I like to understand what a statement is really saying about the universe. There is a lot of discussion around how the J.G should be implemented. There is one question in particular that is especially malignant.
Where we will all the jobs necessary for J.G workers come from?This usually comes from Austrians and some MMTers opposed to the idea. They state something along the lines of, there is simply not enough work to employ all of these people, further any work work that is created by the State will be unproductive and massively hyper-inflationary. The reason why J.G work is unproductive is because the demand has not been determined by the market.
The Issue. Misinformed definitions of ‘market’, ‘productive’ and ‘inflation-causes’.
This is so wrong I don’t know where to begin....
Read the rest at lowerleftlimit
Productive J.G employment is not necessary
by Shaun Hingston
3 comments:
I agree with Shaun - productive vs. non-productive is an attempt to frame an argument.
The response should be to re-frame the argument back to compensating the unemployed properly for the system failure that left them unemployed.
The NAIRU is a good weapon there. They are unemployed because the article of faith that is NAIRU says they must be unemployed, therefore it is morally right that they should be fully compensated for their loss.
I'm kind of surprised that some enterprising ambulance chasing lawyer isn't sueing somebody on behalf of the unemployed.
Once you get onto the debate about increasing payments to people for doing nothing, the option of paying them the same amount to do something suddenly becomes remarkably attractive.
The response should be to re-frame the argument back to compensating the unemployed properly for the system failure that left them unemployed.
Exactly and I think another possible approach is to say something along the lines of the following:
1. People are born into economies where the ownership of all controllable resources has already been determined.
2. People must in someway interact via employment with the ownership structure, in order to obtain enough resources to survive.
3. If they don’t obtain enough resources they die.
Shifting employment responsibility to the ownership-structure.
Shaun H.
So far most of the objections I have seen so far by various objectors are attempts to reframe the argument away from MMT as a macro theory into other paradigms whose noms and universe of discourse are antithetical to the MMT macro project.
The objectors often like the monetary economics but would like to jettison the macro, which they see as "Keynesian," read big government intrusion.
At heart these folks seem to be Austrians and Neoliberals economically and conservatives or Libertarians politically. Some are open about it, and others are in the closet or may not even realize how deeply ingrained their tendencies are. Anyone who has taken Bill Mitchell's weekly quizes has experienced how deeply ingrained such tendencies are due to years of exposure to enemy propaganda and cultural conditioning.
It's the age-old battle of ideologies in which norms are disguised norms as facts, often even from the people asserting them. This is a lot of what Ludwig's philosophy of logica and language is about exposing, and the subject of my PhD dissertation.
The maddening things is when it comes down to data and facts, opponents have some excuse to change the subject or even deny the obvious when it confronts them.
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