So, Emma Vigeland of the Majority Report interviewed Mark Paul, an economist who wrote a book called "The Ends of Freedom", which calls for an economic bill of rights. I dont have access to the entire book right now, but I did read a little bit of the preview over on google books, and it gave me enough of an idea to go in a different direction and engage with his points.
His book is actually...quite similar to the one I'm trying to write that I mentioned. He seems to base his ideas for a second economic bill of rights in the language of freedom, which I do myself. I tend to frame it a little differently than him, leaning more into the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, whereas he seems to take a more generic positive freedom perspective to it (both are valid, and come to the same conclusion, don't get me wrong), but eh...we do have significant ideological differences here. And like many, it comes down to a basic income vs a jobs guarantee. It should be noted that Mark Paul IS in favor of both in his book, but in the interview at least, he leans a lot harder into the job guarantee aspect of his idea, whereas I lean far harder into a UBI.
It was asked of him why he supports both, since most people support one or the other, and he believes we can afford both. I think this is a dubious proposition. As you guys know, I've grappled with the numbers of all of these programs, I've established clearly defined spending limits of what I believe is sustainable, and I dare not go much past that point. The cost of UBI, medicare for all, and a jobs guarantee is as such where in my opinion, at best, only two are sustainable at the same time. Even before reading the google preview I concluded that "yeah if he's for all 3, he's gonna be for an NIT, not a real UBI" and surprise surprise, his book mentioned an NIT style UBI.
And here's the problem with that. an NIT style UBI isn't a real UBI. It does not guarantee real freedom to Americans. This is because a UBI under an NIT format is basically a tax credit. And much like the child tax credit, it can be heavily means tested or even repealed simply by modifying the tax code. Push comes to shove, I could see JG advocates quickly abandoning the UBI and forcing people back into the work force, sabotaging their freedom and gutting the program. We already saw this happen with Joe Manchin and his unhinged "entitlement society" rants on the child tax credit. Some people really dont want people to have free money and wanna force people to work, and to me, work is directly counter to freedom, as I'll get to later.
Mark Paul also seems to be wanting to fund his proposals through debt, like an MMT economist would, and this is problematic too. A UBI could cause inflation that way, hence why most MMT economists like stephanie kelton hate the idea of UBI. Most of them lean into JG and romanticize the government putting everyone to work FDR style to grow the economy, so that the debt that they produce is always outpaced by growth. That's how MMT economists overcome debt long term. It doesnt matter how big the debt gets, as long as the economy continues to grow faster than it. They have a point, but the problem is that this will inevitably force us to stay in a work obsessed world, having to constantly work so we can constantly have line on chart go up so that it keeps outpacing our national debt always growing up. That's why they support jobs. Jobs produce things, more things means bigger numbers, bigger numbers means national debt stays comparatively small. My own version of an economic bill of rights focuses more on UBI, and also I am spending a great deal of my own attempt at a book so far integrating my proposal of reducing the work week over time into it. I try to fund things through balanced budgets and focusing less on growth, MMT economists want more growth and more debt spending. They're too different schools of thought. THeirs is inherently pro growth and pro work, and while mine isn't inherently anti growth, it is anti work, and I do value getting us off of this sisyphusian treadmill in the long term.
At the end of the day, I dont trust job guarantee supporting MMT economists to implement a real UBI, because the second people stop working, the second their entire view of the world comes crashing down as the national debt starts outpacing growth and we face financial apocalypse. This is not a path to freedom, but a path to sisyphusian hell or financial ruin.
So, let's dispense with the idea that can CAN do both, because we can't, in my view. It's either a job guarantee, or a UBI. They represent two ideologies, with two fundamentally different approaches to work and growth, and are fundamentally incompatible with each other as I see them. I respect JG advocates insofar as they support guaranteed SOMETHING, but those MFers will really just keep us working forever so line goes up forever and ever. Growth to them is about outpacing the national debt of their own creation, rather than an inherent good in itself. To free humanity, we need to break that very same cycle IMO.
As such, let's go into why it should be UBI, and not a JG.
1) Work is inherently anti freedom in my view
Work, in this context, is defined as that which we HAVE to do, not what we WANT to do. We kind of blur this line under capitalism, acting like people voluntarily take up jobs, rather than being economically coerced to do so, but we all know my views. Wage slavery is a real thing under capitalism, and denying one's basic needs to coerce them into the job market is an affront to real freedom.
Work fills our lives, and it creates the hellish treadmill I mentioned above. We can't stop. because if we stop, financial ruin comes for us. We cant pay our bills, we lose our homes, we lose access to food, etc. We cant live in a modern society without these things, and our system keeps us stuck, having to work. Forever. And MMT economists, ie, ones that are for spending based on massive national debt and then outgrowing it later through economic growth and jobs programs, just keep us trapped on that cycle forever. We need to break that cycle if we want to be free. This is a sisyphusian hell of our own making.
Freedom, for me, is the ability to do what I want, when I wanna do it. It means both negative, as in no one is stopping me, but it also means positive, in that I have an environment which supports my ability do live as I want. Mark Paul is right in that we tend to value negative without the positive, and that without the positive, we are not free. But the biggest violation of our liberty is, essentially, that very compulsion to work.
Our lives are filled with HAVING to do stuff. We HAVE to get up at 6:30 AM, we HAVE to be at work by 8. We HAVE to wear a suit and tie and look presentable by an employer's standards. We HAVE to work until 12. We HAVE to take a lunch break (although I respect that having one is better than not having one). We HAVE to work from 12:30-5. We HAVE to go home, clean the house, buy groceries, file taxes, etc. Our world is filled with HAVE TOS. Our schedules are so busy we can never just sit back and relax. The ideal of the 8 hour work day was such: 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work, and 8 to do what we wish. But it's 8 hours ON THE CLOCK at work, several preparing for work, several meeting our basic needs and taking on other responsibilities, and how much time are we left to do what we WANT?! None, really. Heck, there's even a thing called revenge bedtime procrastination where people start staying up late in defiance of the system just to get a taste of their freedom back. And this makes them sleep deprived. Because that extra time for freedom comes out of time to sleep.
We should be structuring society to MINIMIZE obligations. We should want to shrink work to make it the smallest part of the day possible. Every hour spent on work is an hour wasted. it is an hour not spent on having fun and enjoying life. When can you enjoy life? Maybe on the weekends here and there, if you're not basically spending the whole weekend doing errands and grocery shopping. Maybe when you retire, when you're too old to work and they dump you off where you just sit there, your body decaying from age, as you wait to die. Seriously, this life we call the american dream is a fricking scam. Jobs are NOT freedom. Jobs are ANTI freedom. The idea that jobs are freedom, is a 1984esque double speak fascist sentiment. Dont believe me? Tell me what the nazis put above the entrance to Auschwitz. My point exactly.
This is not living. This is hell. We have made hell for ourselves. And well meaning MMT economists might see the job guarantee as their way to make people free, but all I see is perpetual wage slavery.
2) The core problem with all economic philosophies is a fixation on jobs and work
What is the core issue with all of capitalism in my opinion? The fact that people have to work. Socialists (and Mark Paul made a reference to this mindset) would argue that it is because work is a mini dictatorship in which you are beholden to a boss, but if you did not have to work in the first place, would you be beholden to a boss? NO! Socialists, nor liberals, never really address the core issue with work, and its involuntary nature. Instead they focus on the nature of the work place. And this is where all of these ideologies that wanna fix capitalism go wrong. The right sits on their hands ignoring the problem acting like working is totally voluntary when it isn't. That's their go to defense for all work place injustices. That we chose to work there and can quit at any time. But can we? Not as long as the threat of poverty and the legal enforcement of the property rights system and punishing people for being homeless and the like exist, no. Our system functionally forces people to work.
Socialists recognize this but their problem is not with labor, their problem is with who owns the means of production. They think capitalism merely alienates people from their labor, and if workers owned the means of production, this would solve everything. it doesnt. Work under a state controlled economy is just as, if not more alienating than work under capitalism. Possibly more so, because at least capitalism has the pretense that you can refuse. People in communist countries have a constitutional requirement to work, and they must work whatever job they are given. They are not given freedom and autonomy over their life. They have less freedom than you have under capitalism, which is why capitalism ultimately won the moral argument in the first place. Capitalism IS less oppressive than socialism, but that doesnt mean capitalism isn't oppressive.
And as we know, liberals mostly focus on reforming capitalism to make work better. They believe in fair wages and fair working conditions, and regulations. But they dont, at the end of the day, support the freedom not to work at all. You must work, you just happen to work under less crappy terms. A job guarantee is just more of the same old nonsense. It doesnt solve the issue with work, it is just yet another band aid on a long history of band aids that seem to ignore the real core issue, the compulsion to work, and seem to focus on the secondary issue of reforming the work place. I'm not saying reforming the work place is bad. It's better than nothing. But is this the best we can do? Obviously not. The goal should be to free people from the compulsion to work altogether.
2.5) But what if people want to work?
I just want to address this real quick, but then the question is asked, what if someone wants to work? Most people are said to want to work. To some extent, you might be right. We are raised in a jobist society to what to work jobs. We act like its in our DNA, but it's more cultural and in our social conditioning. Mark paul asked at one point in the interview about kids being asked what they wanna do when they grow up? And how many of them often have generic unrealistic answers. Like wanting to run an aquarium. I "wanted" to be a movie star, but only because my own imagination was so limited and i really never had an answer. From a young child, I feared the future and the world of work and adulthood. I literally remembered having panic attacks and freaking out when leaving high school and going to college. I understood it as "the good part of my life is over, it just goes downhill from here". Why? Because it was the traditional end of living a life of what i wanted to do, which i did as a child, and started realizing that from now on id have to live life based on what i HAD to do. People just take that for granted that that's what life is. But I always understood, from a young age, that work was slavery. We just end up indoctrinating most people into accepting it.
And let's focus on those childish answers. Many people dont want any job. They often romanticize the best job, like running an aquarium. Or being a movie star. People have dreams. And then when they reach adulthood, they're told screw you, accept what you can get. So they work in food service, or in retail, or in a call center, or an office. Is this their ideal dream job? 99/100 times, probably not. But capitalism forces people to contort to its needs. Work isnt done for the person with the dream and their happiness and self satisfaction. It's done to either 1) get things that need to be done done, and/or 2) to make people money. There are few to no dream jobs either under capitalism or socialism. Nor are job guarantee jobs one's dream jobs.
Anyway, one point I also wanted to address before I move on (and come back to the above point) is that even in my ideal world, anyone who wants to work can probably find a job. My idea doesnt fully eliminate the job market. I dont think that's feasible any time soon. People can work if they want to, I'm just not forcing them to. Some people might work, but some might not work. As long as everyone is living as they want, then I'm fine with it.
3) Let's discuss what jobs really are
Work, is, at best, the way to create the goods and services that we want and need. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The point of a job isnt to fulfill anyone's dream or to make them feel better, the point of a job is the product of the work done. We like to romanticize work as a calling through some serious protestant work ethic bullcrap that has survived the ages, and it's getting old. We need to get done with this stuff. Jobs arent callings. You, as a worker, are an input to create an output. That's all. There's nothing magical or mystical about it. All the jobs have dignity bullcrap is stuff we made up to tell ourselves that our suffering and lack of freedom are necessary and freedom. The mind doesnt want to accept that we are just slaves to the economy. We want to tell ourselves that our suffering and having to be chained to this job is essential. That our job has a purpose, that it makes us dignified. But in reality, it doesnt. I dont think humans evolved for 200,000 years, + the billions of years our ancestors existed in different life forms, just to be able to work for 40 hours a week under modern capitalism, a system that has only existed for 200 years, and that we are hard wired for this system.
In reality, I'm going to offer a darker explanation. Our more immediate ancestors were dragged kicking and screaming to the factories. During industrialization, we privatized all of the land, we forced people to have no other choice BUT to work in factories under an industrial mindset, and our minds were broken and tamed to accept life as it is. Nowadays, jobs are just seen as natural and a fact of life, but again, our ancestors were dragged kicking and screaming to join societies. We were conquered. Our ancestors enslaved to a hostile system that forced us to work or die. We literally made the alternatives to work so miserable that people would "willingly" choose work instead. And we just act like this is natural.
Businesses are in the business of making a profit. They sell products and services not out of the good of their hearts, but to make money. When they offer a job, it is, again, not to fulfill your calling or sense of personal fulfillment, you're there to MAKE THEM MONEY. You are paid a pittance of this money called a wage to sustain, you but, wages under capitalism, without liberal reforms, typically fall to the lowest possible to sustain workers.
When you apply for a job, you're competing against hundreds of other people to prove you are the best. You play up your resume, what you accomplished in the past, you talk about your work ethic. You sit there filling our forms full of extraneous information, you take personality tests, and then you go to an interview where you're grilled for an hour and a half about your experience, your ambitions, etc. All of this is a fancy screening process for you to prove yourself a good worker bee. if youre NOT a good worker bee, who isnt invested in the concept of work, youre useless to them, and they dont want you. Thats why they screen for things like gaps in employment history, they wanna make sure you havent had much of a life outside of work because then you might show...you have ambitions beside work. They ask you where you wanna be in 5 years. They expect you to sing and dance and do anything to prove what a good workers you are, but what dont they like you asking about? Wages. Youre there for money. But they dont wanna hear that. They wanna hear about YOU and the value you provide them. Asking too much about money or working conditions or time off will give them the wrong idea that you're not really invested and they wont want you. So, you either prove yourself to be a good little productive worker, or you can screw off and starve I guess.
Why do we want MORE work? The core reason people beg for more jobs is because we've created this cult where we conditioned people to want work, make it impossible for most people to say openly that they dont wanna work (think about why that is and the consequences it will have on your life), and because we've introduced every sanction possible outside of a hard legal requirement to work (although a soft requirement does exist for most people through the mechanisms of capitalism, the proeprty rights system, the legal system, etc.) to make sure that people wanna work.
4) More jobs don't mean more freedom
I mean, under capitalism, having more options gives more freedom than would exist if we didn't have said options, but it's just another option within a limited spectrum of bad options. The work a job guarantee provides is not always good work. It is work that is dull, monotonous, difficult, and dangerous. Mark Paul talked about things like FDR putting people to work making underwear, but that's....dull monotonous work. And of course, he also put people to work on dangerous and difficult construction projects. I mean is the work has to be done, so be it. But let's not glorify work. This is just more monotonous "have tos" that take the place of "want tos."
A job guarantee just provides one more option in a crappy market with crappy options. it can, at best, provide a floor to force the private sector to produce better options since anyone can just work for the government instead, but odds are in order to function, it will likely have to produce a worse job than every other option to be optimal.
THe federal government in a job guarantee is considered the employer of last resort. If people choose to work for the government vs the private sector, it means that it's taking business away from the private sector, which could hurt growth and innovation. Odds are, I would suspect, in order to not create a wage price spiral, that government work would have to be worse than every other option. Because if it raises wages too much, to the point businesses cant outcompete the government without adding inflationary pressure, it's gonna mess up the economy. I suspect that a job guarantee in the long term would have a similar effect on the economy as work houses during the victorian era. Basically, the work houses were there to ensure that people who didnt have a private sector job would have it worse than those who did. It was a form of "guaranteed employment" for the unemployed, and the whole purpose of its existence was to round up those who didnt wanna work, and to force them to work, with most people working in them being poor and miserable. They were a form of institutionalized cruelty used by early capitalist supporters to force people into the work force whether they like it or not.
I would say, I see the job guarantee ending the same way. Mark Paul seems to think that we can employ every single person and have a system where everyones' needs are met. THis goes against the math. We DO need unemployment to keep wages in check. If we had true full employment and the private sector couldnt find workers, they would start raising wages at a rate that would force them to raise prices on the consumer side, leading to a wage price spiral. That is why unemployment exists, and why it is necessary. "Full employment" is a misnomer, it's not and has never been a realistic goal. In practice it means a 4% unemployment rate where most unemployment is just temporary churn. It is a state in which unemployment is brought to the lowest possible rate the system can bear.
For a job guarantee to NOT cause a wage price spiral, the federal government would have to, ultimately, be the employer of last resort. Not just in name, but in the rank of preferable options. A federal job would have to be worse than every private sector job to exist, or at least most of them. It would have to employ those the market otherwise considered unemployable. It would have to be the last option that the people can choose between, and the last option they would want. A job guarantee, to function, would likely need to provide the worst employment the system has to offer. It is true that a job guarantee cause raise the bar and provide SOME standards, but it still can't provide better than the private sector can, or it would cause a wage price spiral in the private sector.
To me, a jobs guarantee means a return of the work houses of old, and this is a dystopian vision of the economy in my opinion.
5) There's no guarantee the work would be useful
Everyone who supports job guarantees seem to dispute this, acting like we'll never run out of valuable work to do, but I dispute this. Sure, at first, a job guarantee will likely do a lot of good. We could fix climate change, update our infrastructure, etc. But then what? Then...idk. Eventually we're just creating BS jobs for the sake of employing people. And that just seems stupid and pointless. We might get like the communist countries where they'd have three clerks selling a piece of meat because they couldnt stand the thought of the other two being unemployed. Eventually it just gets to "i'll pretend to work, and you'll pretend to pay me."
There's an anecdote about Milton Friedman visiting china. This has never been confirmed, and this anecdote has taken on many forms over the years, but in this version of it, he visits china and surveys their economy. He sees a bunch of people with shovels digging to build roads. He asks him, where's all the modern construction equipment? And his guide says "well you see, this is a jobs program". And Friedman said "if it's jobs you want you should give them spoons!"
It kind of represents the disconnect I think a JG offers, and the core fallacy that JG advocates and jobists have in particular. Work exists to do things. It isnt the work that's valuable, it's the product or service that comes with it. Employing people for employment's sake is like the dumbest thing ever to me. Because it represents this idea that jobs exist for their own sake, and that the goal is to employ people for the sake of employing people. It's a dumb mindset. If we create jobs just to justify giving people a paycheck, just fricking give them a paycheck. Dont force them to jump through hoops for their bread just because that's what we've conditioned people to do.
Inevitably, and this happened to the aforementioned workhouses too, the point of these programs becomes about the work itself, not the benefits the work provides. The work houses were never particularly profitable, if anything the state mightve taken a loss on them, and that's the case with the JG too. It just reinforces this system of jobs and seems more about instilling and maintaining work ethic in the populace than about actually getting to the point and producing the things people want and need. As such, i think the idea of guaranteeing work itself is dumb. If you wanna guarantee work, just set the federal reserve rates at the point to minimize involuntary unemployment and be done with it. Maybe institute a "work sharing" program of reducing work hours so everyone who wants to work can...but they will work less. And THEN go from there. We don't need to make jobs out of thin air for people to do instead. That's just a really dumb and terrible idea.
Conclusion: If you're for freedom, you should be pro UBI, not pro JG
A UBI gives people an option that a jobs guarantee doesn't: the right not to work at all. it gives people ultimate freedom and control over one's life. It represents a shift from seeing work as this really awesome good thing, and kind of exposes it to be crappy. I believe, if we really want a system of positive freedom and economic rights, a UBI, NOT a jobs guarantee, should be the mechanism to get there. I think it's time we realize as a society that work and jobs aren't all they're cracked up to be, and that if we want freedom, we want freedom FROM compulsory labor, not just an expansion of it.
Also, it's not like freedom TO work is incompatible with UBI. I just recognize the limits of jobs. Jobs dont exist to fulfill people psychologically, or to fulfill one's dreams, they exist to make things and do things that need to be done, and very few people truly work their dream job. Most are compulsed economically to work the jobs that are available, and to temper their expectations and to accept less. Ultimately, jobs make people subservient to capital, and place them in economic dictatorships that they dont even have a choice to participate in.
A basic income would allow people to do what they want to do in life. It would allow them to pursue their dreams. Write a book, make a great work of art, start a rock band, become a political commentator/twitch streamer. Or even, nothing at all. A basic income would allow those who dont dream of labor...to not labor. And that is something that no other policy provides.
And if people want to work a traditional job for money...let them. As Karl Widerquist would say, i have no issues with people having sex as long as its not rape, and I have no problem with people working as long as that's voluntary too. If we really care for FREEDOM, we should want to maximize peoples' choices, to do that, we need to give them the ability to opt out entirely.
A jobs guarantee is just another bad option out of a list of bad options.
Ultimately I would support both if I believed that both were economically feasible, but I've concluded that they actually aren't, and any grand deal that promises both should be treated with skepticism, because it doesnt seem like most of them really care about UBI much in practice. They often support some band aid NIT version of UBI and are likely to abandon it the second trouble hits and the second they see the economic pressure to either drop one or the other. JG supporters will inevitably continue to support the JG, if that's what they lead with.
I ask anyone, if you have to choose between the two, which would you pick? Most JG advocates, push comes to shove, would push a JG, they're fair weather UBI supporters at best. And I understand I'm being a purity testy A-hole right now, but that's how I see it. I want what I want, I understand progressives' mindsets enough to know a lot of them arent true believers in UBI, and I believe that their ideology is inherently different than mine, even if we have common ground on a lot of things. Ultimately, the left has two paths here. The path to sisyphusian hell in the form of a job guarantee, or a path to a technologically advanced post work heaven with UBI. But we cant do both. We cant afford both. At least not unless you dont believe universal healthcare should be a thing.And that's another whole can of worms to get into and a compromise I dont think either side would support.
So, it's either UBI or JG. We cant have both. It's a matter of what vision is more appealing. I would rather have UBI since it delinks work from income and causes us to think about work in a new way where it becomes less important. I personally never liked work. I actually hate the idea of work and think it is antithetical to freedom, and if freedom is what we really want, we should want the option that allows people to opt out of work and to work on their own terms, over the idea that just reinforces work as a concept and keeps us on the sisyphusian treadmill forever. I dont believe work is great, that it's dignified. I think it's evil, and one that should be minimized, like sickness and suffering.
That's just how I see it.
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