Governments routinely buy jobs: bailouts, privatizations and merger approvals all come with employment pledges attached. Combining contractual data on more than 18,000 employment commitments covering over 900,000 workers from the East German privatization with a dynamic general equilibrium model of firm growth, we show that mandated employment targets do lower unemployment in the short run, but by distorting where labor goes and dulling firms' incentives to invest, they slow productivity growth and erode those welfare gains entirely over time.