deficit is too small given the saving intentions of the non-government sector. Aggregate demand has to rise to reduce unemployment. Providing a pittance to small businesses will not relieve the demand constraint on the labour market. It might redistribute the unemployment but will not do anything to significantly reduce it.