The theory has been thoroughly discredited by such simple expedients as setting up hunks of meat with screens around them that keep out flies. Amazingly enough, no maggots appear.
The GOP, though, still loves Spontaneous Generation as an economic cure. People have been on unemployment for too long! Even though there are three times as many job applicants as there are jobs out there, the GOP has decided that if people who still don't have jobs are ever to get jobs, we must bump them off of unemployment insurance (which pays a whopping 40-50% of their previous take-home pay, because everyone loves to lounge around on a 50-60% pay cut), and then, hey presto, through the miracle of Spontaneous Generation, all those people will magically get jobs that don't currently exist!
Or they'll starve. But that decreases the surplus population, which some GOP economist or someone once described as a good thing.
Let me back up to that number. Per the CBPP, based on government numbers (http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3252), there are three times as many unemployed as there are job openings.
'At one point at the beginning of the recovery there were 7 people looking for work for every job opening. That ratio has declined, but remains at a level roughly equal to the highest point reached in the 2001 recession and its aftermath. In September 2013, 11.3 million workers were unemployed but there were only 3.9 million job openings. That is about three unemployed workers for every available position — in other words, even if every available job were filled by an unemployed individual, about two of every three unemployed workers would still be unemployed.'
But we can, of course, magically employ everyone (read: all those malingerers) if we just boot them off of unemployment because, hey, magic!
The Punishment Cure
The Republican response to the unemployed is a mix of callousness and bad economics.