Brother, can you spare a job?

So what do you want to do for a living when you grow up?

Or is that if you grow up?

Or is that if you can make a living?

And how many people can't make a living these days?

Two obvious clues:

--1) September's U.S. unemployment rate was 9.8 percent, the highest in more than a quarter century.

--2) September's S.C. unemployment rate was 11.6 percent.

A prominent person recently mused that far too many quite intelligent Americans are making their livings -- or is that trying to make their livings? -- as attorneys. His case against that practice:

"I mean lawyers, after all, don't produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That's important, but it doesn't put food on the table, and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise."

He cited the example of a "public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know." He asked, "Why isn't she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?"

That question, you know, wasn't posed by a business tycoon, brain surgeon or rocket scientist.

It was posed by a Harvard Law School graduate -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia -- during C-SPAN's "Supreme Court Week" early this month.

Two obvious answers:

--1) That public defender isn't out inventing the automobile because it was invented more than a century ago.

--2) Serving as a public defender, even in Podunk, is "doing something productive for this society."

Yet Scalia has a pertinent lawyer-glut point. According to the American Bar Association Web site, our nation had more than 1.18 million lawyers as of the end of last year -- more than 9,000 of them in South Carolina.

Our nation and state also have significant surpluses of artists, including poets, dancers, musicians, singers, stand-up comics, sculptors, painters, novelists and philosophers. Some of those folks are lucky and/or gifted enough to make some money at those enviable enterprises.

A few elite talents even ascend to the heady heights of editorial-writerdom.

However, while it's understandable that creative toil is popular in this land of the free thinkers, we're running ever shorter of not just jobs but people capable of performing many practical, indispensable tasks.

If -- or is that when? -- Congress passes "health insurance reform," where will we find enough physicians, nurses and medical technicians to provide that "free" and "universal" care?

Where we will find enough people still making enough of a living to pay for it?

Good news: The economic recovery has begun.

Bad news: It's a "jobless recovery."

The adjective in that oxymoronic title induces intensifying fret across the age range over how to pay past, current and future bills.

That includes college students building up major debt to keep up with steep tuition hikes.

That includes non-students taking on heavier work loads to keep their jobs.

And as hard times force hard looks at how to make ends meet, our high balance-sheet anxiety extends beyond individual financial obligations to the colossal -- and rapidly growing -- collective national debt.

The pursuit of self-fulfillment through the acquisition of an uplifting avocation is increasingly being pushed into the dream-world ditch by the real-world pursuit of self-support through the acquisition of filthy lucre.

So whether you are, are not yet or will never grow up, that chilling question persists:

Can you make a living?

Frank Wooten is assistant editor of The Post and Courier. His e-mail is wooten@postandcourier.com.