Shaun Scott is a DSA member running for Seattle City Council. We talked to him about his bold platform: building public housing, taxing the rich, and pushing for a municipal Green New Deal.A job guarantee (universal job offer to fit the applicant to the work) is only one piece of the pie to right the ship of the economy. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the UN General Assembly, all persons have a right to work (article 23), a right to leisure (article 24) and a right to an adequate standard of living, including food, housing and medical care (article 25).
Owing to the structure of the housing industry, it is not considered profitable enough for private firms to invest in the construction of "affordable housing." There was a public housing project in the US perviously but it degenerated into people living in substandard "projects." Thus, there is a strong bias against repeating this "boondoggle."
Many have come to think of public works as doomed by inefficiency, poor planning, poor management and corruption. There is precedent for this bias.
This should not be taken as proof that the government can do no good through public works, however. Rather, it shows the challenges that are associated with this opportunity. It is possible to learn from the mistakes of the past and do better the next time — unless one assumes that the government can do no good, which many do. This assumption makes for political resistance. The burden is on advocates of public works to show how this assumption is ill-founded, in this case regarding public housing.
all persons have a right to work
ReplyDeleteOne can work without being a wage slave and one can be a wage slave and do no useful work or even do negative work.
So why the endless conflation of being a wage-slave (having a job) and work, Tom?
Elitist much?
As for public housing, just forbid house and apartment renting and pretty soon those rental houses and apartments would be for sale at reasonable prices.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, land ownership should be limited to so-much per citizen ala ancient Old Testament Israel.
all persons have a right to work (article 23), a right to leisure (article 24)
ReplyDeleteWorking and leisure are not at all mutually exclusive but being a wage-slave and leisure ARE mutually exclusive.
Then why do you promote wage-slavery, Tom?
Andrew Anderson: Then why do you promote wage-slavery, Tom?
ReplyDeleteWhy do you think you are wiser and better than Jesus, who promoted it the same way?
Once again, under the Mosaic Law - which was still in effect during Christ's earthly ministry - all Hebrew families were to own roughly equal agricultural and grazing lands.
ReplyDeleteSo wage labor was NORMALLY something no Hebrew needed to do.
Extrapolating to the present, no citizen of a country with a Christian heritage should NORMALLY ever need to work for wages either.
So what you and Tom promote as normal, i.e. working for wages, is actually ABNORMAL from a Christian perspective.