The environment is degrading, an aging population needs care, and wages are stagnant. And that was before COVID-19. A job guarantee could address it all.
“Is there a limit to how much we can care for each other?”HuffPost
That’s the radical question at the heart of economist Pavlina Tcherneva’s timely new book, ”The Case for a Job Guarantee,” due to be published this month....
Millions Are Unemployed. Crises Abound. Is It Time To Guarantee Public Service Jobs?
Alexander C. Kaufman
16 comments:
and wages are stagnant.
Except the purpose of MMT's Job Guarantee is to SUPPRESS wage increases since minimum wage laws are sufficient to raise wages.
an aging population needs care,
And who's fault is it that the population is aging?
I.e., how many potential caretakers were aborted by the ME generation?
I have no children of my own (and not via abortion either) but that's MY problem and I'm not looking for the younger generations to be enslaved to take care of me, should I ever need it.
Except the purpose of MMT's Job Guarantee is to SUPPRESS wage increases since minimum wage laws are sufficient to raise wages.
Yeah, right. Jobs that people don't have, jobs that don't exist pay very well. Minimum wages don't do a damn thing for people who are unemployed. A JG would boost wages enormously - and particularly for those at the bottom. Better than anything else, better than any bright idea crackpot scheme.
Only the craziest pretzel logic allows people to oppose the necessity of a Job Guarantee. How people can fool themselves into such nonsense is beyond me.
Food and water are necessities. A JG is a "nice to have". News flash: civilization is less than nice...
Food and water are necessities. A JG is a "nice to have".
A viewpoint of those who are served food and water by the jobs of others. If these others are prevented from doing anything, from doing jobs of any kind in order to procure food and water for themselves. Well, that's their problem according to this irrational, Marie Antoinette viewpoint.
A Job Guarantee is a minimum necessary for a sane and just economic order. All positive. No negatives, unless from the morality of a serial killer or a mentality with severe cognitive deficits.
Simple logic, understood for millennia. Jesus, Shakespeare, Necker, Fichte, Lincoln, Tolstoy and many others explained it. Could easily be formalized. Again, the inability of those who cannot or wish not to follow it is what is curious.
A Job Guarantee is a minimum necessary for a sane and just economic order. Calgacus
The problem with the MMT School, and it's a huge one, is they think Guaranteed Wage-Slavery is a substitute for JUSTICE.
It isn't. They're the ones with severe cognitive or moral deficits, imo - most likely from ignorance or disbelief of the Bible.
We haven't had a sane and just economic order for hundreds of years. Our ancestors lived from hand to mouth, and people are forced into that condition today. This is the legacy of ruling class politics, democracy and culture.
Explanations are for intellectuals and those who have the luxury of entertaining alternative visions. Culture is for the masses, and is a measure of what people actually do when they are done talking.
Democracy allows marginalized groups, such as the unemployed, to be ignored.
“.e., how many potential caretakers were aborted by the ME generation?“
Can’t afford to raise the kids “out of money!”
AA: The problem with the MMT School, and it's a huge one, is they think Guaranteed Wage-Slavery is a substitute for JUSTICE.
The problem is inability to see what is JUSTICE - if a statue outside a courtroom came to life and bit you on your ass. We don't "think"- we KNOW, because we have massive experience, logic, the words of people like Jesus, common sense, majorities in polls and history on our side. There is nothing more certain than if you had all your pet schemes in place, but there was no guarantee of employment - you would make a hell creating far more injustice than justice.
How can you throw off the capitalistic, tyrannical brainwashing that you still clearly have - if you never listen to anyone else? not even to Jesus!
In your terms, in any society there is either wage-slavery or slavery. You work for/with somebody else and get something back: wage-slavery. Or you work and you get nothing: Slavery. There isn't any other logically possible alternative. It's either something, or nothing. "High wage" wage-slavery, where what you give is about what you get is the best conceivable. It's like, it even can be, building your own house. But with other people and capital, to do far more with less effort. A JG is about enslaving yourself - to yourself. Which isn't slavery.
most likely from ignorance or disbelief of the Bible.
Again, dodging. Remarkable hypocrisy. You pretend to be a biblical inerrancy type Christian, but when Jesus's unequivocal words are quoted to you, you spend not a second, not a word in reply, but dodge, dodge, dodge.
Never come to grips or comment on a word of what Jesus said. Why do you hate Jesus's words?
Peter Pan:
We haven't had a sane and just economic order for hundreds of years.
One can always argue about the perfection of various utopias.
Obsessively insisting on the perfect revolutionary utopia, carping about anything or anyone that ever lived or did anything in the real world is one way to justify lying around doing nothing. Which is what much of the left, quite often the ones that think they are the Real Revolutionaries or Marxists do.
Everywhere in the rich nations, the current economic order is much less sane and just than it was 50 years ago, than the one built by those New Dealers and Social Democrats. Coincides with, was identical with "Full Employment Abandoned" as in Bill Mitchell's book. Turn the clock back to 1970 USA and it would look like a utopia compared to today.
The "intellectuals" are the one who hate a JG, and frequently invent psychotic fairy tales about history, like FDR being a tool of tyrannical capitalists, rather than their most feared opponent. At least the right-wingers / serial killers understand the game. JG or New Deal = communism, = socialism. Much of the left couldn't recognize socialism, communism or a revolution if they were bit on the ass by them, and expend massive polemical efforts in opposing traditional socialism.
But ordinary people read, revere and understand those JG supporters throughout history. They know whose side those guys were on. Arrogant, fascistic JG haters, bullshit artists who invent reasons for sadism towards the poor and unemployed - not so much.
That's because ordinary working people, poor people can understand and follow logical arguments and explanations in a detached and rigorous manner. Many or most intellectuals, not so much.
I wouldn't say the Left doesn't do anything. They have demonstrated their ability to scream their righteous indignation at racism and police brutality. If you question their tactics or suggest other issues are more pressing, they will try to get you sacked from your job. This is what passes for activism these days.
50 years ago there were 4 billion people, and women in developed countries were not full participants in the labour market. Since then labour has lost its bargaining power. What benefits workers had were a result of labour struggles before and during the New Deal. An eight hour workday had to be fought for.
The existence of the Soviet Union was a factor in FDR's decision. Then there was the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Nothing comparable to it exists today.
FDR may well have saved capitalism from itself. Yet the system has every incentive to undo the New Deal, and to prevent its return.
Unemployed or underemployed people would support a JG if implemented. I'm not so sure about the rest of society. They have been conditioned into accepting scarcity. Marginalized folks would also support a UBI. They would swallow their pride and take the money.
These policies are pipe dreams under the current leadership. Protest "movements" that do not address issues faced by the poor and unemployed will not be listened to. At a minimum we need an organization comparable to the CIO. And we need it before an opportunist emulates what Trump did 4 years ago.
If you question their tactics or suggest other issues are more pressing, they will try to get you sacked from your job. This is what passes for activism these days.
The protests are a very big thing, and a good thing over all. So big that it is inevitable that a lot of dumb things are done.
Frances Fox Piven predicted the protests (in Jacobin several months ago) and she is well worth reading on them.
What benefits workers had were a result of labour struggles before and during the New Deal.
Yes, in some ways, and of course overall. But bad historians - the great majority - emphasize this obsessively though, to the extent of caricaturing and slandering Roosevelt, whose aim was not "saving capitalism" but enacting socialist measures without calling them socialist. Right wing historians have it right (like Gary Dean Best, biographer and idolizer of Hoover) - just read his comments on FDR's nomination acceptance speech - explaining how it was pure socialism.
The New Deal revived the labor movement and socialism in the USA, not vice versa. They were near death before it. Especially at the beginning, the causation was clearly top-down, not bottom-up. (The bottom up part was the very election of FDR & New Deal politicians) Roosevelt was "led to", pressured by the left/labor do things - which crappy pseudo-Left historians absurdly say were against his will - but which in reality he had been arguing for for years.
The CIO was mainly organized by veterans of the Workers Alliance of America, which in turn was the union for Roosevelt's work programs. No New Deal, no work programs, no WAA, no CIO, no worker victories in the late 30s.
History might not repeat itself, maybe the next New Deal will not be so led from the top. But the po-mo fabrication and slander - from the Left! - of Roosevelt, following the same towards Lincoln (e.g. by Howard Zinn in the past, many today) can only benefit the top dogs and hurt ordinary people. You can hardly read an issue of Counterpunch or Jacobin without reading crackpot Civil War or New Deal revisionism. And they tend to be to the side of sanity. Z-net is a little better, but not entirely free of this crap.
The protests are a big zero. They are the latest nail in the coffin of relevant left politics. In the meantime, populism is being brought in by authoritarians of the right. That does not bode well for policies like a JG.
So based on your interpretation of history, you're counting on the munificence of a few wealthy men to bring in socialism?
Here you go:
https://patrioticmillionaires.org/
May as well go that route, given the imbecility being demonstrated on the streets.
Enjoy your faux socialism, provided these folks can deliver it to you.
FDR was a social democrat. That's a compliment. If he were a socialist, he'd fall into the category of 'useful idiot'.
Very glad you agree that FDR was a Social Democrat. But my point is that Social Democrat = Socialist. Engels, Lenin, Stalin etc were all "Social Democrats". As were Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington in the USA. They are two words for the same thing, as the Right has never forgotten. Convincing people that they are different was a great victory for the plutocracy, which has yielded them immeasurable fruit since it was accomplished a hundred years ago.
I am not so optimistic about the effect of the current protests, but neither am I convinced of my own ability to judge them.
I am not saying that the munificence of a few wealthy men brought about the social democratic = socialist measures of the past. The democratic, electoral process elected people like FDR who did, as Karl Marx for instance said was possible. My "interpretation" was universally accepted, especially by "the common man" - until crackpot revisionism set in, which claims causes that usually came after their asserted effects. (That's why it's crackpot).
And still, mine is probably the most widely believed "interpretation" especially among the purportedly deluded "common" - that is "lesser" - people. Because it is the only one that makes any sense and doesn't massively and tendentiously erase facts and dates.
For instance of what I was talking about, a recent article in Counterpunch : Was It Only “Fear Itself?”: FDR and Today
"Many people now understand that spending on World World II was what “saved capitalism” but I suspect the myth that benevolent motives dominated New Deal thinking is still believed by many."
Of course "the myth that benevolent motives dominated New Deal thinking" is the blatantly obvious truth, doubted only by the insane or ignorant, and the effect of WWII spending compared to the New Deal is grossly overstated.
The value of such crap is typified by a second quote: "Robert Morley, a law professor at Columbia, had created the original “Brain Trust” to advise Roosevelt during the 1932 presidential campaign. " Except that Robert Morley was an actor - in the movie Beat the Devil, the name of Counterpunch founder Alexander Cockburn's column. His father wrote the script, the earnings from which supported their family for years. Raymond Moley was the Brain Truster. (Forgotten now, but Moley was a major columnist for decades, after he "went to the side of the fatcats". (FDR's words on Moley, reported by Rexford Tugwell))
In the meantime, populism is being brought in by authoritarians of the right.
Trump's recent rally in Tulsa was a big flop that couldn't even half fill the stadium, though they had expected and planned for a huge overflow. Sign of a fading, not a rising star. I would have bet on him to win in November until coronavirus. But now it's a pretty sure loser.
You're going to compare Debs with FDR and even Joe Stalin?
You're not being serious.
The difference between social democracy and socialism is the difference between reforms and transformative change. It is a good idea to make a distinction between moderate and radical movements, and to dispel illusions about what can be achieved.
Social democracy can bring about a gentler capitalism. A politician of FDR's caliber would be a shoe-in for office. Instead, the powers that be have selected Joe Biden.
To end capitalism, you need someone like Debs, or Malcolm X. Or other individuals who have been jailed and murdered in response to their activism.
The "socialism" of today is effectively social democracy. Just ask a Trotskyist, who will brand it as pseudo-leftist. I'm not arguing that the Socialist Equality Party in the US isn't a fringe movement, but they know their theory. SOCDEM movements shouldn't be confused with socialist ones.
Trump is a con man who lacks ideological fervor. America may not be so lucky next time. The likes of Orban in Hungary (or Duterte, or Bolsonaro) are waiting in the wings. 4 to 8 years of Sleepy Joe in the White House will serve as preparation for the next crisis. Or rather, whoever is Biden's VP.
I disagree that the protests are a big zero. Police reform is happening, meaningful police reform which holds cops accountable for reprehensible actions. The icons of the confederacy are coming down....... at the behest of former confederates!!! NASCAR is sounding like a backer of the NAACP
You're going to compare Debs with FDR and even Joe Stalin?
You're not being serious.
No, I am quite serious. Joe Stalin thought FDR was "comparable" enough - to want to run him as the Communist candidate for US president, until Earl Browder convinced him that would lose Roosevelt more votes than he would gain.
The difference between social democracy and socialism is the difference between reforms and transformative change.
A. No, historically they have been the same thing.
B. Parties like the SEP often do God's work. But they and the great majority of lefties couldn't tell the difference between reforms and transformative change, between what is "moderate" and what is "radical" (provisional, contingent, even subjective labels) if they were bit on the ass by them. What is often understood as "Revolution" is noisy slogan-pushing that actually amounts to "meet the new boss, same as the old boss". While structural change that may work more slowly, but more decisively and permanently, is foolishly sneered at as "reform"
I don't call anyone a faux leftist. But the SEP is quite as faux as those who it is wont to call faux - who are better thought of as fellow leftists who are vrai in a different way. Is there anything more faux than obsessing about what is "faux" in others - and never looking at what is true there, what others do right?
To end capitalism, you need someone like Debs, or Malcolm X. Or other individuals who have been jailed and murdered in response to their activism.
Umm, no. You need someone more like Lincoln or FDR - both of whom struck far more terror into the ruling classes than Debs or Malcolm X. Someone who is only an activist - say Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison couldn't do it, as they well knew and said. You need to be a politician too, and foremost. Lenin managed to be both.
I'm not arguing that the Socialist Equality Party in the US isn't a fringe movement, but they know their theory.
No, they don't know their theory. They are typical in blinkered exclusionism and go along with dominant historical amnesia. Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin belonged to the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Marx & Engels advised the German Social Democrats. Pre WWI, there were no major divisions, no communists vs socialists vs social democrats. These were all synonyms, with Social Democrat being much the most popular label, next Socialist, and Communist rarer and mainly historical.
SOCDEM movements shouldn't be confused with socialist ones.
Yes, they should be. Always. Especially now. Getting people to obsess over this distinction is a tremendous victory for the ruling class, which has repaid them endlessly since it happened during WWI. Basically, whenever anybody these days says X & Y shouldn't be conflated or confused, I say they should be. (Example, currency and bonds) And vice versa - people blithely glom together things which it is usually lunacy to conflate. (Example - state credit and bank credit)
Without the beneficial "confusing", we have social democrats compromising excessively and "socialists" becoming monastic sects who are fervent and steadfast in their faith learnt by heart- which unfortunately has no point of contact whatsoever with the real world.
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