So, we just discussed the "Job Creator Network" and how they basically tanked student loan forgiveness, but can we just talk about how dystopian this term actually is? "Job Creator". The term originated during the 2012 election cycle when I went full leftie to my knowledge, and it was swung around a lot by the GOP back then, often to poor effect.
You see, back then, the big debate we were having was over extended unemployment benefits. The democrats wanted to expand those benefits because even several years later, unemployment was STILL insanely high, while the republicans were claiming we needed to get people off of unemployment and into work, advocating for cutting unemployment benefits, and giving tax cuts to the rich, on the basis that the rich were "job creators." That was the term they used.
Essentially, this is where trickle down economics really started to fall apart for me. The republican idea since the 1980s had always been that if you gave the rich tax breaks, they'll turn around and create jobs, leading to more prosperity. And it seemed to make sense...at the time, if you didn't have a fundamental sense of how macroeconomics works (which most people don't). The argument was that these poor millionaires and billionaires and small business owners ("won't someone PLEASE think of the small businesses!" /s) can't create jobs because we're in the middle of a recession and we need to lower taxes on them so that they create more jobs, and that this would kickstart the economy.
Reality was a bit more....murky though. While this argument might have had a point in 2009 or so, when the country was still REELING from the initial effects of the recession, by 2011-2012, it was a different story. Corporations were making record profits. Yet, unemployment was still high. My dad got laid off in 2011. He never had been laid off in his life before 2008, but starting when the bottom fell out, unemployment started being a yearly occurrence. He was let go every year in the late winter/early spring when the business he was involved in slumped, and then brought back in late spring or so. So the news would come in around late January/early February, oh, hey, you're being let go, and then they were brought back in late April/early May when business picked up again. Except, in 2011, things went a little differently. Everyone was brought into the office, and the business started going on saying "oh hey, we made record profits this year? Thank you for contributing to the company! Unfortunately to keep our record profits, we gotta lay you off." And that was that. He was laid off. And then in April, half way through what would be a normal 6 month limit of unemployment, he was told he wasn't coming back. It took him a LITERAL YEAR to find a job, going well into Obama's unemployment expansions, and ended up taking a job in another field for lower pay just to get SOMETHING.
Let's dissect this. These businesses, they hire you, and then you do work for them. And they squeeze as much as they can from you, and then when they're done, they dump you. You're expected to go above and beyond for them, but then they just...get rid of you when they're done. And the people in 2012, well, they weren't having it about "job creators" and record profits. The illusion of trickle down economics was exposed for the farce it was. If we gave rich people tax cuts at the expense of unemployment, what would have happened was the rich would've gotten even richer, and the poor poorer. People on unemployment would've been kicked off of unemployment, and the rich's profits would've gone up even more.
The recession really scarred me politically. I graduated grad school around the time all of this was going on, and my experiences with this job market weren't any better. You see, in the recession, they fired and laid off as many people as they could, and then they overworked the people left. We were told we were lucky to have a job. And we couldn't get our foot in the door anywhere. As the adage many college grads will tell you about, you need a job to get experience, but you need experience to get a job. It's a catch 22. Even low level service jobs making minimum wage were insanely choosey. You had horror stories of people applying to hundreds of jobs for months on end, and each job getting hundreds of applicants. And of course, people who worked were told they were lucky to have a job at all, and those who didn't were desperately trying to work, with only unemployment to keep them from losing everything at all.
It seemed like there was a total failure of the social contract somewhere. We have this mentality that everyone works, and everyone gets a job and "contributes to society", and that this is just, but then we do this via capitalism. And capitalism actually functions under different principles than this kind of "reciprocity". It operates under the principles of "freedom." We're told that there is a market of employers and a market of workers, and that things are set according to supply and demand. Workers can apply to jobs as they want, and employers can hire people as they want. Employers are concerned about one thing: profit. They want to maximize their end. And workers, in theory, want to maximize theirs.
But, in practice, things are a lot more skewed. Workers are expected to work, and the system is set up where no one is "forced" to work on paper, but they kind of are. People need to work, or they starve and are denied the basics in life. So they will run to employers as quickly as they can to take a job, any job. And then because our system is set up to ensure that there is always a surplus of workers vs employers, and employers can be choosey and tell you that you're lucky to have a job, well, we can see why we were in that situation. Employers are used to a poor desperate population willing to work a job, any job, at any rate, and workers were used to being walked over. Even Marx observed this phenomenon, calling it the "reserve army of labor". Admittedly, capitalism functions best when a small proportion of people are unemployed as it keeps inflation down, but there's something fundamentally broken about a system that expects every single person to get a job, but can't seem to employ everyone.
Liberals have traditionally advocated for improving these relationships. The New Deal, unions, regulations, etc., were aimed at making the working experience better, but all things considered, they kind of acted as baid aids at improving things. They did improve working conditions for people, but when employers could get away with stuff, they would. Employers do the bare minimum to comply with regulations. If you tell them that they need to pay you $7.25, don't expect much more than that, as they have no need to pay you more in many cases. If you tell them they can't work you beyond 40 hours without paying more they might bite the bullet and pay overtime, or pay salary to avoid all regulations. Require them to pay health insurance to people working full time? Welcome to why most part time jobs don't let you work more than 25 hours a week. And any time a new regulation is imposed, the right screams that it distorts the market and "kills jobs". The idea being, either you accept the scraps they offer, or don't work at all. If you increase the minimum wage, you reduce employment in traditional economic models. Isn't it better to have everyone working, but not able to live on their wages, than to have fewer people working, but they can all live? After all, what are those who don't work expected to do for money? Maybe something is wrong with this system.
Even in the 1960s, this system was never perfect. The Presidential Commission on Poverty under Nixon in 1969 studied poverty, and found that the only realistic way to solve it was a universal basic income. For all the benefits of social liberalism of the 1930s and 1960s, it did not end the war on poverty. Because the system structurally cannot guarantee prosperity for all. We on the left look like the 1930s to 1960s were the good old days, in which everyone can get a job and you could feed a family on one income, but even then there was a dark underbelly to the system. Poverty was rife. It was why the war on poverty happened. Elderly people lacked healthcare, and others unemployed through no fault of their own often lived in abject poverty. Welfare was intended to get people out of poverty and into work, but it largely failed to do so. It did improve the lives of people on it, but it often didnt go far enough and was very intrusive and authoritarian into peoples' lives, and caused all kinds of perverse incentives that kept people in poverty. Back then, the right thought, if we had a negative income tax or a UBI type program, that would change the incentives. It should be noted the right largely didn't seem to support people choosing not to work, so there would always be some requirements on their programs, but their idea to give cash aid seemed superior to the welfare systems at the time. Unfortunately as stagflation took hold and anti welfarism became a rallying cry on the emerging Reagan coalition, we largely abandoned the idea for decades, as the idea of having a large scale universal social program became unthinkable both on the left and the right. Occasionally a random person would propose such an idea, but largely they were considered fringe and no one paid much attention.
Coming across basic income and studying it helped me understand the problems with the economy more clearly, and significantly shifted my politics from bog standard social liberalism to the social libertarianism I have now. Don't get me wrong, traditional liberalism has done good things and is a major improvement over the conservative social darwinist mentality. But...UBI helped me put my finger on exactly what was wrong with the economy. It's the focus on jobs. The fact is, we can't employ every single person, and yet we expect them to run through this sordid game of musical chairs in their quest for work in order to be able to provide for themselves. THose who get jobs can get complacent, often times they think they earned their standing in life whereas those who don't are lazy or otherwise undeserving. Some might support the bog standard liberal line of some people are down on their luck and need help but we shouldn't just give money to everyone, but UBI...really kind of resonated with me when I came across it. I'm going to be honest, I was skeptical at first, and it came across as too good to be true, but as I researched it and studied the evidence I quickly realized it could work.
And it would solve the problems with the economy. I don't go in the same direction of Marx or the communists, who insist work is a sacred obligation of society and just see the problem as some ownership class that is exploiting people. I mean, the ownership class is exploiting people, but for me, alienation runs much deeper than the just being alienated from my work due to the capitalist class and ownership. I'm alienated FROM WORK ITSELF.
I mean, for most of my life, I lived in what Andrew Yang has latered considered to be a scarcity mindset. This idea that we all need to work for a living, and if we don't all work, there won't be enough to go around, and we all will starve, and while the system isn't pretty, it's necessary to motivate people to work to survive. But, as I experienced the recession, I realized that the problem is actually that we're too work obsessed, and that this obsession with work is why people are poor. In modern society we've reached levels of productivity that to previous generations sound like science fiction. We could provide every single person a solidly middle class income if we distributed all of our resources equally. Of course, that would be "communism" or so the right claims. And no one would work and the system would implode. Yes yes, commies reading this, I know that this isn't literal communism, but the point stands. It everyone earns the same amount of money whether they work or not, there is no economic incentive to work at all. But what if we distributed just a portion of that? Say, just enough to stay out of poverty? Why, we could ensure there's still plenty of incentive to work, and we could solve poverty. And it would theoretically eliminate so many problems I had with work in the first place. It would remove the involuntary nature of it, causing people to be able to say no to work (and yes, I read Widerquist's theory around this time as well and it resonated with me A LOT), while still ensuring that people will, generally, want to. Not saying every single person will, but eh, there will arguably be enough labor to do the necessary labor for society to function.
After all, isn't that why we work? Behind all of these pretenses regarding work, is the idea that we NEED work done for society to function. That's why we tend to obsess over it as a society, and why most people on both the left and the right tend to build their entire ideologies around the idea of work, rather than questioning the concept. But as I observe the societies of plenty in the west in the 21st century, I feel like work is the source of much misery in our societies. We insist everyone work, but then people struggle to get jobs. People are underpaid, they get treated like crap, and many begin to hate their lives, feeling trapped in a never ending cycle of working just to survive.
Let's dispense with this pretense that work should be an actual social obligation. Because under capitalism, businesses never follow their social obligations to provide for their workers. For as much as we try to make the worker/employer relation better, it will never be just as long as people are forced to participate. People are wage slaves under capitalism, and trying to reform this institution while keeping the coercive elements to it that drive these imbalances in the first place. There is nothing wrong with one party voluntarily offering a wage for services, and another willing to accept those wages for their labor, but it should be voluntary. Forcing people is the root of everything else wrong with this social arrangement. When you really think about it, our economy is just forcing poor people to work for rich people in exchange for the mere basics to survive, and sometimes not even that. And as Rick and Morty would say, that sounds like slavery with extra steps.
Work isn't a glorious institution, it isn't some noble social obligation. It's difficult, it's unpleasant, it's dirty. Most of us would rather be doing something else. I honestly never really came across the idea that people like work until I delved into this topic and started debating it only to encounter these BS moral arguments about how work is good for us and blah blah blah. Most people I know dream of hitting the lottery and never having to work again. That's what's normal for me. Of course, most wouldn't quit for $15000 or so a year, but it does give the option to some extent.
To go into my humanist principles, as I thought about work as a post Christian atheist around 2013-2014, I ended up developing my own version of human centered capitalism. Do we exist to serve the economy, or does the economy exist to serve us? Without a god, and without masters mandating such an institution, all you have is moral nihilism. Which many stuck in the christian bubble see as scary, but I see as liberating. And while work might be a punishment from God due to original sin in their worldview, work is just...what we need to do to get things done. And if it's unpleasant, and dirty, rather than insist on making more of it, like jobists insist, shouldnt we try to minimize it as a concept? Obviously a lot of work is societally beneficial, but I cant get behind employing people full time and more and insisting on this never ending cycle of "job creation" when there's a better way to do things. We dont exist for this economy, but we act as if we do. The economy exists for us, and it's time its institutions serve us rather than the other way around.
As such, I went into a largely social libertarian perspective, rather than one that takes me to a more traditional social democratic or socialist place. Social democrats are often ideological opponents of social libertarians, agreeing with them on a lot of stuff, but thinking that our ideas that we do away with the reciprocity principle is immoral. They literally moralize work, and that mentality always came off as bizarre to me. I literally came across these people debating thinkers like Phillippe Van Parijs and I just have to wonder what kind of copium these guys are on. Work SUCKS. And maybe people in high level professional jobs like politics or academia can act like their jobs are great and noble, but if you're like an actual working class worker, nah, work sucks. Working class people end up being pro work in a sense too, but more in a resentful "i have to suffer so so should you" mentality. Which I just can't agree with because that is crab mentality and keeps us all suffering. That's what we really need to break. These mindsets that jobs are the end all and be all of society and that we all need to spend all our time working.
And socialists, those guys get crazy. The more I look at what leftism actually does, it actually is based on that kind of mentality that we all must work and suffer together. They resent the rich because they dont have to work like the rest of us, and want to take away their wealth...to force people to work like the rest of them. And a huge reason why communism was always so oppressive is it forced people to work at the point of a gun. People had no freedom over their lives. And that's why they often didn't have work incentives. They were basically legally required to have a job and anyone who didn't was sent to the gulag. We kind of discussed this with Rammstein's early days in the GDR and how they were legally required to work a day job while spending the rest of their time trying to work on their music careers. Capitalism ultimately gave them the freedom to succeed. I just understand that they still try to force people to work too, and I ultimately want to make work less coercive and central to our lives.
As long as the sausage gets made, I don't care if people work or not. I believe in freedom. I believe in markets, but for markets to work functionally, people need to be able to refuse to participate. I think both extreme collectivism and extreme individualism are toxic. In the US we have a "you owe people nothing" mentality, which, without state interference leads to us all struggling just to survive while a small proportion of people hoard the wealth. Meanwhile communist countries end up seeing work as a social obligation enforced at the point of a gun. The failures of both systems all come down to the fact that both try to force people to work, with no real option to say no. Communism through direct state violence and repression, and capitalism through more passive means of resource denial. I just want to ensure people have the resources to survive without being forced into anything, and then they can live as they want. If they work, they work, if they don't, they dont. As for the collective....well, as long as the end result is positive and people still work to do the necessary labor we need, I have no problems with that. And if we can't get the sausage made, well, then I support the highest SUSTAINABLE level of UBI, whatever that is, to give people the most freedom and stability in their lives as we can accomplish. And hope that over time as we can automate more work, we can raise the UBI to higher levels. The point is, we can do better than the system we have now, and all it really requires are a few simple, but admittedly expensive reforms. As long as we do things the way they are now, we shouldnt be surprised at the result. If we want to live in a better society, we need to change it.
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